Penn State astronomy pioneers shaped department’s past, present and future

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Over the years, the Penn State Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics has hosted many visitors on the rooftop of Davey Lab for evening telescope observing programs, and each year hundreds more participate in planetarium shows under the small dome in a classroom on the fifth floor.

The domes were part of the construction of Davey Lab in the early 1970s, and the planetarium was installed about a decade later in the mid-1980s. However, Penn State has been hosting these programs at University Park since long before these two facilities existed.

Years ago, near what are now the Eisenhower Parking Deck and University Health Services, there were two small brick buildings with metal domes atop them, which were built and used for telescope observing programs in the 1930s. Over the years, the domes’ history had mostly been forgotten along with their use.

That changed several years ago, when a member of the Yeagley family visited campus and revealed to current astronomy faculty and staff that family patriarch Henry Yeagley (1899-1997) had taught telescope-making at Penn State in the 1930s and been the champion of small-telescope observing at the University.

Following that revelation, Professor of Astronomy Richard Wade decided to do some digging in the University Archives and in the archives of the Daily Collegian.

Observatories and planetaria

Wade learned that Yeagley had indeed taught a telescope-making course; that the Class of 1936 gifted a telescope in his honor that was originally mounted on the roof of Buckhout Laboratory; and that the Class of 1938 gifted the funding to build those two observatory domes previously located on Eisenhower Road.

What really caught Wade’s attention, though, was that Yeagley had a bigger vision for bringing astronomy to the community: Yeagley had worked very hard to convince Penn State to build many more than those two observatories, and he wanted to bring a large planetarium to the University Park campus.

In the 1940s, Armand Spitz from the Franklin Institute began selling low-cost planetarium projectors so that institutions could bring planetarium shows to more people, and Yeagley built a small planetarium in Osmond Laboratory around one of those projectors. Armed with this knowledge, the department found the original projector in Davey Lab storage and restored it to working condition. The projector (serial No. 9) now is on display outside the entrance of the current planetarium on the fifth floor of Davey Lab.

For many years now, faculty in the department have been advocating for a new, 150-seat planetarium at University Park, and currently there is a proposal to build it at The Arboretum at Penn State.

While working to define the concept for this proposed new planetarium, the department found pictures and design drawings in the University Archives for a planetarium and multiple observatories that Henry Yeagley had proposed in the 1940s to be built on the current site of either the Penn State Golf Courses’ White Course or the Arboretum. The department was stunned to realize Yeagley’s pitch had so closely matched their own — 70 years before.