CRACKPOTS, INQUISITIVE OPEN-NIGHT VISITORS BELEAGUER ASTRONOMERS

Telescope long covers came off, and astronomers abandoned secluded existences to lay open the far reaches of space to all first-nighters at the Harvard Observatory's annual season of "Open Nights" which began last Wednesday.

Observing weather, true to the average of open nights, was half hazy with clouds and half clear, but as the graduate student of astronomy who was exhibiting the moon and the planet Jupiter through the big 15-inch 'scope, reminded his audience, it is unfair to blame 'the observatory staff for the pranks of the elements. However, no rain checks were given.

Sun is Small Star

Several hundred people crowded the lecture room to hear Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, one of the greatest woman star-gazers, recount the stupendous facts and figures which are the daily fare of the inhabitants of the Observatory hill.

For instance, some of the seven stars that can be measured by instruments would make the sun look like a pinhead by comparison, the great red star Antares having a diameter 400 times that of our sun-star.

Dr. Gaposchkin further explained that what appear to be single stars, even with the most powerful telescopes, are usually a "family" of the great flery masses which figuratively stand toe-to-toe and spin about each other at the dizzy rate of four revolutions a day. Only by the frequent eclipses which cause varying amounts of light, can astronomers detect these bodies.

The layman observers next crowded up into the wooden dome which houses the 96-year-old refracting telescope, which, in its day, was the largest in the world. Climbing up into a plush-covered seat beside the graduate observerer, the visitors at first caught a glimpse of the craters of the moon, but only a small portion of the total surface could be seen at a time.

One woman, after taking a squint through the eye piece, annoyed the youthful astronomer particularly. "Yes, that is very interesting," she remarked, and added, "particularly because of my knowledge of astrology." But she did not hazard any prophecy on the course of world events from her observation,--perhaps because of the obscuring haze.

Laymen View Mars

Later, the dome and telescope were swung onto Jupiter, but the planet appeared only as a very small pill, and the many moons which are its distinguishing feature were hidden.

Hardships endured by midnight watches in the smaller dome belonging to the six-inch refractor were experienced by those who had to squat down on the floor in the cold night air to see Mars. A College Junior amplified the spectacle by recalling his recent observations of the receding Martian ice-cap.

Out in the Observatory's yard, an amateur, Carl Joseph Redland, in daylight hours a barber in the University Barber Shop, displayed a 12 1/2-inch reflecting telescope which he had made entirely by hand, even to iron-cast mountings, and the mirrow which is ground to a focal test accuracy of a millionth of an inch.

Probably the nearest of all considering weather conditions, were the objects and photographic plates on show in the main building. On one side of the room, a veteran observer was explaining the intricacies of small Japanese, Chinese, German, French, and English sundials of the past three centuries.

But in the center of the room, a short, oldish man with a Russian accent and a copy of his own scientific thesis, was trying the patience of another astronomer by vociferously and lengthily insisting and "proving" that the earth was flat, notwithstanding the revolving model of the planet before him.