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.” He wrote his poem in 1864 but it might have been composed with...
by David H. Levy 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.” I have never forgotten those beauties, in particular Bart’s favorite: The Eta Carinae nebula...
By David Levy Nothing in the night sky quite beats a total eclipse of the Moon. Other than a shooting star, eclipses prove to all who watch them that the sky is a changing place. During the several hours of a lunar eclipse, we can actually watch as the Moon slowly orbits the Earth, and as it passes through the shadow of the Earth we can enjoy its...
By David Levy 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. Before they had a chance to answer, David upped the ante by asking if we’d like to...
By David Levy 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. Actually, there are two Omicron stars in that constellation. The first...
By David H. Levy Star GazersWhat 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. Norman...
By David Levy 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. It was the spectacular, flawless...
“A Dragon Lives forever, but not so girls and boys.” By David Levy 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. It is called the Astronomical...
By David H. Levy 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 As I spent hour after hour hunting for comets, I came across the...
By David H. Levy A few weeks ago, I received a message from Cameron Gillis, an amateur astronomer who wrote that he liked galaxies. Just for fun, I decided to take the opposite approach, a philosophical reversal. If he likes galaxies, then I hate them. As we prepared for our meeting I began to explain the various reasons why I hate them. When, for...
