Equatorial Room on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
An equatorial room, in "The CHABOT Observatory" Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Vol. 6, No. 35, p.85
/ref> Equatorial rooms tend to be large circular rooms to accommodate all the range of motion of a long telescope on an equatorial mount and are usually topped with a dome to keep out the weather. In some cases an observatory would move to a new location, or the equatorial telescope itself would be removed. The space would then be converted, for example, into use as a classroom or library. These peculiar rooms can sometimes be found in buildings at old colleges and towns, with their former use long forgotten.
An equatorial room, in astronomical observatories
An observatory is a location used for observing terrestrial, marine, or celestial events. Astronomy, climatology/meteorology, geophysical, oceanography and volcanology are examples of disciplines for which observatories have been constructed. Hi ...
, is the room which contains an equatorial mount
An equatorial mount is a mount for instruments that compensates for Earth's rotation by having one rotational axis, the polar axis, parallel to the Earth's axis of rotation. This type of mount is used for astronomical telescopes and cameras. Th ...
ed telescope
A telescope is a device used to observe distant objects by their emission, absorption, or reflection of electromagnetic radiation. Originally meaning only an optical instrument using lenses, curved mirrors, or a combination of both to obse ...
. It is usually referred to in observatory buildings that contain more than one type of instrument: for example buildings with an "equatorial room" containing an equatorial telescope and a "transit room" containing a transit telescope
In astronomy, a transit instrument is a small telescope with extremely precisely graduated mount used for the precise observation of star positions. They were previously widely used in astronomical observatories and naval observatories to measu ...
./ref> Equatorial rooms tend to be large circular rooms to accommodate all the range of motion of a long telescope on an equatorial mount and are usually topped with a dome to keep out the weather. In some cases an observatory would move to a new location, or the equatorial telescope itself would be removed. The space would then be converted, for example, into use as a classroom or library. These peculiar rooms can sometimes be found in buildings at old colleges and towns, with their former use long forgotten.
References
Further reading
* * Rooms Astronomical observatories Telescopes {{room-stub