The newly restored Great Melbourne Telescope is set to be publicly unveiled at its original home in the Royal Botanic Gardens this summer.
The Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, Lily D’Ambrosio with the Minister for Creative Industries, Martin Foley announced a $600,000 Government grant to assist in the final stages of the telescope’s restoration.
“The Great Melbourne Telescope is being painstakingly restored by volunteers and staff at Museums Victoria after it was damaged by bushfires in Canberra in 2003,” Ms D’Ambrosio said.
“An important piece of Victoria’s history, the telescope was built in Dublin in 1869 and was installed in the Melbourne Observatory located in the Royal Botanic Gardens,” she said.
“It had been a major attraction for the city as the second largest telescope in the world and the largest in the southern hemisphere.”
Ms D’Ambrosio said that after the observatory closed in 1944, the telescope was sold and relocated to Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra.
“In the early 1990’s it was converted into Australia’s first fully robotic and computerised telescope and was used in an international project that discovered the first observational evidence of dark matter,” she said.
She said Museums Victoria recovered the telescope’s remains and brought it back to Melbourne in 2008, partnering with the Royal Botanic Gardens and the Astronomical Society of Victoria to refurbish it and return it to its original home for community use.
“Every week since its return, a team of more than a dozen volunteer engineering and astronomy buffs have met to catalogue and clean the telescope’s surviving features and re-design and re-engineer its more than 400 missing components.”
Ms D’Ambrosio said the small volunteer group nicknamed ‘The Barrys’ had collectively contributed over 30,000 hours of work to the project.
