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No one of the Lithuanian telescopes has traveled as far and as many times as the 48-cm Grubb Parsons reflector: it was repeatedly moved from site to site, from country to country. During its history of nearly 70 years, the telescope was installed at five different observatories, and its extended journey – all the time to the east – stretched out nearly 7000 kilometers.
The 48-cm primary mirror and the telescope tube, built by Grubb Parsons (Newcastle, UK), were purchased through funds from the Polish National Culture Foundation and arrived at the Astronomical Observatory of Vilnius University (AOVU) in 1938. Grubb Parsons, a well-known company, kept building world class telescopes until its shutdown in 1985, and its latest large instrument built at their workshops was the 4.2-m William Hershel Telescope (La Palma, Canary Islands). Along with the 48-cm Grubb Parsons reflector, AOVU purchased a slitless Carl Zeiss spectrograph. By the arrival of both instruments, the observatory had already acquired the 25-cm reflector by the famous telescope maker George Calver (Chelmsford, England), the mounting of which had to be used with the new 48-cm telescope. Other necessary mechanical parts for the Grubb Parsons telescope were manufactured at the Technical Facilities Shops of the Department of Physics of Vilnius University. Shortly thereafter, the telescope was completed and housed in the East dome of the observatory’s double-domed building on Ciurlionio Street. (ref: http://www.astro.ff.vu.lt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=36&Itemid=53)
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