Welcome to the oldest building on the college campus, the N.A. Richardson Observatory. The building was the dream of the college’s founder and first chairman of the board of trustees, Noble Asa Richardson, who was also an amateur astronomer. The Observatory was built in 1930 and had a 16-inch Newtonian telescope housed under the dome on a pier-based German equatorial mount. At the time, it was the largest telescope at any junior college in the nation.