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Accidental Journey
The Observatory
Far side
The Flag Story

 

  
    View from the Meridian Room, Dunsink Observatory
[Photograph | Tim O'Riley] [click on the image to progress]
  
   
 
    This was my fourth visit and there was more of an air of melancholy about the place than I had previously sensed. Although open on certain nights of the year when members of the public can look at the stars through one of the old telescopes, the instruments at Dunsink are no longer up-to-date and many of its staff have moved on or been relocated to the city centre. The main building is imposing and I am sure it was once a fine home and workplace but now the interior felt uninhabited.

Outside, the garden had lost any individual character it may once have had through regular human involvement tending. The observatory was home to a number of telescopes, many now gone, from which astronomers over the years had contemplated the cosmos. In the little dome at the top of the main building, the wind whistles through the floorboards and up the spiral stairs. The telescope is no longer here but the mount, dated 1895, seems immoveable and its foundations extend far beneath into the bedrock, like an anchor.

In the garden by the Meridian Room, the older telescope mounts dating back to the 1830s have been relocated. Huge stone pillars two or three metres high, they stand displaced, stripped of the valuable brass fittings on which their instruments used to pivot. The room where they previously stood is oriented so that star sightings could be made across an arc of sky as the earth rotated about its axis.

  
     
 

 


 
 

 


All works © Tim O'Riley 2009. All photographs © their respective authors.