120 Summer Visitors See Observatory On Open Night

More than 120 visitors attended the annual College Observatory Open Night last Thursday for an evening of a bit of astronomical information and theory followed by actual telescope observation.

Owen J. Gingerich, lecturer on Astronamy, said in a lecture to the gathering that there may well be undiscovered planets similar to Pluto in our solar system. He then described Pluto and graphically demonstrated the planet's distance from the sun.

Afterward, the visitors toured the Observatory's facilities, viewing solar movies, photographs of the skies, the moon through a telescope, and the IBM 70-90 computer in operation.

The $3.5 million computer, used primarily for satellite tracking, is now available to Harvard graduate students and can handle more calculations in four minutes than can a man in a life-time.