Skyward This month I have a story to tell. A few nights ago two close friends from Plattsburgh, Ed Guenther and Wendy Gordon, enjoyed a very pleasant wintertime visit with me. During that time another close friend, David Rossetter, drove us to the Chiricahua Astronomy Complex in southeastern Arizona. Although the weather was clear and cold when...
Skyward: Star Gazing This month let us explore one of the seminal galaxies in the night sky, NGC 253, Caroline Herschel’s galaxy. It shines deep in the southern portion of the sky, south of the bright star Beta Ceti and southeast of the even brighter star Fomalhaut. This is one of my favorite galaxies, largely because of the beautiful story that...
When David Rossetter and I began our observing session at the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association’s Chiricahua Astronomy Complex on the evening of August 5, 2023, we did not expect that we would be treated to an evening of cosmic history. That was the night we glimpsed Comet Pons-Brooks, a comet with an orbit that, like Halley’s comet, takes...
Despite what you read online, it is possible to think of meteor watching as one of the most boring things you can do with the night sky. No cosmic connection, no postulating about the origins of the Universe, no understanding of what dark matter might entail. When we look for meteors, we are in our own celestial backyard. We usually do not...
NGC 663 One of the first astronomy books I ever read was John Benson Sidgwick’s Introducing Astronomy. Thew book was published in 1959, a year after his death. In it was a large section in which each constellation was introduced, along with interesting things to see in each one. I particularly recall Cassiopeia, in which, between the...
As an undergraduate student at Acadia University, in the Canadian maritime province of Nova Scotia, my geology professor was trying to teach us about the water cycle. Despite reams of published evidence, the best document he could come up with was this beautiful line from Ecclesiastes: “All the rivers run into the sea, Yet the sea is not full...
A lot can happen in thirty years, especially when it involves comets and asteroids that creep across the sky, and even more particularly with comets that go bump in the night. Such is the case with Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which is by far the most important and seminal of the 23 comets I have discovered. The Jupiter-Comet story began for me on...
It is my honor to introduce you, dear readers, this month to my latest book, “Clipper, Cosmos, and Children: Finding the Eureka moment.” It is a book specially designed to inspire young people to enjoy the night sky. Whether you are physically young, or even just young at heart, this new book is meant to inspire you to reach for the stars. This...
Dear readers, What follows is the most difficult article I have ever written. On Friday, September 23, 2022, my wife Wendee died. She had been suffering from metastatic breast cancer for over a decade, but this past summer she was truly and clearly suffering. We had an oncologist who was good clinically but who had no bedside manner, and a nurse...
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...
