Years before he’d become a senior engineer for SpaceX, Martin McCormick (BS ’10) would take friends to the spot near the Morrow Plots, where they’d spend hours on end.
“Under the red lights, we could see our breath condense in that cold dome as we aimed the iron beast at Saturn and the Seven Sisters,” he says. “In the late 1800s, that telescope was supposedly one of the very best refractors in the world, and while it was now an old relic entrusted to careless undergrads, that iron still exuded a sense of magical power.
“I always remember how we would stare for minutes at the moon and then, in looking away, realize that the intense brightness left us temporarily blinded in one eye.”
