Yerkes Observatory ~ Mike Frost (BAA: Director, Historical Section)

Yerkes was one of the great 19th-century observatories. It is still the home of the world's largest refracting telescope. The buildings, built by the University of Chicago and financed by Charles Tyson Yerkes and the Rockefeller Foundation, are architecturally fascinating. This is the story of the observatory and the extraordinary people who worked there - George Ellery Hale, Edwin Hubble, Edward Emerson Barnard, Otto Struve, Gerard Kuiper, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Carl Sagan and many others.