Visitors gazed up at the stars Tuesday night, their view not at all hindered by the cloudy skies.
Instead, they sat in Elgin School District U-46’s observatory/planetarium at a public viewing of the facility that usually plays host to students.
Peggy Hernandez, a teacher at the planetarium, said although the facility has about 18,000 students come through each year, many in the public don’t know much about it.
“There’s people who are very curious,” she said. “A lot of people who live in Elgin have never been inside.”
The public viewings began last year as a way to educate the community, not only on astronomy, but the history behind the building, Hernandez said.
The Elgin National Watch Company built the observatory in 1909 to determine the exact time, which it used as a selling points for its watches, Hernandez told visitors Tuesday night. At that time, the most accurate way to tell time was to measure the Earth’s rotation.
Some of the original pieces used to tell time in the early 1900s still sit in the observatory, including clocks in glass bell jars.
To make sure the equipment did not move, and thus remained accurate, the clocks were housed in a vault that was kept at exactly 81 degrees at all times, and were virtually unaffected by atmospheric pressure, Hernandez explained.
When the watch company went out of business in 1960, it donated the building to U-46, which uses the facility to teach children about the moon, solar system, stars and other astronomy topics.
Hernandez used a projector on the dome ceiling inside the planetarium to show the crowd the sky from the viewpoint of Elgin, pointing out several constellations and how they could spot them on their own.
Jennifer Baldwin grew up in Elgin and remembers coming to the planetarium as a child. She wanted to show it to her 6-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter, not only for a science lesson, but also for a slice of local history.
“A lot of people don’t know Elgin has so many things like this,” she said.
Teresa Moeller, of Cary, who teaches in U-46, brought her daughter Jessica Kapustka, of Batavia, along with her 6- and 4-year-old grandchildren.
“I thought it was interesting to see how important Elgin is in our history,” Kapustka said.
