© The contents of this finding aid are the copyright of the University of Chicago Library
© 2011 University of Chicago Library
The Yerkes Observatory Logbooks and Notebooks were processed and preserved with support from the John Crerar Foundation.
This collection is open for research.
When quoting material from this collection, the preferred citation is: Yerkes Observatory. Logbooks and Notebooks, [Box #, Folder #], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library
Yerkes Observatory, located in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, is a facility of the University of Chicago's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The observatory opened in 1897 as the joint creation of three founders: William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago; Professor George E. Hale, the observatory’s first director; and Charles T. Yerkes, a wealthy Chicago businessman who provided funds for the erection of the observatory building. On the shores of Lake Geneva, this observatory was designed by Henry Ives Cobb, with landscape architecture by John Olmsted.
Yerkes became known in the astronomical community as the home of the last of the great refracting telescopes, a 40-inch instrument first exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The observatory housed the university's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics until the 1960s, and was the site of some of the most significant research in modern astronomy and astrophysics.
The collection is divided in two series. The first series includes all the notebooks that include the research observations of a clearly identifiable author. The second series contains all notebooks and logbooks that were intended for general use or were unclassifiable. Hence, most of the logbooks and notebooks of this series have multiple authors or unidentifiable authors.
Logbooks compiled by Edward Emerson Bernard, W. W. Morgan and Philip Fox may be found with their papers, also held by the Special Collections Research Center.