(upbeat gentle music) (gentle tone music) - You're in Yerkes Observatory.

This is considered the birthplace of modern astrophysics.

(gentle tone music) It was really the first thorough astrophysics school in America.

It opened its doors October 21st, 1897, and it began to combine astronomy and physics to study the disposition of space, the personality of space, not just discovering a moon of Jupiter, but telling you how fast that moon was moving, how that moon was imploding.

Was that moon young or old?

So we really set the astrophysics world on its ear because no one had done this kind of stuff before.

(gentle tone music) And this is a full school.

It was a 50 acre campus where the students lived in the attic and the professors lived in the houses dotted around the woods that were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and his son, John Charles Olmsted.

Certainly the preeminent landscape designers in American history who had designed the US Capitol grounds, Central Park in New York City, and many things in Wisconsin and Chicago as well.

(gentle tone music) Most observatories are a dome and a telescope.

Yerkes Observatory is a full school with the most famous refracting telescope in the history of the world.

And it's an architectural masterpiece.

(gentle tone music) Welcome aboard the ship.

(observatory shutters buzzing and creaking) And this entire floor goes 23 feet up to the balcony.

The floor weighs 74,000 pounds, and that's how you get up to the eye piece.

This was built in 1896 and 1897.

It still works remarkably well to this day.

Away we go.

(telescope buzzing) And here we are.

Now, refractor telescope uses lenses.

All modern telescopes use mirrors to gather light, but before mirrors got really great, technologically speaking, lenses were the norm.

And this has two 40 inch diameter lenses that were made in Paris in the 1880s.

The tube and the base weigh 160,000 pounds.

The tube rotates 360 degrees and goes up and down.

So this is how you move the telescope up and down.

It is this giant, and it just moves my hand.

And so you can move it sideways.

You can move it up and down.

Over the past month, I've looked at the Andromeda Galaxy, and Jupiter, and the moon, and plenty of Messier objects, and it's like taking a road trip in space.

Although this style of astronomy observation is outdated, because telescopes are in the sky now, and they're on mountaintops in South America.

This is a really visceral human experience.

And to look at Neptune through this eye piece is very rewarding.

Your eyeball is looking at the cosmos as opposed to looking at something on a laptop or a cell phone.

And the reason why this telescope became so significant and Yerkes Observatory's great refractor had a camera.

And so Williams Bay, Wisconsin took the first pictures of space beyond the moon that the world ever saw.

So you take them on glass plates, and the glass plates could then be photocopied essentially and put in newspapers and magazines.

(gentle tone music) I mean, you're talking about Yerkes Observatory that had Edwin Hubble as one of its students and staff.

Edwin Hubble figured out that there was more than one galaxy.

Mary Calvert was here for many decades.

One of the first people to map the stars.

Nancy Grace Roman was here for eight years.

She was NASA's very first chief of astronomy.

She's the central force behind the Hubble telescope.

William Morgan in 1951 in this building discovered the shape of our galaxy.

William Morgan figured out that our spiral arm structure was what we were, the people that came through this building, like Otto Struve, Gerard Kuiper who pioneered the research that figured out everything on the other side of Neptune.

Carl Sagan, the most famous astronomer of the second half of the century, they all lived and worked in little old Williams Bay, Wisconsin.

(gentle tone music) (upbeat piano music)