Bob Hampton's Kwajalein Observatory

Not long after my arrival at Kwajalein I purchased a large Dobsonian telescope, 13.1" diameter and about as tall as me.  Just next to the BCB, where I worked at the time, were several abandoned observatory domes left over from some obsolete missile tracking system.  It didn't take long for me to realize that one of them would make a perfect home for my new telescope.

During my three years on Kwajalein I must have spent hundreds of nights, dusk to dawn, thousands of hours, here at this telescope dome, watching the sky.  I saw all the Planets, moons of other worlds, comets, asteroids, colorful nebulae, the zodiacal light, and distant spiral galaxies.  All these things that I had only read about became real for me here at this dome.

My telescope wasn't designed for photography, but sometimes I took my camera to the dome with me anyway, to make time-exposure photos of the observatory itself.  I'd set the camera up on it's tripod, open the shutter, and then walk away and watch the sky for a few minutes or a few hours before returning to close the shutter.

This is a view toward the north. Notice that Polaris, "the north star", the seeming pivot point for all the other stars in the photo, appears very low on the horizon.  Kwajalein is about 7 1/2 degrees north of the Equator.