Pamplin Media Group
A trailer with two telescopes inside, including a 14-foot-long custom telescope, was reported stolen.
Authorities are asking for the public s help in locating a trailer containing two valuable telescopes that was reported stolen from the Laurelwood area this week.
The Washington County Sheriff s Office said a rural property owner reported a 1997 Wells Cargo enclosed trailer he had been storing went missing overnight. He discovered it was gone on Thursday, March 11.
Among the items in the trailer was a 14-foot-long telescope valued at $15,000, the sheriff s office said. The telescope was custom-built, and the owner had reportedly been working on it for decades.
March 14, 2021
Carlton Observatory telescopes stolen
News-Register file photo##At a star party in Carlton in 2018, Kendall Stephens peers through the viewfinder of “BigBlue.”
Submitted photo##The missing trailer in which Big Blue and another telescope were stored.
Hundreds of children and adults had marveled at seeing Saturn and other planets through “Big Blue,” the main telescope for the planned Carlton Observatory.
Now the 15-inch Newtonian telescope is missing, along with another prized scope and the trailer in which they were stored.
Janet Juelke and her husband, Forrest Babcock, who are working toward building an observatory in Yamhill County since they moved to Carlton in 2013, discovered the trailer had been stolen March 11 or 12. The forest green, 20-foot-long Wells Cargo trailer had been stored at Juelke’s daughter’s house on Bald Peak Road, a rural site on the border of Yamhill and Washington counties.