Old Eyes on the Sky: Touring Harvard's Shuttered Oak Ridge Observatory

Harvard University's Oak Ridge Observatory, also known as the George R. Agassiz Station, hosts the largest U.S. optical telescope east of Texas. Unfortunately, the observatory shut down in 2005. Harvard senior astronomer David Latham and the last person to serve as director of the observatory, the now-retired Robert Stefanik, agreed to meet me one morning in April for a tour of the observatory, which sits about 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Harvard, outside of Boston, in a rural area that mad