Dear Don,
You left us far too soon, my friend. From your home in California and later in Arizona, you lived quietly and well, with a passion for stargazing that dominated your life.
As the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “I am like a slip of comet,/ Scarce worth discovery.”… Continue reading.
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly stars and clusters seen;
Round celestial islands have I been
With telescope after telescope to the night sky hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That Galileo ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Baade speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new star cluster swims into his ken;
Through his majestic window looks upon the Milky Way
He star’d at the centre of our galaxy.… Continue reading.
Ever since I read Bart J. Bok’s foreword to Rose Wilder’s and Gerald Ames’ The Golden Book of Astronomy, I have marveled at what the night sky had to offer and how much of that has changed. “Such wonders,” Bok wrote,” fill this book.”… Continue reading.
On May 30 observers all across the western hemisphere were outside, hoping to see a wonderful “new” meteor shower. The shower is actually not new. It is called the Tau Herculids, and it sends us dust particles from Comet Schwassmann-Wachman III.… Continue reading.
In the late summer of 1964 I was leaving the Observatory of the Royal Astronomical Society’s Montreal Centre with some friends, one of whom was David Zackon. I asked the group if they would like to drop by my house to observe with a 3.5-inch reflector.… Continue reading.
Over the last few months you must have read dozens of articles, online or in print, about the Omicron variant of COVID-19. Fortunately, this is not one of them. This article is about Omicron² Eridani. It is a faint star in the constellation of Eridanus, the River.… Continue reading.
What crowd is this? What have we here? We must not pass it by;
A telescope upon its frame, and pointed to the sky…
– William Wordsworth, 1806
While I was working on my master’s degree at Queen’s University in Canada some 42 years ago, I came across this poem, loved it, and decided to include it in my thesis.… Continue reading.
We all got a special and thoroughly delightful present early on Christmas morning. Although I did not set my alarm, Wendee did get up around 5 am. I turned on our television set, and what I saw 15 minutes later was the most thrilling space view since 1969, when Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon.… Continue reading.
“A Dragon Lives forever, but not so girls and boys.”
Three quarters of a century ago, during the Second World War, the famous Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, along with Charles Federer, founding editor of Sky and Telescope Magazine, launched an association of astronomy clubs across the United States.… Continue reading.
Agreed, this seems like an awfully daffy title for an astronomy article. But there is method to the madness, and there is a story. During the late summer of 2019 there was a star party in southeast Arizona that featured a dark sky and five perfect back-to-back nights.… Continue reading.