John Whalan (pictured) met Elaine “Chipper” Petersen in 1971 in Professor William Lankford’s astronomy class—the first one ever offered at George Mason University. They began going on stargazing dates, taking Mason’s small, portable telescope out to the nearby Fort Belvoir golf course. It was dark enough there that they had good visibility of the sky, and their hope was to photograph planets and nebulae. But they soon realized that the telescope was too small for astrophotography.
That’s when they got a crazy idea: They would build a bigger telescope.
So, Whalan, BS Biology ’74, and Petersen, BA English ’74, along with their classmate, Bob Veenstra, BS Biology ’74, proposed a plan to Lankford.
“We said, ‘If you finance it, we will build you a telescope,’” said Whalan.
Lankford agreed, and the students were given $200 from the Physics Department to get started. They spent thousands of hours working on the telescope in the evenings, on weekends, during the summer. When they finished, they had built a 500-pound, 12.5” Cassegrain compound reflector telescope. At the time, it was the largest telescope in Northern Virginia.
With no place to house it, the university offered up a pig shed, where the George Mason Stadium currently stands. Named the Herschel Observatory, the structure took four years to complete.
The telescope was available to Mason students, and tours were given to the public.
“A lot of people in Northern Virginia looked through it,” said Whalan.
He and Petersen married two months after the dedication of their observatory.
Read more about the history of the Herschel Observatory here and here.
Photo by Keith Dorset/Broadside Photograph Collection from University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center.
This image is part of the 50th Anniversary exhibit, Past, Present, Future: Mason’s Core Remains Constant, which showcases photos captured by student photographers working for Broadside, Mason's student newspaper from 1969 to 2014. On the lower level of Horizon Hall, the exhibit runs through December 2022.