PERIDIER TELESCOPE

Capabilities of Telescope

The Peridier Telescope is a twelve-inch reflector with Calver optics. At its current location the telescope has a limiting visual magnitude of 9 and it has a field of view between 10min. and 1deg.. This makes it a great instrument for observing Messier objects and objects within the Solar System. Mounts exist for doing camera and CCD work.

Currently the telescope is housed 10 miles West of the University of Texas campus. Originally installed as a tool for graduate students, the telescope is now exclusively used for undergraduate familiarization of the sky. Star Parties are held at the Bee Caves facility monthly during the fall and spring sessions of the University of Texas by the Astronomy Students Association. The telescope is also used by the Austin Astronomical Society and by non-science majors for AST 103L projects.

  History of the Telescope

The Peridier Telescope was donated to the University of Texas by the estate of Julien Peridier. After spending thirty years at Mr. Peridier's observatory in Le Houga, France, the telescope was transeferred in 1967 to its present home at the University's site in Austin, Texas at the Bee Caves Reserch Facility (map). While at the Peridier Observatory the telescope was involved in many different research projects; including, a five year program of multicolor photoelectric photometry of the Moon and planets,  supported by NASA. The United States Air Force also used the telescope to observe the occultation of Regulus by Venus.

Although Mr. Peridier received several electrical engineering degrees, his life-long passion was astronomy. A life-time member of all the major astronoical societies of Europe and America, Mr. Peridier's first experience with serious astronomy came as an active amateur observer during the 1905 solar eclipse in Spain. Before World War I, Mr. Peridier contributed to the Variable Star Sections of both the British and French Astronomical Associations. Mr. Peridier bequethed the telescope to the University of Texas as a teaching instrument in honor of his esteemed collaborator, galaxy expert G. De Vaucouleurs.