Adventures with the Night Sky
Both the Shaw family and the Hudson family had a great interest in the sciences, evident by the many scientific instruments and books throughout the Shaw-Hudson house. The 19th and early 20th century was an era of exciting and transformative scientific discoveries, a period when significant features of the relationship between contemporary science and culture first assumed form. Studies of major developments within the disciplines—including geology, biology, botany, astronomy, physics, chemistry, technology, mathematics, and medicine were popular amongst the growing middle and upper class, with both the Shaw’s and Hudson’s having several doctors, engineers and nurses in their families. Indeed, it is obvious that Clara Hudson herself, was a science enthusiasts, as much of her writings deal with the sciences.
The following are excerpts from The Romances of a Country Doctor, a paper read at the annual meeting of the Northampton Historical Society at the Unitarian Church, Northampton, on October 7, 1947 and Plain Tales from Plainfield or The Way Things Used to Be, 1962, both by Clara Elizabeth Hudson. Ms. Hudson was a granddaughter of Dr. Samuel Shaw and the last surviving relative to live in the Shaw Hudson House.
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“My uncle, Charles Lyman Shaw,(1842-1902) had owned a 4-inch Alvan Clark telescope and because I had taken astronomy at Columbia University under Professor John K. Rees in 1900-1901 during my Senior year at Barnard College, he willed the telescope to me. As the tripod on which it was meant to be mounted was too heavy for me to carry safely, I thought it best to sell it.(Alvan Clark (March 8, 1804 – August 19, 1887), born in Ashfield, Massachusetts)
The clear air and open spaces in Plainfield make it a most desirable place to study the heavens. Many an evening I stood on a small triangle of grass at the junction of Main and Central Streets near our house and gazed at the various constellations. The curved handle of the Big Dipper (Ursa Major) led one to my favorite stars, Arcturus in Bootes. In wonderment I tried hard to realize that the light reaching me had left Arcturus 36 light-years before. A light-year is 6,000,000,000,000miles.
Now the grass triangle has gone, replaced by the hard-surfaced highway, and automobiles have rendered unsafe my favorite observation post.
I remember one night when there was to be an eclipse of the moon at a late hour I stayed up to see it. In their longer lives my mother and two aunts had seen other eclipses, so they retired. I decided to read until time for the eclipse to take place. Unfortunately, the book which I had already begun and therefore continued reading at this time was Wilkie Collins‘ a spine-tingling tale in which a cemetery as well as the lady in white figured. Sitting alone with my book, I became almost too scared to venture out to look at the darkening moon.
Once my brother Darwin asked my mother, “What is an eclipse of the sun?” She tried to illustrate by saying, “Let’s pretend that the student lamp is the sun. Let’s use Uncle Charles’ hat as the moon, and ourselves as the earth. When we pass the hat between ourselves and the lamp, the hat shuts off the light of the lamp and we can’t see the light. Now tell me what makes an eclipse of the sun-.” Darwin replied: “Uncle Charles’ hat.”
When a friend and I drove to Arizona and New Mexico I was eager to visit the observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, a place of which I had known as associated with the work of Professor Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of the latest planet, Pluto. Professor Carl Lampland very courteously showed me around the interesting observatory. When I inquired about Professor Tombaugh, I learned to my surprise that he was at that very moment in the next room and that Professor Lampland, who had an engagement elsewhere, was planning to turn me over to him. I protested that I ought not to take up Professor Tombaugh’s time, but Professor Lampland insisted on bringing him in. After briefly stating that my interest was largely due to the course in astronomy which I had taken at Columbia under Professor Rees, I started to leave. Apparently pleased at the chance to talk to someone who knew even a little about astronomy, Professor “T” kept showing me more and more objects of interest, undeterred by my repeated protest that I was afraid that I had forgotten much of the astronomy I had known thirty years earlier and that I was no longer intelligent enough on the subject to warrant taking so much of his time. When I left I was more than ever impressed with the fact that compared with the questions dealing with the universe the everyday annoyances of life pale into significance.
In Cummington, one of my distant cousins had been shown Venus crossing the sun, a so-called Transit of Venus. His mother had darkened a room in her house by drawing the dark shades and then had made a small hole in one shade. As Venus crossed the sun, its image was visible on an opposite surface. Her son became one of the firm of Wamer and Swasey, makers of two of the largest telescopes in the USA – the Lick at Hamilton, California, and the Yeckes at Williams Bay, Wisconsin.
With a group of Smith College teachers and students of astronomy, on January 24, 1925 I went to Wilson, Connecticut, just over the state line, to see a total eclipse of the sun which was not visible from Northampton. The special train which was used was to leave Northampton before daylight, and it was in the dark of night that a friend and I walked from Crescent Street, where we both lived, to the railroad station. By the time we reached our destination in Connecticut and climbed an incline not far from the siding where our train let us off, the sun had risen. By using dark glasses we could look directly at the Sun and see the moon as it gradually bit further and further into the sun. As less and less of the sun was visible the sky became darker and darker. Enthralled by the eerie spectacle, a hush fell on all. For a very few minutes the sun disappeared behind the moon except that brilliant streaks of lights called the corona were visible, radiating from the circumference of the invisible sun. Hurriedly the students accumulated what data they could. All too soon the moon’s shadow passed and daylight returned. I felt as though I had been with Mark Twain’s knight in King Arthur’s court when he claimed to have blotted out the sun. Returning to Northampton, we were brought down to earth by finding our late-rising families still having breakfast.
One winter day while my mother, aunt and I were spending the cold months at Crescent Inn in Northampton, I was called to the telephone by Miss Mary Hopkins of the Department of Astronomy at Smith College. She said she had a problem which the hoped I could help her solve. The girls in one of her classes had been contributing to an
astronomical bulletin published by Miss Mary Byrd, a former teacher at Smith. I understood that Miss Byrd had resigned her position at the college because she disapproved of Smith’s having accepted money from John D. Rockefeller Sr., the oil king. She regarded it as “tainted money,” I was told.
Every two weeks the girls would read the skies. They learned that in order to find the constellations in the same spot as they had appeared two weeks earlier they had to view them one hour earlier. The date for viewing had been the night before. But it had been a cloudy evening. Though the winter holiday had begun, Miss Hopkins expected that some one among the students, whose homes were in Northampton, would be available. She then found that all had accepted an invitation to some attractive event elsewhere. As she wanted to leave town the following morning to begin her vacation, she appealed strongly to me as the only local amateur astronomer whom she knew. She easily persuaded me to go to her rescue and do the best I could.
That winter was a very snowy one and when I entered the campus in the evening I found snowbanks nearly to my shoulder on either side of the shoveled, canyon-like, narrow walks. There were no lights anywhere except above the door to the observatory. On my arrival we selected a spot outdoors near an old pump, now removed, from which we had a clear view of the sky in all directions. Facing the library, Miss Hopkins asked me what the constellation was that one saw above the ridge of the library. After I told her, she asked the name of the Alpha star, the brightest one in the constellation; then she asked me to tell her approximately its relative distance from the ridge of the library to the point directly above us, the zenith. Facing, in turn, the three other points of the compass, the above procedure was repeated. This completed my outdoor work.
Returning to the observatory I wrote at full speed a report of my star-gazing, as Miss Hopkins wanted to get the statement into the last collection of mail. We apparently met the publication, for I received by an early mail a note of appreciation from the editor and a promise to send me a copy of the paper as soon as it was printed. To my disappointment, however, it never arrived.“
