Harvard College Observatory
On the night of July 16-17, 1850, astronomers here made the first daguerreotype of a star — Vega — through a telescope that was the largest in North America.
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Women hired as "computers" to crunch numbers — including Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and Williamina Fleming — ended up rewriting stellar classification entirely. The observatory also holds the Harvard Plate Stacks: roughly 600,000 glass photographic plates of the sky taken between the 1880s and 1989, a century of the universe in a single archive.
What to look for
- The 15-inch Great Refractor, installed in 1847 and the largest telescope in the US until 1867 — the same instrument used to photograph the moon at a quality that won the 1851 Great Exhibition prize in London
- The Harvard Plate Stacks, housing approximately 600,000 astronomical plates and now partially searchable through the 2024 StarGlass database
- Any exhibit referencing the women computers — Cannon, Leavitt, Payne-Gaposchkin, Fleming, Cushman — whose stellar research came from examining these very plates
Located in Cambridge, MA (not central Boston); part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian complex.
Harvard College Observatory is one of 31 sights worth the detour in Boston, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Boston pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Boston
- Museum of Fine Arts BostonFour hundred and fifty thousand works of art under one roof — one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas.
- TD GardenThe subway stops underneath it — TD Garden is built directly above MBTA's North Station, so you step off the train and you are already at the door.
- Fenway ParkThe oldest active ballpark in MLB, where a cramped city block accidentally invented some of baseball's most famous features.
- Isabella Stewart Gardner MuseumIn 1990, thieves walked out with thirteen works worth $500 million — none have ever come back, and the case is still open.
- Boston Public LibraryJohn Adams' personal 3,800-volume library lives here — and any Massachusetts adult can walk in and access it.
- Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & SmithsonianThe lab that produced the first-ever image of a black hole sits right on the Harvard campus.