Dyer Observatory

Dyer Observatory sits on Brentwood Hill in southern Davidson County, Tennessee, within Nashville, and has been part of Vanderbilt University since nineteen fifty-three. Arthur Dyer, head of the Nashville Bridge Company, paid for the dome and helped raise donations from Nashville businesses to equip it. The main telescope is a twenty-four-inch reflector, large by the standards of campus observatories.

For decades, Dyer hosted public nights where Nashville residents could look through the eyepiece and see the craters of the moon or the rings of Saturn. The observatory is on the National Register of Historic Places and sits in a landscape of cedar glades, one of Tennessee's most distinctive ecological communities, on a hilltop that on clear nights still earns its keep.