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While walking through a building at Saint Joseph's College a few weeks ago, I noticed a flyer on a bulletin board about an observatory near Lowell, Indiana. It was something I had never heard of before, so I checked it out on the Internet.

The Calumet Astronomical Society has been in existence since 1975, but only recently--in 2005--did they build an observatory, the Thomas Conway Observatory, southeast of Lowell, near the Buckley Homestead Park. The society claims to be the most active astronomy organization in the Chicago area.

Their website has pictures of the observatory and a long explanation of how it came to be. The telescope is a 16-inch reflector. Nearby is another telescope, the NIRo or Northwest Indiana Robotic observatory, run by Purdue University Calumet that was dedicated in August, 2010. It is a 20-inch reflector that cost a quarter of a million dollars. It captures the image with a camera and transmits it to Purdue-Calumet.

Did you know that this facility was nearby?

(I need a picture. How about the one that is shown in this article? It is taken with a much bigger telescope than what is available near Lowell.)