[OAO 2 "Stargazer"]

De-accessed by NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center via GSA Auction;

Private Collector, Acquired in the Above

The Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO) 2, nicknamed "Stargazer," was NASA's first successful space telescope, and the direct predecessor to the Hubble Space Telescope and many other astronomical satellites. The "Stargazer" satellite, launched on December 7, 1968, only two weeks before the launch of Apollo 8 and the first crewed flight to the Moon, provided observations that could not be collected on Earth, such as the heat signatures of young stars and the vast swaths of hydrogen gas that surround comets.

"Stargazer" contained two experimental packages, each viewing space from opposite ends (thus the flaps on each end of the model). Fred Whipple, director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the principal investigator for Project Celescope, which used four telescopic Schwarzschild cameras to image the sky's UV wavelengths. Arthur Code, director of the Washburn Observatory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was the principal investigator for the Wisconsin Experiment Package, which consisted of four stellar photometers to measure the UV brightness of stars, two scanning spectrometers to record target spectra, and a nebular photometer to measure the brightness of such objects.

Eventually shut down in February 1973, "Stargazer" and its experimental packages captured 8,500 images across 10% of the sky, and provided UV data on more than 1,200 stars, alongside observations of planets, galaxies, and comets.