Located in Dome A
Aperture 762mm, Coudé focus f/47
In Dome A, you will find The Thompson 30-inch Reflector. Constructed by Sir Howard Grubb of Dublin and presented to the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1896 by Sir Henry Thompson.
Sir Henry Thompson was a London surgeon and amateur astronomer. Whilst at Greenwich, it was originally mounted on the same support as the Thompson 26-inch refractor, they counterbalanced each other. It remained the largest telescope at Greenwich until the 1930s. It was used to photograph comets, asteroids and the satellites of outer planets.
On 28th January 1908 Philibert Jacques Melotte, a British astronomer, discovered the 8th Moon of Jupiter using the Thompson reflector. The satellite was simply known as Jupiter VIII until 1975 when it was finally named. This moon was named Pasiphaë after the wife of the Greek King Minos. In Greek legend Pasiphaë was the mother of the minotaur – half man with a bull’s head. In the 1950’s, when the telescope was moved to Herstmonceux, it was given its own mount, an equatorial fork. The telescope was used for researching the nature of stars. Its function was to collect light from individual stars and beam it into a high-resolution spectrograph which was installed on a lower level of the dome.
During the day, Dome A is not open to the public, but is still used by our volunteers on Stargazing evenings.
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