Preston Heritage Weekend – Diary Saturday 9th September 2017 Moor Park And The Jeremiah Horrocks Observatory

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My next chosen tour from the programme options of the Preston Heritage Day was a tour of one of the city’s biggest park, Moor Park. This incorporated a visit to the Jeremiah Horrocks Observatory located in the park. I arrived just too late for the start of the park tour, but I had to walk across the whole length of the Park to get to the observatory and I got to see several plaques and marker board outlining the park history and culture. It contain a former horse racing course, and a large pond named The Serpentine, after the open air swimming pool in London’s Hyde Park. The Moor Park Serpentine once also served as a swimming pool. Signs around the park starkly demanded that visitors should not feed the rats. That worried me that the park might be infested with them, but it was just an aggressive anti-littering campaign. I got to the observatory itself and it proved to be a major highlight of the whole day. Dating from 1927, It contains a large refractor telescope named after the astronomer who first discovered the transit of Venus. Though bigger, better telescopes have now been built in Preston, and this one I affected by light pollution from the expanding city itself, the observatory is used as a museum. It contains several studies of the history of British astronomy and real meteorite fragments. Right outside the museum, members of the Preston And District Astronomical society set up their own telescopes and invited the public to observe the sky and beyond. Through a filtered lens I was I able to see the Sun in extreme close up, observing sun-spots and solar flares there. It was truly amazing and totally unexpected. Arthur Chappell