Ever since the late 1980s, the University of Arizona’s Alumni Association has sponsored an annual astronomy camp. Its purpose is to expose young people to the universe and the ways that astronomers study and uncover new secrets about it. The youngsters get to use serious research telescopes. Up to this year, the main locales for the astronomy camp had been the summits of Mount Lemmon and Mount Bigelow, high in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. This year the camp moved to Kitt Peak National Observatory, where the mighty 90-inch Bart J. Bok Telescope was waiting for them.

I had a little bit to do with the dedication of the 90-inch for Bart, since I knew this great astronomer for the last few years of his life and wrote a biography of him. The 90-inch was Bart’s idea; its genesis was a talk he had with Lee Hayworth, then the director of the National Science Foundation. As the story goes, Bart was proposing a 60-inch telescope, but Hayworth responded: “Bart, you know how to build observatories. You know how to run observatories. Let’s turn your 6 upside down to a 9 and give Steward Observatory a 90-inch.” The optical design was a close copy of Kitt Peak’s 84-inch Ritchey-Chrétien reflector, whose optical system provided wider fields of view than classical Cassegrain systems.

The 90-inch is used heavily for research during the time of the month when the Moon doesn’t brighten the sky, but it was still possible to set the telescope aside for several nights for use by young people, most of whom have very little experience with astronomy. Although part of the national observatory, the 90-inch has its observing time scheduled by a Steward Observatory committee. It’s to their credit that the scope was made available for educational purposes.

A central purpose of the astronomy camp, according to Director Don McCarthy, is to assemble a group of young people who have few perceived notions about astronomy and are thus amenable to fresh teaching. I’ve been involved with the camp from the beginning when I would join Ray White, the popular University of Arizona astronomy professor, at the summit of Mount Lemmon and talk with the small group of young astronomers at the 40-inch telescope. Within a few years Don McCarthy had taken over the operation of the camp, and he has run it ever since. For many years, the camp used the 61-inch Kuiper telescope on Mount Bigelow, named for the famous astronomer who founded the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

Over the years, two telescopic observations stand out as memorable camp experiences. One was a view of Messier 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, with the 61-inch reflector. The galaxy was magnificent; its many arms stretching far out from its nucleus. It felt as though the telescope had transported me into space and that I was viewing the Whirlpool from a close distance. The other view happened last week. We were looking at Saturn with the 90-inch. The planet appeared exquisite with bands (softer than Jupiter’s but still distinct and beautiful) visible on the globe, and the rings circled the planet in a very narrow ellipse that looked almost like a flat line. My wife, Wendee, noted that the ring system cast a shadow on the tops of the planet’s gas clouds.

Each year the camp offers a different theme, and this time it was the International Year of Astronomy 2009. It was especially appropriate, since the camp is a wonderful way to inspire young people about the wonders of the night sky.

One of the small worlds orbiting the Sun has a new moniker. The International Astronomical Union has named asteroid 120349 Kalas in honor of husband and wife John and Elizabeth (Liz) Kalas for their years of promoting astronomy at public events. John specializes in displaying solar activity with hydrogen-alpha telescopes to groups of young people. In addition to assisting her husband on crowded afternoons and evenings, Liz is an award-winning master quilter.

The story behind the asteroid naming began in 2001 when Tom Glinos asked if he could place his new 20-inch Ritchey-Chrétien telescope at our observatory. My wife, Wendee, and I agreed, and the scope become a part of a comet-hunting program, called CN3, that I have conducted since 1965. On December 12, 2004, our team discovered a faint asteroid with the scope. Designated 2004 XC42, it was about 20th magnitude, which is the limit for asteroids we can detect with the 20-inch and about as faint as you have to look today if you want to discover asteroids. Once the orbit of 2004 XC42 was determined with sufficient accuracy, the Minor Planet Center assigned it the permanent number 120349 and, as the discovers, we had the privilege of proposing a name. It was made official two weeks ago.

This past weekend was a particularly busy one for John and Liz’s outreach activities. Keith Mullen of southeastern Arizona’s Huachuca Astronomy Club had organized a very nice star party called “C-Row Star B.Q.” sponsored, in part, by Celestron. Although it’s a star party for club members and their families, it had all the attractions of a big public event, including door prizes personally called out by Celestron CEO, Joe Lupica. There were lectures during the afternoon, including Kim Rogalski’s insights about the geology of the area, and Bob Gent’s take on some of the national astronomy societies like the Astronomical League and the International Dark-Sky Association. Noted deep-sky observer Steve Coe showed us some of his photographic accomplishments, and I shared some ideas about the relationship of astronomy and literature from my recently completed PhD dissertation.

During the afternoon we had a chance to visit Doug Snyder’s nearby observatory and see his beautiful 20-inch Obsession telescope. During the spring of 2002, he used the scope for the co-discovery of Comet Snyder-Murakami, which turned to be a very nice telescopic comet and one of the latest (and now very rare) visual comet discoveries.

Back at the C-Row Star B.Q. at Keith Mullen’s RepoGazer Observatory, the crowd of enthusiastic amateur astronomers were preparing for night. Near the end of the evening lecture program I checked that John and Liz were in the audience before making the announcement that our asteroid discovery had been named in their honor. We felt that it was important to make the announcement at this star party because it was held as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, a celebration in which public outreach plays a major role. John and Liz represent what astronomy outreach is all about — sharing telescopes, inspiring people to learn about astronomy, and especially encouraging as many people as possible to go out at look toward the stars.

Until rather recently, if you wanted to take moderately wide-field pictures of the sky that also went deep, your choice for commercial equipment was limited to Schmidt cameras and old-fashioned film. There was really no other way to do it.

Now there is. Dean Koenig and his team at Starizona, a telescope manufacturer and store based in Tucson, Arizona, have painstakingly developed an elegant system called HyperStar. It is a special lens system that retrofits to Celestron and Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes (SCTs), turning them into wide-field, f/1.8 imaging systems.

Not all SCTs are compatible with the HyperStar system, but there’re details on the Starizona website about which scopes are compatible or can be made compatible. As of now it includes 8- to 14-inch Celestrons and Meade’s 10- and 14-inch models. I currently have three HyperStar-equipped scopes in my observatory — a 14-inch Celestron and 10- and 14-inch Meades.

HyperStar is not a visual tool. Rather it is a sophisticated lens system that mounts to the front corrector of the SCT and places the camera at the telescope’s prime focus. The observer’s head would block light from entering the telescope if he or she tried to use it visually. One of the reasons I like HyperStar so much is that it has enabled me to expand my photographic comet hunting by capturing deep images with exposure times measured in seconds rather than minutes.

Dean is one of the most interesting people I know in the astronomical community. Over the years we have observed together on countless occasions. He’s also been exceptionally helpful when it comes to keeping my telescopes running smoothly, since he knows that I have 10 thumbs. I remember one time we were spending night after night struggling to bring an old Schmidt camera to focus on film, when we were interrupted as the stars overhead simply dimmed. It turned out that a violent dust storm, born half a world away over a great Mongolian desert, had crossed the Pacific and was blanketing our Arizona sky that night.

There was another time I call Dean’s magic night. We were trying to install a CCD camera into my redesigned 12-inch Schmidt camera. Dean bore-sighted down the tube, took a guess as to where the camera needed to be, locked it down, and asked me to take a test picture. The image came back with a field full of perfectly focused stars, all beautifully aligned! Instead of taking four nights, this focusing job took four minutes.

HyperStar is like that CCD-equipped Schmidt camera, since it turns a long-focus SCT into a fast, wide-field powerhouse of an imaging telescope. My 14-inch scopes record 18th-magnitude stars in single, 30-second exposures.

During the early morning hours of May 25th, I set up Gemini, my new 10-inch JMI binocular telescope, for a predawn comet sweep. Starting my hunt a little earlier than usual, I headed out among the stars in Pegasus. I was searching about a degree and a half from NGC 7331, the bright galaxy near the famous galaxy cluster Stephan’s Quintet, when I chanced upon a faint fuzzy spot of perhaps 11th magnitude. Since I knew the field well, I assumed right away that it was a comet.

It didn’t take me long to confirm it was indeed a comet, but one that was already well known. Using the Minor Planet Center’s website, I checked for known asteroids and comets in the area, and found that Eric Christensen discovered this comet in 2006. It has been slowly brightening ever since, but it should fade slowly over the next few months as it heads south.

Although Eric is now involved with the Gemini South telescope in Chile, he remembers fondly his time with the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona. Currently the most successful of the major surveys looking for asteroids that pass close to Earth (NEOs — near-Earth objects — as they’re known to astronomers), finding some 70% of those discovered in the past three years, the program is run by Ed Beshore and Steve Larson. The program includes a southern survey conducted by Rob McNaught and Gordon Gerradd. That survey resulted in the discovery of what became the Great Comet of 2007.

I know Steve Larson very well. In the summer of 1985 he hired me to be part of his “Near-Nucleus Studies Net” for the International Halley Watch, a multi-year effort designed to coordinate and archive observations from around the world. The job was fun and rewarding. My favorite part was the observing we did, both with the 61-inch telescope atop Mt. Bigelow, and with the 20-inch on Tumamoc Hill just west of Tucson.

We amassed a huge amount of data from those years. The two pictures here were taken during January 1986. The first shows the comet in outburst on January 6th, with several jets emanating from its nucleus, including a remarkable tailward jet feature. Steve and I obtained that image with the 61-inch telescope. While visually less impressive, the second image is my favorite. On the evening of January 27th I struggled to find the comet in twilight less than two weeks before its February 9th perihelion passage near the Sun. I finally spotted it and grabbed a test image seconds before the comet set behind a distant hill. The image shows the comet at left, the hill in the center, and a cactus branch on the right.

Years later, it appears that Eric had a similar experience working with Steve Larson. “Working for Catalina was a fantastic experience,” he writes; “it was very satisfying to do interesting work with good people. I was hired as an observer in 2003, when Catalina was in the final stages of some major equipment and software upgrades. I was involved in software development, maintaining and improving the acquisition and reduction pipelines and user-interface tools. There was also a fair amount of hands-on work, from washing optics and collimating the telescopes to installing exhaust fans and air conditioning in the dome. Working on a project like Catalina with limited staff and budget was challenging but gratifying, and there was rarely a dull moment. There was always a new problem to solve, a new improvement to implement, a new way to squeeze a few more discoveries out of our existing system.”

This year Comet Christensen reaches perihelion in early July, when it could be 8th magnitude. The comet is a tribute to a lot of hard and conscientious work. Eric is enjoying the big telescope in Chile, but he misses “the thrill of the hunt that was a regular part of the experience at Catalina. The feeling of being the first to lay eyes on a new comet or near-Earth asteroid was absolutely incomparable. I spent more than a few sleepless days after a telescope shift, so high on adrenaline I couldn’t wait for night to come so I could observe again.”

Through his years of observing, Eric has captured the magic of what discovery is all about 19 times. Even now, as twilight fades and the southern sky appears in all its grandeur, he has that “Peltierian” wonder: Has something changed in the sky since last night? For those of us who search the heavens, those words express why we are so passionate about it.

I first learned of Italian amateur astronomer Mauro Zanotta two days before Christmas in 1991. I had been asked to confirm a comet independently discovered by him and Howard Brewington in the United States. The comet was just a little brighter than 10th magnitude and moderately condensed, making it relatively easy to spot. Zanotta, who had seen the comet first, was an active observer. He made the discovery at his alpine observing site near Laino Mountain in northern Italy near the Swiss border.

Now I’ve learned that Zanotta died in a tragic skiing accident a week ago. According to Massimo Uberti, his long-time friend and fellow amateur, Zanotta was skiing down an incredibly steep slope on Mont Blanc when something happened just 150 meters from the end of the trail. The accident ended a life too short. Zanotta, who was born in Milan, was only 46 years old. For most of his life, astronomy and skiing were his passions. He loved observing, and cherished the hours he spent searching for comets. He was married and the father of a 4-year-old son.

Zanotta’s comet discovery came near the end of the golden age of visual comet hunting. At the time a small commando unit of amateur astronomers hunted for comets, competing with each other and with the photographic surveys then underway. Automated CCD surveys were not yet in vogue, though we had a glimpse of the future when the first CCD comet discovery at the University of Arizona’s Project Spacewatch took place just a few weeks earlier.

Zanotta’s comet, officially known as C/1991 Y1, arrived with little fanfare. Many of us in the astronomical community knew at the time that CCD discoveries would increase in the years ahead, but I had no conception of the extent to which the new technology would take over. It need not be said that CCD finds now utterly dominate comet discoveries — there hasn’t been a visual one since 2006.

I never got to meet Zanotta. I wish I had. We had much in common, including our mutual love of astronomy, and we might have enjoyed observing together. I do know that Zanotta did meet Howard Brewington during a trip to the United States in the summer following their discovery, and that they did some comet hunting together. We might have also enjoyed discussing the things that amateurs like, such as the future of astronomy and that despite the new equipment then available, finding comets visually would become more difficult in the future. Searching would always be easy, but making a discovery would be the hard part.

But Mauro Zanotta was one of the lucky ones who discovered a “brave new world,” as Miranda said in Act 5 scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. His eyes were the first to see the comet that would forever bear his name. His untimely death is a lesson reminding us to cherish each moment when we go out and watch the stars. Rest in peace, Mauro. You done good.

As a youth, Bob Friedman spent nine summers at a boy’s summer camp near Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Called Camp Skycrest, this place offered a variety of science programs known as “shops.” When I worked there during the summer of 1967, I asked to introduce astronomy to the camp program. Frederick Brown, the camp’s director, didn’t think that the program would be very popular, but it was. During that summer almost half of all the campers had some contact with the night sky, a record that would be good even for 2009 and the International Year of Astronomy (IYA).

The highlight of the astronomy program was the Perseid meteor watch, which I hoped to conduct on the evening of Saturday, August 12th. Although the day’s weather looked promising, with only some cumulus clouds to block the blue sky, heavy clouds moved in around sunset, and we had to call off the event. The next evening was no better, nor was the night after that.

By Monday, August 14th, I considered foregoing what would have been my day off in the hope that the sky would finally be clear. But Joe Howard, a friend from California, persuaded me otherwise. “A day off at Skycrest,” he insisted, “is a very holy thing.” Considering the 18-hour days I had been working, it was hard to disagree with him. The sky must have felt the same way, because it wasn’t clear that night either.

Wednesday, August 15th dawned partly cloudy. The Moon was passing first quarter and Perseid numbers were plummeting, but by late afternoon it seemed that we would finally have at least some clear sky at night. At sunset I gathered the team of 12 youthful observers. The camp director gave us a lecture about keeping the noise down, and he arranged for the dining room to be open all night with snacks available.

Despite the Moon, our first meteor came almost as soon as we began observing, and the numbers remained fairly steady throughout the night. The Moon’s departure around 1 a.m. brought with it some intermittent fog, and we eventually had to close down by about 2:30. On that night the group logged 166 meteors, most of them late-shower Perseids.

So what? What does a long-ago meteor watch to do with the current IYA? Plenty, actually. I recently wrote to Bob Friedman, who currently manages a Yahoo group dedicated to those who attended Camp Skycrest when it was run as a science camp. “Remember it?” he wrote about the meteor watch. “That was one of the most memorable nights I had in my nine years at Skycrest!”

I know that Bob wasn’t the only one who was inspired that night. Alex Scheeline, currently a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champagne, still talks about that seminal night. I am sure the others who were there, and who might read these words, remember it too. It’s more proof that astronomy can touch people’s lives in very memorable ways.

Despite the children’s interest in astronomy, the summer of 1967 never had enough clear weather at Camp Skycrest for a good series of observations. May the summer of 2009 be a better one for all of us who enjoy starry nights.

Two weeks ago I slipped up when I wrote that I named my new binocular telescope Zubenelgenubi after the famous double star in Libra. That name really belongs to my 12-inch Dobsonian in a small dome that’s part of our Jarnac Observatory complex. Gemini is the correct name for the 10-inch JMI binocular telescope, in honor the NASA program that prepared humans to fly to the Moon. The Gemini program included the first spacewalk by an American astronaut; the first rendezvous of spacecraft (Gemini 6 and Gemini 7 were, at their closest, about a foot apart); and the first orbital docking of a Gemini spacecraft and an Agena target vehicle. These were heady days, exciting and hopeful. Now, Gemini is the name of a telescope that allows me to search for comets with both eyes.

This begs the larger question — why bother to name telescopes? Isn’t it silly? In a small profile of me that appeared in Meade’s 2007 telescope catalog, I’m quoted as saying “I give every telescope a name. Because part of the majesty of the sky is the majesty of the instrument you view it with.”

For me, naming a telescope is as natural a thing to do as owning one. The tradition began with my first telescope, Echo, named for the passive communications satellite launched in August 1960. For a few years, Echo was my only telescope, and it still is one of my most prized possessions. In the late summer of 1964, fellow amateur David Zackon lent me his 8-inch Cave Newtonian while he was away at school. Eventually my parents agreed to buy the telescope from him for $400, and it is now named Pegasus. It has some of the finest optics of any telescope I own.

Throughout the decades, other telescopes joined and left my band of brothers. Today’s collection is divided among three groups — scopes intended for visual comet hunting; scopes for photographic comet hunting; and scopes for sightseeing. Their names range from the stately — Gemini, Miranda (a 16-inch Newtonian), and Pegasus — to the personal, like Clyde, my 14-inch Celestron. While it’s named for the late astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, it’s less for his discovery of Pluto than it is for his personality and unforgettable sense of humor. He was a true mentor who moved me as he inspired many others, and I think of his unforgivable puns each time I use the telescope.

My collection offers a history lesson in the evolution of amateur telescope design over the last half century. The long-tubed Newtonians on their unwieldy mounts were state-of-the-art during the 1960s and ‘70s. The newer compound telescopes, each with a computer standing beside it, represent the current state of automated imaging. Obadiah, a modified 12-inch Schmidt camera made by Meade, can capture 17th-magnitude stars in 30-second CCD exposures. Each telescope offers its own particular magic, and each is best for a specific type of observing.

I also think it’s a good idea to name a telescope regardless of whether you officially own it. In my case, I consider a telescope mine if one of the following conditions applies: I bought it; I paid for at least part of it; or I bumped into it. As such, I own the 61-inch telescope on Mount Bigelow north of Tucson. One night while rushing across the observing floor in complete darkness I slammed into it, nearly knocking myself out. The mighty telescope didn’t budge, and its target, Comet Halley, was perfectly imaged. This week, as Atlantis repairs and upgrades the Hubble Space Telescope, I get the feeling that this wonderful instrument is partially mine too. But this telescope really belongs to all of us who love the stars.

In the early 1960s, the Montreal Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada held an annual Star Night in Westmount Park. I looked forward to those events, since they gave me some of my earliest opportunities to peer through many telescopes. Eventually I ended up volunteering to help with future events.

It makes sense that the old idea of Star Night is having a renaissance of sorts with present day star parties. One of the major annual events of our National Sharing the Sky Foundation is a Star Night held on the spacious, grassy mall at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Last weekend was our 13th, and it was a special one, helping celebrate the International Year of Astronomy. Unfortunately, it was also one of only two that was hindered by clouds.

We couldn’t run the event without the help of others, especially the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association. Member George Barber provided his sound system, which played soft music in between the announcements and welcoming messages I had for the crowd. John and Liz Kalas, and Thom and Twila Peck have been with us for every minute of every year, and the Flandrau Science Center officials Michael Terenzoni and Michael Magee provide a base of operations.

Each year our Star Night offers something different, and this year’s highlight was Saturn, whose nearly edge-on rings caused many a viewer to step back and ponder his or her place in space and time. Especially now, Saturn’s great ring system remains a show stopper.

Partly because local television outlets didn’t give us the support they’ve provided in the past, the attendance was down this year. Nevertheless, hundreds of visitors came by to talk astronomy and enjoy the views through our telescopes. Some even got to share their memories of past Star Nights, like the one on March 30, 2001.

That evening as we were finishing up a Star Night at Sabino Canyon several miles northeast of the University of Arizona, some of us noticed a red glow behind the Catalina Mountains to our northeast. By 10:30 the crowds were gone, but the reddish glow persisted. Suddenly our cleanup activities stopped as the glow evolved rapidly into an exquisite rayed arc of long, tenuous auroral light. It was by far the best aurora I’ve ever seen from Tucson, and it even rivaled some displays I’ve seen from Canada.

As in the past, this year’s Star Night was successful in giving some people their first look through a telescope — a look many of them will never forget.

Although I’ve seen 77 eclipses ranging from total solars to penumbral lunars, three transits, and several stellar occultations, I had yet to see a planet occulted by the Moon. Thus, I was excited by the prospect of seeing the waning crescent Moon swing over Venus in the predawn sky last Wednesday morning, April 22nd. While the occultation was visible from much of North America, it was only in the west that the ingress would take place in a completely dark sky.

So with the chance to add something new and different to my observing accomplishments, I set my alarm for 4:30 a.m. (Oh-dark thirty, as a friend once commented). But I stepped outside to see the first cloudy sky in several days. Somewhat crestfallen, I walked to the observatory to go through the motions. However, as my eyes because more dark adapted, I could see that there was a small break in the clouds toward the east. Suddenly there was an opening that allowed me a spectacular view of the Moon and Venus separated by about a fifth of a degree. I set up “Flaire,” one of my telescopes used for imaging. The cloud wasn’t moving very much, but Venus and the Moon were rising toward it, and within a few minutes the pairing disappeared from view. It was starting to look like I’d miss the occultation.

I was disappointed, but missing an occultation wasn’t as disappointing as, say, missing a total solar eclipse. These things happen, I told myself. It’s not going to make me give away all my telescopes and take up a career as an accountant. As I looked up at the cloudy sky I thought about some of the proverbs from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Proverbs like “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings;” “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom;” and “He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.” These were worthy thoughts to consider in this International Year of astronomy as I watched a sky full of clouds, and no occultation.

But the sky was dynamic that morning. Clouds overhead were thickening and thinning, allowing stars behind them to appear and vanish. Then, almost on cue, the cloud to the east began to dissipate just a bit. It revealed a brightening.

Then it happened. The cloud thinned further, and the crescent Moon burst forth with part of brilliant Venus shining on its limb! The ingress had begun, but it wasn’t finished. While not exactly rivaling the diamond ring during a total eclipse of the Sun, Venus slipping behind the Moon’s limb is one of the most stunning sights I’ve seen in all my years of stargazing.

Half a minute later it was over. The thin Moon resumed its normal appearance. Venus was hidden from view. The clouds thickened once more. On this night, it took only an instant to capture one of nature’s most glorious wonders.

Last March 2nd I experienced first light with a new telescope. Maintaining my tradition using Jupiter as my first-light object, I waited until well into dawn so that the giant planet could climb into the eastern sky and I could officially inaugurate the new instrument. But this time it wasn’t just one telescope; it was two. I was using my new 10-inch binocular telescope, the RB-10, made by JMI Telescopes.

Using a binocular telescope is the natural extension of the way most of us started out observing the heavens. My first look at the sky through an optical instrument was with my parents’ 7 x 50 binoculars during the summer of 1960. They gave me an excellent start.

From the small binoculars that introduce most of us to the night sky to the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) that towers atop Arizona’s Mount Graham, twin-scope systems are powerful tools for astronomy. The LBT sports a pair of 8.4-meter (331-inch) primary mirrors supported by 580 metric tons of telescope.

In between the world-class LBT and the small binoculars that can carry us from baseball games to the stars, Jim Burr of JMI Telescopes has developed a line of sophisticated binocular telescopes ranging in size from 6- to 16-inch aperture. Each consists of two complete telescopes mounted together. All the adjustments needed to keep them precisely aimed and focused on the same object are made while you look through the eyepieces.

I quickly learned that observing with the RB-10, which I nicknamed Zubenelgenubi (view correction) after a famous double star in Libra, is different from regular observing in some remarkable ways. The most important one is that you face away from the object you’re looking at. You also look down (as if you were sitting at a desk reading a book), so right off the bat you’ve in a comfortable position using this instrument. Control buttons located underneath the eyepieces let you electronically adjust the interocular distance (space between the eyepieces), and the focus.

Starizona’s Dean Koenig helped me get the RB-10 set up. When he delivered it to my house, I thought we’d need a bulldozer to carry it from his van to the observatory. But as we gradually unpacked the box the main pieces were light enough for Dean to carry by himself. We had the RB-10 ready for observing in less than two hours.

While Burr recommends medium- to high-power eyepieces for the RB-10, I like low powers for comet hunting. I selected a pair of 25-mm Plossls that yield a field of view about three-quarters of a degree across and make comet searching eminently comfortable with this instrument. The RB-10 has also given me hours of fun observing solar system objects. The Moon hangs in space, awaiting its next spacecraft visit. Jupiter is a special joy. And when an Earth-orbiting satellite tracked through my field one time, it really appeared to hang below the canopy of background stars.

While my chance of making more visual comet discoveries are very slim these days, I always say that it’s the search that’s the fun part. With this new pair of 10-inch telescopes, the search will be even more fun than before.

As a boy, I had three noteworthy characteristics: I was tall for my age, I loved astronomy, and I hated sports. No matter how much I tried to inspire others to look up and take an interest in the night sky, I remember people changing the subject. “Doveed” they would say, using my Hebrew nickname, “you’re so tall, you should be a basketball player.”

During the summer of 1955, while attending a YMHA day camp (the Hebrew version of the YMCA), we celebrated parents’ afternoon. As my mom and dad sat in the balcony, our little group of boys stood in line to shoot hoops. I stood in line behind all the other boys. My parents waved frantically at me. I smiled and waved back. They waved more anxiously, but I never moved forward. As the other children moved along, I never took my turn at the ball. I just stood there, grinning and waving.

Even today, friends still make fun of my lack of interest in sports. I do think that healthy competition in any field is important, and I married a woman who spent 26 years teaching physical education at a middle school. In charge of the only program using the school’s huge sports field, she added an astronomical twist by organizing a viewing session for the 1994 annular solar eclipse that tracked over the school. There was an iron-clad rule prohibiting any students from watching the eclipse without supervision, so she also took the responsibility of overseeing any who wanted to view the event.

Our annual Adirondack Astronomy Retreat in Upstate New York is also conducive for daytime play. The observing field is far larger than needed for the telescopes we have set up, which leaves plenty of room for jumping rope, Frisbee, and other easy sports. Even more exciting for people like me is the camp’s elegant system of hiking trails. My favorite is a hike that offers a majestic view of the camp from above, plus some of the nearby Adirondack peaks. And there’s another that provides a view of Lake Champlain to the east.

Despite my lack of athletic prowess, there are times when exercise and being in better shape than I am would help. During my last visit to New York City’s Hayden Planetarium Rose Center, director Neil Tyson, who was a boxer in his youth, often emphasized his points with a friendly jab to my shoulder. As his enthusiasm intensified, so did his jabs. Neil may have forgotten his own strength as he showed me a huge hanging mobile of Jupiter impregnated with Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact spots. I consider myself lucky to have remained standing!

Throughout the year, our Sharing the Sky Foundation offers monthly star nights at our local school. The children gather on the basketball court, shooting hoops while waiting for the sky to darken and the night’s program to begin. As the hoops evolve into the night and the stars come out, everybody scores.

This past weekend marked a key moment of the International Year of Astronomy, with 100 beautiful hours devoted entirely to astronomy throughout the world. “An event 400 years in the Making” blasted the poster mounted by the G Wiz Science Center in Sarasota, Florida, where I’d been invited to speak. The program was designed to break the IYA’s global plans into small, local events, and Sarasota was an ideal place for one of them.

The city has changed much since I first visited there in 1976. Now one of state’s largest cities, it straddles the Gulf Coast where it’s surrounded by majestic lakes, tall trees, and a rich variety of marine wildlife.

I began one of my lectures by asking if anyone in the audience remembered Paula Eppstein, a long time Sarasota resident who died in 2004. Several hands went up, and I was delighted because it showed that the activist role she played in the city’s arts and science projects had not been forgotten. Before moving to Sarasota in 1978, she worked with her husband, Lothar, running an arts, music, and science camp at Lake Placid, New York. Called Camp Minnowbrook, it was extraordinarily successful. Under the pristine summer Adirondack sky, it gave girls and boys an opportunity to look at a menu of planets, double stars, star clusters, and galaxies. The camp prospered for many years until Lothar’s declining health forced it to close after the 1976 season (he died the following year).

In one sense, Camp Minnowbrook plays an important role in the IYA. Many of the children who went there retained their love of the night sky and have become active in IYA. And it was through a camp connection that I was invited to the G Wiz Science Center to share in its festivities for 100 Hours of Astronomy.

Celebrating the IYA event in Sarasota seemed extra fitting to me because of the city’s connections to astronomy. One of the most noteworthy involves George Fleenor, who lives just north in Bradentron. He has been fighting a mostly successful struggle to have the Sarasota’s streetlights retrofitted to be more astronomically friendly. The city has made admirable progress, carefully shielding the streetlights on the beaches to protect a large population of sea turtles, which can become disorientated by nighttime lighting. The city center is still too bright for most astronomical observing, but progress is being made.

There is, however, an interesting astronomical oddity near the center of the city, albeit not an official one. In the halls and alleyways of the history of astronomy there are only a handful of people who standout as great visual comet hunters. That the names of two of them should meet at an intersection in Sarasota seems rather unusual. Nevertheless, that’s the case where Swift Road and South Tuttle Avenue cross near the city center. While the thoroughfares aren’t named for the famous astronomers, the intersection certainly brings to mind Comet Swift-Tuttle in 1862, and the discovery soon after of it being the source of August’s annual Perseid meteor shower. If Fleenor’s dream of shielding all of Sarasota’s streetlights eventually turns to reality, perhaps some future observers with catch sight of a Perseid meteor or two from this intersection.

Long known as “The Nation’s Attic,” the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., is home to a wonderful collection of our national treasures. I found that out during my first visit to the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in April 1993. At the time, Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker and I had discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, but we had yet to learn the true significance of the discovery. It would soon be known that the comet had slightly more than a year of life left before it crashed into Jupiter in July 1994.

The purpose of my visit to the NASM back then was to discuss comet hunting. I ended up being late for a 9:30 a.m. meeting. I had rushed in to the museum, gone through security, and asked directions to the third floor. “Just cross this large room until you reach the elevators,” I was told. Seemed easy enough, but as I began hurrying across the ground floor concourse, the periphery of my vision kept trying to tell me that there were wonders to see. But I hadn’t come to see the exhibits.

That’s when I almost bumped into a particularly large exhibit. I stopped to take a look. It was Columbia, the Apollo 11 command module. For I moment I just stared, thunderstruck. I was a foot away from the spacecraft that carried Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins to the Moon and back in July 1969! And soaring high above it was the Spirit of St. Louis, Lindberg’s plane that made the first transatlantic flight in 1927. I walked a little farther, and stood alongside Friendship 7, John Glenn’s Mercury capsule that orbited Earth in February 1962. Skylab was nearby. I decided it was well worth being a few minutes late in order to feel this unparalleled sense of humanity’s accomplishment in space.

Since the NASM opened in July 1976, its collection has been getting better and better. One of Clyde Tombaugh’s two photographic discovery plates of Pluto resides there. And the museum now boasts William Herschel’s twenty-foot telescope. This is the instrument with which he did most of the observations from the mature part of his career after discovering Uranus with a smaller scope. It is also the telescope that his son John took to Cape Town, South Africa, during the 1830s to chart the southern sky.

My recent visit to the NASM was to give the opening lecture for a 2009 series honoring the International Year of Astronomy. David DeVorkin, curator of the museum’s astronomy collection, asked me to answer the question “Why is astronomy so popular?” When I got started in astronomy that was an easy question to answer. In those days we were headed for the Moon. Today, however, with Moon landing just a memory, the topic is more challenging.

I did think of three good reasons. Astronomy deals with distant places and other times that take us away from the routines of daily life. It forces us to look at the world from the quieter perspective of the sky that is ushered in at sunset, an activity far removed from the evening news and the trivia of the day. Astronomy also deals with unimaginable vastness; giant worlds, fusing suns, great clusters of stars, and superclusters of galaxies. And. at its most basic level, astronomy is accessible to everyone. One cannot be an amateur brain surgeon, but one can easily enjoy a lifetime of success as an amateur astronomer. Without a formal education in the subject, it is possible, and in fact fairly easy, to enter the peaceful, magnificent world of the night sky and spend a lifetime enjoying it.

During my stay in Washington I had a chance to pass by the White House, which reminded me of my January posting here about “Obamastronomy,” and a photo caption suggesting that the White House might have room for a dome on its roof. After returning home I had a little Photoshop fun with a few of my snapshots, as you can see here.

Wouldn’t it be great if every home had an observatory so that we could all reach for the stars?

In my April 1999 Star Trails column in Sky & Telescope, I wrote an open letter to my 1-year-old granddaughter, Summer. Since then a lot has happened, and Summer is currently enjoying 5th grade, while her brother, Matthew, is beginning his own quest for life as a first grader. Last week I had the honor of speaking to both of their classes, as well as presiding over a special International Year of Astronomy (IYA) event at their school.

In addition to a quiet family visit, my wife, Wendee, and I travelled to New Mexico to help our daughter Nanette complete her own effort for the IYA. Her idea was to encourage students at Georgia O’Keefe Elementary School in Albuquerque, to come up with projects, especially those that dip into history, relating to the IYA. It started last fall, when she proposed an essay-writing contest that involved books the student had read about astronomy. “My plan,” she said, “was to keep them excited about the contest throughout the month.” She was wildly successful. In addition to the competition, the month was filled with a series of class-sized activities, salted with visits from members of the Albuquerque Astronomical Society who helped the student observe the Sun. Last week I presented awards to the writers of the winning essays in each grade.

So who were the winners? Everyone! Each girl and boy who participated in this inspired project was a winner. The competition itself was designed to expose the young students to the rich history we have in astronomy. Of the 78 projects that were successfully completed, the ones that meant the most to me gave an impression of the huge size differentials within our solar system. How can we imagine the vastness of our world, when a child can tell us that it is tiny compared to mighty Jupiter? While we gather this information in classrooms and digest it after school, we have no real conception of what it means.

We got to see projects that explained the planetary content of the solar system, including Pluto (which, according to the New Mexico legislature, is still a major planet), and welcoming Ceres and Eris as dwarf planets. Some of the artwork included black holes, which can be small enough to be contained within a planetary system. One project even recalled, in lively artwork, the travels we made to the Moon so long ago that they’re now part of history.

The awards presentations were only part of the day. While visiting my grandson’s first-grade class, I tried to bring Galileo’s story to life by staging a small drama about the Italian scientist's struggle to popularize the telescope, its discoveries, and the consequences he faced afterwards. I ended my morning with a visit to Summer’s fifth-grade class. I introduced the subject of life on other worlds, and the inquisitive students took it from there, engaging themselves in a conversation about how common life should be in our galaxy. They may all be correct in their diverse views, or all wrong; I don’t care. That they were very much engaged in their discussion, however, was precious.

Between March 6th and 11th I enjoyed a visit to the United Kingdom where I spent several days with the Birmingham Astronomical Society getting a firsthand look at some of the activities taking place for the International Year of Astronomy (IYA) celebrations.

The UK got a jump start on the IYA with the publication of Allan Chapman’s outstanding article about Englishman Thomas Harriot in the December 2008 issue of the Journal of the British Astronomical Association. The article offers a clear and concise argument that Harriot deserves to stand alongside Galileo as someone who studied the Moon through a telescope in 1609. Although Harriot never published his telescopic drawing of the Moon, it was reproduced in Chapman’s article and its clarity and elegance bring us back to the English night of July 26, 1609, when the drawing was made.

But does Harriot’s work belong in the same league as that of Galileo? Historians credit Galileo with being the first to study the Moon, Jupiter, Venus, and the Sun because he observed, published, and made worldwide announcements about his discoveries. Harriot, on the other hand, kept his work quiet, like an observer who discovers a comet but fails to report it.

Chapman proposes that in 2009, on the 400th anniversary of the astronomical telescope, Harriot be invited to share the dais with Galileo, and I agree. We may yet find others. The telescope clearly was a cooperative effort.

My trip was a time to reconnect with English astronomy, and I did so in three ways. Between March 8th and 10th I visited the Thinktank planetarium in Birmingham, the University of Birmingham’s Physics Department, and the Birmingham Astronomical Society (BAS). I found a huge supply of enthusiasm for spreading astronomy, and particularly the night sky. On April 3rd, the BAS will conduct a “MoonWatch.” Then on July 25th, one day shy of the 400th anniversary of Harriot’s telescopic sketch, the BAS will host a “Lunar Celebration” at the Thinktank. I am sure that these and the other events will be fully attended. You can visit www.birmingham-astronomy.co.uk to learn more about them.

Aside from lecture presentations, my trip included two personal visits that I treasure. One gave me a chance to see two great towers rising out of the busy skyline of Birmingham. These towers are said to have inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers, the second book of his The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I don’t know if the story is true, but around the turn of the last century, Tolkien spent his early years in Birmingham’s Edgbaston region. I even had a chance to photograph one of the Edgbaston Waterworks towers beneath the Moon. In The Two Towers the Moon plays a significant role as a form of celestial clock to mark the passage of time within the narrative.

The other highlight for me was a visit to Stratford-on-Avon, the village where Shakespeare was born, grew up, visited frequently during his working lifetime, and where he spent his final years. I’ve always agreed with James Joyce’s suggestion, written in Ulysses, that young Shakespeare enjoyed looking at the great supernova of 1572 shining above Cassiopeia, the W-shaped constellation that was the celestial imprint of his own initial.

During my visit I found an open field across the Avon River with a superb view to the north. Shakespeare might have wandered in a field much like this one during his own childhood look at Cassiopeia. Such observations might well have opened his young mind to an appreciation of humanity, nature, and the sky in a way that would strengthen his later writing. And I’m pleased that, as part of the International Year of Astronomy, I visited the area to help inspire today’s generations to look up in wonder, as Shakespeare, Harriot, and Galileo did so long ago.