Ridgeway Observatory
Six entries from the log of a volunteer observatory above Carrow. Each one steps further across the page than the one before it, so how far right an entry has walked is how far through the history you have read.
1948
A retired schoolmaster left the parish his fifteen-inch refractor and the field it stood in. Four volunteers built the first dome over it in a single summer, out of marine plywood.
1961
The observatory began opening one evening a week to anyone who walked up the track. The Thursday queue is still how most of our members first arrived.
1974
Every clear night went onto glass. The cabinet in the west wing holds eleven thousand plates, and half of them record a sky that is no longer that dark.
1989
The parish agreed to hood every street lamp within two miles. It cost two years of letters and gave the ridge back a full magnitude of sky.
2004
Volunteers scanned the archive plate by plate across nine winters. Three of the images held a variable star that nobody had catalogued.
2019
The ridge was designated a dark-sky site and the second dome opened under it, with a roof a fourteen-year-old can drive from a phone.