Alvan Clark, a nineteenth-century astronomer and telescope-maker
Ashfield is the birthplace of prominent director Cecil B. DeMille (whose parents were vacationing in the town at the time), Alvan Clark, nineteenth century astronomer and telescope maker, and William S. Clark, member of the Massachusetts Senate and third president of Massachusetts Agricultural College (now UMass Amherst).
The observatory formerly included a twelve inch (30 cm.) refractor telescope built by the Alvan Clark firm in 1916 for the Czarist government of Russia.
In Boston, he met with Alvan Clark and purchased an 18½-inch lens and mounting for the Dearborn Observatory, at the time, the largest refracting telescope ever built.
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He won the Royal Photographic Society Medal in 1905 for the camera which he designed for the 24-inch Clark telescope.
In 1877 while the McCormick Refractor was still in Cambridgeport, Alvan Clark used it to verify the discovery of the moons of Mars the night after the discovery observations were made by Asaph Hall with the Naval Observatory refractor.
The facilities include a 24-inch Boller and Chivens reflector with a CCD and retrofitted with a DFM control system, a 12" Fitz/Clark refractor, a 6" Alvan Clark refractor, a Hale Spectrohelioscope, and six Meade 8" SCTs.