Virtual Tours

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian now offers virtual tours of two popular facilities on campus: the Great Refractor and the Plate Stacks. Both tours allow visitors to walk through the facilities from the comfort of their own homes while learning about the history and purpose of each space.

The Great Refractor

Virtual Tour

This 15-inch telescope was installed in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1847.  Named the "Great Refractor," it was the largest and most significant telescope in the United States for 20 years, spuring the development of the Harvard College Observatory.  Housed in the Sears Tower, which is the oldest building of the complext at the Center for Astrophysics, the Great Refractor was used to discover the eighth satellite of Saturn in 1848, and it was used by J.A. Whipple to take the first daguerreotype of a star.

Black and white image of a large historical telescope in an observatory dome.

Plate Stacks

Virtual Tour

The Harvard College Observatory's Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection (Plate Stacks) is the largest collection of its kind in the world. The core of the collection is over 550,000 glass plate negatives and spectral images, covering both the northern and southern hemispheres. Hundreds of women studied and curated the Harvard Plate Stacks while making discoveries of their own, but more often than not their work went unrecognized.

Photographic glass plate negative from 1888 in the Harvard Obs. Plate Stacks