24-inch Dyer Telescope

The Brian Dyer Telescope is the latest addition to Lowell Observatory’s fleet of public telescopes. Installed in the spring of 2020, the new instrument was named by its donors to memorialize their friend and businessman Brian Dyer, who unexpectedly died before his time in 2011. It is located in a retrofitted dome that sits about 50 yards to the south of the historic Clark Refractor dome. This structure was previously known as the McAllister Dome, named in honor of John Vickers McAllister—husband of longtime Flagstaff philanthropist Frances McAllister. It was built in 1996 to house a 16-inch telescope previously operated at Northwestern University. That telescope became nearly inoperable and Lowell decided the time had come to replace it. While the structure has been renamed the Brian Dyer Dome, the area around the dome continues to honor the McAllister heritage with the name “John Vickers McAllister Public Observing Plaza”.

The Dyer Telescope is a PlaneWave CDK24a—a 24-inch (0.61-meter) f/6.5 Corrected Dall-Kirkham astrograph. It covers a 70-millimeter field of view without any field curvature, off-axis coma, or astigmatism. This means you will enjoy pinpoint focus from the center to the edge of the field of view. The 24-inch aperture matches that of the historic Clark Refractor, though the design of the Dyer results in a much shorter telescope.