The dome at Washburn Observatory overlooking Lake Mendota opened to the outside air and let the telescope look out at the dark Wednesday night. Students and stargazers gathered at the building in the middle of campus for its bimonthly open house.

Many of the amateur astronomers said they came to see Mars.

“This is my first time coming to an observatory,” said Sonya Schilcher, a University of Wisconsin industrial engineering student. “I think it is interesting to see Mars.”

Schilcher first became aware of the open house through reading the Advanced for Madison magazine.

For UW sophomore Allison Noble, this was her first time visiting the Washburn Observatory, and added that it is helping her field of study.

“I want to be an astrophysics major,” she said.

First year UW graduate student Katie Devine said last night was a good chance to see Mars, which is 38 million miles away.

“[Mars] is very bright and close to see. However, tonight is very cloudy and it is a bit hard to see [Mars] clearly,” she said. “The Washburn Observatory will be opened for viewing sessions if sky is 75 percent free of clouds.”

Devine is now working as a volunteer tour guide at the open house twice a year. She said there are two telescopes on the UW campus, one on Observatory Drive and one in the Humanities Building, which many people continue to use.

She said that the reflecting telescope at Washburn Observatory is older and larger, but the bulky instrument is still appreciated.

“It is a fantastic telescope for us,” Devine said.

The telescope was built under a contract with the Alvan Clark family in May of 1878. It was decided that the telescope would have a diameter of 15.6 inches, making it the third largest telescope in the United States at the time. James C. Watson was appointed as the first director of the Observatory, but he died before its completion in 1881.

The observatory was named after former Wisconsin governor Cadwallader C. Washburn, who, in 1876, allocated a sum of $3,000 per year over three years for the creation of an observatory on the UW campus.

The telescope was widely used during the 1880s to 1958, when the new Pine Bluff Observatory, just 15 miles from Madison, was completed. Currently, the public primarily uses Washburn Observatory during open houses, as do students in the Introductory Astronomy courses.

“The one in here is for some outreach programs and Girl/Boy Scouts activities,” Devine said. “Sometimes, graduate students use it for observation, too.”

As Bob Bless said in a historical document in 1978, the Washburn Observatory has contributed to UW’s astronomy department development.

“We recognize a century of contributions to astronomy by Washburn Observatory. Older traditions of research, such as the properties of the interstellar medium and the development of innovative astronomical instrumentation, are still being pursued along with more recent activities such as space astronomy,” Bliss wrote. “New directions are being established. We have every hope that Washburn Observatory’s second century will be as exciting and productive as the first.”

The 15-inch refractor housed in the observatory has a magnification power of about 500 times.

The observatory is normally scheduled for public viewing on the first and third Wednesdays of the month. Stargazers are asked to use their own judgment if weather conditions are good for the nighttime viewings.