On its way to land in Tucson, Arizona, Air Force One flies low over our observatory on the afternoon of January 12, 2011.
CN3y Sharing the Sky web log 21
Sharing the Sky visits the Wendee and David Levy Observatory
As Wendee and I began last night’s first Sharing the Sky event of 2011, we bore thoughts of what has already happened this year. Just eight days into 2011, a young man carrying a gun opened fire on our Congressional representative, Democrat Gabrielle Giffords. As the bullet tore through her head, she slumped forwards. The event was so shocking, so unexpected, so awful that the first news was that the Congresswoman had died.
About an hour later I turned on my computer to begin scanning the previous night’s images, which I had taken. This represented the first time I had worked nine cameras at once. As the computer displayed the latest news from the web, it told me of copied National Public Radio’s report that Giffords had been killed. As many other news organizations confirmed this premature report, Wendee and I went into a sorrowful, pensive mode.
Reports of her death, it turned out, were premature, and over the next weeks our Congresswoman began to make a spectacular recovery. The high point of these days was Wednesday, January 12, when President Barak Obama arrived to bring a special message of hope to weary Tucsonans. As I looked upwards around 3:20 pm that afternoon, I noticed first that the airspace over Tucson was completely clear of airplanes, save for a single military helicopter. A few miunutes later I could see the vapor trail of a large plane approaching from the east. I pounded on the office door to alert Wendee. As we looked eastward the outline of Air Force One grew larger and clearer, until it flew almost directly over our house. Despite the sense of tragedy, President Obama was on his way to set things right.
Two weeks later, we gathered for our star party at the Wendee and David Levy Observatory. Under a clearing sky, we set up Uncle Guy, the wonderful Meade 14-inch reflector that had been awarded to the Sharing the Sky Foundation a few years ago. The children, with their parents and school teaching staff, enjoyed their views through this mighty time machine that could peer into the reaches of space and time.
The first object we looked at was Betelgeuse, the mighty red giant star that has been in the news lately. It could, the news said, become a supernova any day now, and if it did it would rival the Sun in brightness. Although I maintained my belief that such an explosion is centuries or millennia away, the kids held on to their tale that the star would explode in 2012, fulfilling the Mayan calendar’s end of the world prediction. Even so, a look at the twinkling reddish star through the telescope helped assuage their fears.
A young student enjoys a lkook through Uncle Guy, STS's telescope that was donated to the Corona Foothills Middle School for the use of the students of trhe Vail school district.
Our next target was not an old star but a young nebula, Messier 42 in Orion. Surrounding the trapezium of four stars (Orion was still too low to permit us to detect the other two fainter stars) was the bright hydrogen and dust cloud of the nebula. I explained how the stars within the nebula were a few million years old or younger, and a few million years, measured against the lifetime of a star, indicates that these stars are infants.
Then we swung the telescope over to Sirius, the brightest star in the sky not because it is big, but because it is close. Dazzling Sirius is Wendee’s favorite star, and the children enjoyed it as well. Moving westward, our next view was of Jupiter with its four Galilean moons Ever since I first saw Jupiter through a 3.5-inch telescope on September 1, 1960, I’ve always been attracted to this, my favorite planet. It was my preferred member of the solar system even before 1994, when fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into its gaseous atmosphere. But now, Jupiter and I enjoy a special closeness, if planet-to-person friendship is possible.
The great spiral galaxy in Andromeda was our final object of the evening. While our first three objects were all within our own galaxy, Messier 31 was a whole new concept—a maelstrom of at least four hundred billion suns, clouds of gas and dust, with, as I explained, a large supermassive black hole in the center. One person asked a good question about black holes. If relatively small single-star black holes were abundant, and if many galaxies have supermassive black holes containing the mass of many suns, could there be intermediate black holes, containing dozens or hundreds of stellar remnants. I don’t know, but why not?
I ended my own evening with a look at the Christmas tree cluster counted as 2264 in Dreyer’s New General Catalog, and as Levy 159 in my own catalog that I have kept since starting comet searching in December 1965) through Thom Peck’s 10-inch Dobsonian reflector. As we left and went home, we reflected on the success of the evening. As long as there are people who want to reach for the stars, maybe all is right with the world after all.