On a two-week trip driving around Ireland on a self-guided tour, we stopped at Caislean na Blarnan to take part in the tradition of kissing the Cloch na Blarnan.
But don’t say I’m full of blarney when I claim that we later saw a Leviathan.
That’s what the giant reflecting telescope with its 6-foot-wide mirror the third Earl of Rosse built in 1845 was called. He constructed the world’s largest telescope on his estate of Birr Castle at Parsonstown, which is now Birr, in County Offaly.
It wasn’t until 1917 and the construction of the 100-inch Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California that Birr’s Leviathan of Parsonstown lost its world title.
Now Birr is fairly in the center of the Emerald Isle, which gets its lush green from lots of rain. So setting up a giant telescope in a land of many rainy nights might seem unwise.
But William Parsons, the Earl of Rosse, used his Leviathan to study nebulas among other celestial targets. Lesser telescopes then couldn’t do much to resolve these blurry patches in the constellations.
But Parson could tell the nebulas contain many individual stars.
Using the Leviathan, the earl was the first person to reveal M51’s spiral structure. It’s the galaxy that’s been nicknamed the Whirlpool Galaxy. Now astrophotography was just getting started about then.
A photograph of the Moon in 1840 was the first example of the technology. So Lord Rosse turned to art instead to record his discovery.
The Whirlpool Galaxy, which is the 51st item in Charles Messier’s list of noncomet astronomical objects, is located in the constellation of Canes Venatici and is about 23 million light years from Earth.
M51 has a smaller companion galaxy, NGC 5195, with a tidal bridge of dust connecting the two. In 1850, Parsons published his first sketch of the spiral nebula. An earlier sketch by the astronomer John Herschel in 1833 also depicted the two galaxies but not as definitively as Rosse’s.
Rosse made an extremely accurate painting of the nebula that shows the Whirlpool Galaxy and its companion connected by the bridge. The pinwheel-shaped galaxy is also known as the Question Mark Galaxy or Rosse’s Galaxy because of his work.
Rosse called M51 a “spiral nebula,” and it wasn’t until the 20th century that astronomers would declare that M51 and other objects like it are really galaxies, filled with billions of stars.
The original Leviathan was partly dismantled after the death of the fourth earl in 1908, but it was reconstructed in 1996-97 and is open to visit Birr Castle, Gardens & Science Centre.
Astrophotography caught up with the Whirlpool Galaxy, and there are many beautiful photos of it now, including extremely detailed ones by the Hubble Space Telescope.
But Lord Rosse’s artwork of the “spiral nebula” was there first and had a major influence on future astronomical studies and advances in our understanding of the cosmos.
Sometimes bigger is better.