The Ladd Observatory, Providence, in a key architects’ drawing of summer 1890. The year of Lovecraft’s birth. It’s from a very poor Google Books scan, with fine details in the sky blown out and most of the small penmanship unreadable, so is not ideal. But it’s the best available. This is what was started with…

Lovecraft knew the Ladd from summer 1903, aged 13, and on Halloween of that year noted that the telescope was haunted by a ‘colour out of space’ where there should be no colour…

The telescope is a 12 inch equatorial, but does not perform in the manner that a glass of its size should. Chromatic aberration is the principal defect. Every lunar crater and every bright object is surrounded by a violet halo.