Last week, the Grade 6 & 8s had an excellent experience at the David Dunlop Observatory – the largest telescope in Canada (right in our backyard!). The DDO telescope was the 2nd largest in the world at the time of its installation (1935), a marvel of human innovation. DDO is also a heritage site, a place of research for the UofT researchers, and is cared for by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, whose members gave us an extraordinary experience of the facility.
The history of Astronomy is directly tied to the history of Islamic civilizations, as it was the early Muslim thinkers who extracted the mathematics from pagan Astrology, giving birth to the field of Astronomy. One of the 1st institutional observatories ever built was in fact by Shaykh Nasir al-Din Tusi, which produced early accurate calendars through observational data via extraordinary astronomical innovation of the time.
