NGC 7331 believed to closely resemble our home

“Remember that all is opinion.” Marcus Aurelius

Our sun, out in the suburbs of our home galaxy, is in orbit around the galactic center breezing along at 135 miles per second. At this rate it takes it about 225 million years to complete an orbit. The last time the sun was at it’s present position in orbit around the galaxy, dinosaurs ruled the earth. It’s reasonable to say that in our lifetime the position of the sun in its orbit remains “unchanged” even though it will travel hopefully a bit more than 135x60x60x24x365x75 miles. And away we go. One thought leads to another.

In the short galactic time from the beginning of recorded astronomy until now, the universe seen by Bedouins, Galileo, Herschel, then Hubble, then Keck and HST is much the same and unchanged. We are using the laboratory all the great astronomers have used – all the equipment still in place. In this fashion we have Newton, Messier, Tycho and the others at our side to share the view and to compare notes when we go out under the night sky.

Bill Spargo and I watched comet Brorsen-Metcalf from my back yard some years ago. I don’t know much about Brorsen, but Metcalf was a Unitarian minister who enjoyed astronomy and who was skilled with glass. Alvin Clark and his sons were very busy when it came time to make Percival Lowell’s refractor for delivery from the east coast to Flagstaff, Arizona, and they prevailed upon Metcalf to assist in making the objective lenses. He undertook the task, but died before final figuring of the glass and Alvin Clark’s staff finished and delivered the scope. Some years later Clyde Tombaugh spent hours looking through the Alvin Clark refractor and while at Lowell Observatory he discovered Pluto. He later worked at White Sands in New Mexico developing tracking optics to observe V2 captured German rockets while in flight. He then went on to teach astronomy at New Mexico State University where Bill Spargo became his student. Bill then taught astronomy in Farmington, NM, where I met him.

A few years after we saw the comet, Bill and I went to the Texas Star Party near McDonald Observatory and I met Clyde Tombaugh and David Levy and the four of us viewed the great southern globular cluster, Omega Centauri through my 17 ½” binocular telescope. The community of observers is not so very large.

Bill’s Cousin, Jon Spargo, has worked at the Very Large Array near Socorro, New Mexico since it started back in the 70’s. He also supports the observatory and club at New Mexico Tech which hosts the Enchanted Skies Star Party. Great Bear Cornicopia (that is his name) is a park ranger from Chaco National Park who gave a great talk one evening at the star party on the Pound ranch 14 1/2 miles southwest of Socorro. It was early October, still warm, and the sky so clear. As he was telling about Coyote and the Crow, and weaving tales of Chaco archeoastronomy, he paused as the space station Mir passed overhead, bright as Venus. The audience, seated on hay bales, all looked up, caught somewhere between the dusty adobe and rock walls of Chaco in 1150 AD and Mir’s orbit. Great Bear continued, “the play may not be too great, but the lighting is fine!” As dusk deepened over the New Mexico high desert a Navajo man and his tribe of high school girls danced the steps remembered for generations and then we all joined hands to do a squaw dance around the fire pit as the stars began to shine.

On Friday nights several of the local club members of the Albuquerque Astronomical Society set up scopes in the parking lot in front of the University of New Mexico observatory, built in the 50’s and currently located just about in the middle of Albuquerque. Despite street lighting, folks come by and enjoy looking through the scopes. A line of moms, dads, kids and students will form and we will show them the brightest available objects. A boy about 8 or 9 years old looked at the moon through my small binocular scope, went to the back of the line, viewed again, and after his third trip I asked him what he saw. Looking past me to the image he held in his mind, he described a brightly lit needle of a central peak casting its long shadow across miles of a central plane in a large crater. “The shadow is as sharp as a knife” -- he had just been there.

During the building of each telescope I draw upon the skills of a band of observers bounded by neither time nor geography to include Jay LeBlanc whose star data files rival the library of Alexandria, Lee Cane who gave me all of his binocular telescope drawings in 1989, Bill Cherrington of the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers, Bill Wren who shared McDonald Observatory, Bill Spargo who knew how to think, Arlin Collins who speaks unix, Brock Parker defying the odds, Barry Spletzer, a real engineer, and Gordon Pegue at home in his myriad of beckoning galaxies.

Last fall at the Okie Tex Star Party, Nagin Cox, a lady from India, graduate of Cornell, orbital mechanics and advanced training while with USAF, responsible for design, launch, transit and landing of two Martian space craft, spoke to about 200 amateur astronomers, sharing with them the excitement, uncertainties and challenges of the mission, concluding the most remarkable talk with an image of the tracks of a small robotic explorer on the surface taken from martian orbit. We all stood up and clapped minutes and minutes – She was JPL, our tax dollar at work, and hope for the continuation of meaningful astronomical science all in one package. She has now joined the Kepler Mission to seek earth sized planets circling other stars.

What remarkable times we live in.

Clear Skies!

Jim Lawrence

Albuquerque, New Mexico

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