For the past three months, the copper dome of the Virtanen Observatory has been silent, rendered obsolete by the perpetual brightness of the Nordic summer. However, as the twilight begins to deepen into true darkness this August, a team from the [SCI-PHY] Physical Sciences department has been racing against the sunset to complete an ambitious restoration project: the resurrection of “The Old Guardian.”
The instrument in question is a 1924 Zeiss Refractor telescope, originally acquired from a university archive and left collecting dust in the college basement for a decade. The restoration project, led by Dr. Hans Weber, was intended to be a simple cleaning exercise for the Summer Engineering Camp. It quickly evolved into a complex battle between Victorian-era mechanics and modern digital control systems.
The Clash of Analog and Digital
The objective was to retrofit the century-old, clockwork-driven mount with a modern GoTo tracking system, allowing the telescope to automatically locate celestial objects via a Python script.
The integration was far from smooth. The team, comprising Dr. Weber and four Year 13 Engineering students, spent the first two weeks of August stripping down the mount. They found that the original brass gears were coated in hardened, tar-like grease that had solidified over fifty years of neglect.
“It was an archaeological dig, not a repair job,” remarked Elias Maki, the student lead for mechanical integration. “We had to soak the gears in industrial solvent for three days just to see the teeth. Dr. Weber forbade us from using any power tools on the brass. We had to scrub every millimetre with toothbrushes. It taught us a respect for tolerance levels that you just don’t get from 3D printing.”
The ‘Phantom Drift’ Incident
The project faced its most critical failure during the “First Light” test on August 15th. With the optics collimated and the new stepper motors attached, the team attempted to lock the telescope onto the ring nebula (M57).
While the computer code, written by [CS-ADV] student volunteers, indicated a perfect lock, the physical image in the eyepiece drifted out of view every forty seconds. This “Phantom Drift” baffled the team for two consecutive nights.
“We blamed the software,” admitted Dr. Weber. “We assumed the students had miscalculated the sidereal rate. We were wrong. It turned out to be a mechanical slippage. The modern 3D-printed brackets we designed were too flexible; they were warping microscopically under the torque of the heavy German brass.”
The solution was not elegant, but it was effective. The team abandoned the sleek plastic brackets and spent a humid Saturday machining new, ugly, but rigid brackets out of scrap aluminium in the workshop. The drift was eliminated.
Optical Resurrection
The visual payout came early this week. With the “Phantom Drift” resolved, the 101-year-old lens delivered an image of Saturn that drew gasps from the exhausted team. Unlike modern catadioptric telescopes, which can struggle with contrast, the long-focal-length refractor provided a view of the Cassini Division in the planet’s rings that looked “etched in glass.”
Ready for the New Term
The restored telescope is now fully operational and linked to the classroom network. As the new academic year approaches, it will serve as the centerpiece for the Year 12 Astrophysics module.
The project leaves behind a valuable lesson for the incoming cohort: technology is not always about replacing the old with the new. Sometimes, it is about machining a piece of scrap aluminium to help a 1920s lens speak to a 2025 computer.
Leave a Reply