Object Details
- Description
- Astronomers compare different photographs of the same region of the sky taken at different times, in order to discover and measure minute movements of celestial objects. Frank Schlesinger, director of the Yale University Observatory, designed this blink comparator in the early 1920s, and had it built at Yale for the Harvard College Observatory. Rather than placing two photographs side-by-side—as was done with the Zeiss blink comparator—Schlesinger’s instrument put one photograph above the other.
- Willem Jacob Luyten, a Dutch astronomer who became a professor at the University of Minnesota, brought this comparator with him when he moved to Minneapolis in 1931. He used it to detect and measure the proper motions of 94,263 stars.
- Ref: Frank Schlesinger, “A Simple Machine for Comparing Two Celestial Photographs,” Astronomical Journal 37 (1926): 45-47.
- Arthur R. Upgren, “Willem Jacob Luyten (1899-1994),” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 104 (1995): 603-605.
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
- date made
- 1920s
- Credit Line
- Space Science Center, University of Minnesota
- Object Name
- blink comparator
