Campus Tour / Field notes 05

Olmsted Observatory

AI-generated atmosphere: the white shingled observatory with its silver dome, animated from a 2011 public-domain photograph. — observatory-pushAI-animated from a public-domain photograph

The photograph, unaltered: October 2011.Carol M. Highsmith — Library of Congress, Carol M. Highsmith ArchivePD — dedicated by creator

Position: 41.88398° N, 71.96019° W
Roof: 191.1 m above sea level (NAVD88)
Outline: OpenStreetMap way 1015123107

Find it on the 3D survey

Reading journal

Quick Look

Connects students to the cosmos and to the universal human experience of wonder, reminding us we all share the same sky.

Deep Dive

Named in honor of William Beach Olmsted, Pomfret's second headmaster (1897-1929), the observatory is a place where students encounter the scale of the universe. Its mission echoes Pomfret's: bring young people face-to-face with ideas bigger than themselves.

Two views of one hill

Where it stands.

Left, the observatory where the 2023 survey puts it, at the edge of the field east of Pomfret Street: real data. Right, the 2011 photograph animated by an AI model, the camera rising off the lawn: not a photograph.

Olmsted Observatory among its neighbours, seen from the air to the south-east: a render of the real 2023 LiDAR survey, coloured from the spring 2023 aerial photograph. A crimson ring marks its roof. — 2023 LiDAR + aerial survey · CT State GIS Office · real data, not AI.CT State GIS Office. (2023). 2023 Aerial imagery. Retrieved from https://maps.cteco.uconn.edu/data/flight2023/. Lidar: 2023 Connecticut Statewide Lidar, NOAA Office for Coastal Management Digital Coast, dataset 10296. © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0), https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright: building outlines that place the tour-stop pins.

AI-generated atmosphere: the white shingled observatory on its lawn, animated from a 2011 public-domain photograph. — observatory-riseAI-animated from a public-domain photograph