The Oak Ridge Observatory, also known as the George R. Agassiz Station, is located at 42 Pinnacle Road, Harvard, Massachusetts, and was formerly operated by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a facility of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO).
The observatory was established in 1933. Through its first 40 years, its primary research focus was on tracking minor planets and asteroids in the solar system. Starting in the 1980s, astronomers began to use the facility to measure stars over long periods of time, which led to hunts for extrasolar planets, i.e., planets outside our solar system. Surveys at Oak Ridge found many such distant planets.
Until most of its projects were discontinued in 2005, it housed the largest telescope east of Texas in the United States, a 61-inch reflector. It also housed an 84-foot (26 m) steerable radio telescope once used in Project BETA, a search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A 41-cm (16-inch) Boller and Chivens Cassegrain reflector originally housed at Oak Ridge is available for public use at the National Air and Space Museum's Public Observatory Project on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
Harvard University's Optical SETI program continues at the site.
Famous quotes containing the words oak, ridge and/or observatory:
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The light passes
from ridge to ridge,
from flower to flower—”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)