Ruby Throated Hummingbird (female)

Public Broadcasting System in my state airs a show a couple of times a week called 'University Place'.  It's lectures presented by various professors/specialists on varied subjects.  I was making breakfast when a professor of history started a talk about the Burnham Telescope which is on display at the university.  He started by talking about the era of refracting telescopes.  The Burnham is a six inch example made in the 1870's and bought by an amateur astronomer named Sherburne Burnham.  He set out in his spare time to document double stars (stars that look like a single one but are really a pair of stars orbiting a central gravitational point).   He built a name for himself in astronomical circles by finding 400 previously unknown doubles.   Burnham and his telescope eventually made it to the university.  Burnham left but the telescope stayed  until it went on an expedition  to look for Vulcan. Things were getting interesting.  I remembered the story of the planet Vulcan (it predates Star Trek by many decades).  Astronomers knew that the planet Mercury's orbit precessed a tiny portion and assumed this was the effect of an unknown planet orbiting even closer to the sun.  (Actually, Mercury's orbit precession was later explained by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.)  A French astronomer even claimed to have observed the planet.  The Burnham telescope was portable and taken by one of the university's professors to view a full eclipse occurring in the South Pacific to see the planet Vulcan. No one observed a planet and the professor wrote a paper disproving it's existence.   After that the telescope was used by university students and had other 'adventures' before ending up on display.   So glad modern technology means I can now watch a lecture while eating an omelet instead of in a lecture hall in a hard seat w/ a tablet arm.  

Tick count is 4.