By David Levy In 1963, while living as a patient at the Jewish National Home for Asthmatic Children in Denver, I strolled outside on the evening of March 23rd to observe the evening sky...
Author - David Levy
by David H. Levy For those of us who were alive back then, where were you on Christmas Eve, in the year 1968? I remember exactly where I was. Sitting in front of my family’s television, we were watching a surreal scene on TV. There was a camera peering through a triangular-shaped window on a spacecraft called Apollo 8, out of which was a view...
By Article Author In 1994, Star Trek: The Next Generation was one of the most popular shows on television. The episodes were so good that it was easy to tell that the cast was especially enjoying themselves. One of the episodes that year was “The Inner Light.” It was a beautiful story in which a strange probe approaches the Enterprise and...
“If you build it,” said the voice, “he will come.” In eastern Iowa near the town of Dyersville, near a well-kept farmhouse, lies a regulation baseball diamond in the midst of a cornfield. This is the field of dreams from the 1989 movie. On the beautiful Sunday afternoon of September 9th, Jeff Struve and I drove down to visit the site as part of...
The stars, it somehow appears, were aligned in good fortune when my mother, Edith Pailet Levy, was born in New Orleans on June 1, 1918. Just one week later, a total eclipse of the Sun tracked all the way across the United States from Oregon to Florida. A few weeks ago, when I told her about this eclipse, Mom appeared to appreciate what I was...
The Regal Princess is a beautiful, majestic cruise vessel designed to sail to exotic destinations. In February 2018, Wendee and I boarded it for a single reason: we wanted to visit the El Caracol Observatory at Chichen Itza. Did we take a 7-day cruise just to see an old pile of rocks? Indeed, we did! On the penultimate day, we climbed aboard a...
Cited by many as the greatest writer who ever lived, William Shakespeare died in late April 1616. When the four hundredth anniversary of his death passed by with nary a mention, it seemed somehow that something had gone wrong with the world. The year 2016 has been difficult so far both for Shakespeare and for the many people who share his...
by David Levy I have now seen 83 eclipses during my life, ranging from total eclipses of the Sun (I’ve seen 11 of those) to, at the other extreme, penumbral eclipses of the Moon. And of all the different kinds of eclipses I have witnessed, these soft, gentle events in which the Earth’s shadow gently kisses the Moon are probably my favorite...
One Sky- One World The night sky is not restricted to a specific country, or even to a specific area of the world. In fact, the sky that we see from the United States is much the same, at least for a particular latitude, over all of the world. The sky that we see from Vail, Arizona, (latitude 31.9 degrees north) is almost...
On December 17, 2015, I reached the milestone of 50 years searching for comets. When I started searching for comets and exploding stars called novae, at 10 minutes before midnight on the night of December 17, 1965, my program has three aims: 1) To become “very” familiar with the sky through searching for comets and/or novae. 2) To discover either...