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Skyward                     

By

David H. Levy

A Nightwatchman’s Journey: The Road not Taken

On Friday, June 14, my latest book, my autobiography entitled A Nightwatchman’s Journey: The Road not Taken was launched at the Royal Astronomical Society’s General Assembly in Toronto.    It is a book I have been working on for almost a decade, and it is the story of my life.    The book begins in medias res, in the midst of a suicide attempt that happened shortly after I graduated from Acadia.  I have suffered from depression throughout my life, but this book describes my efforts to conquer it.  It tells of how I made many poor decisions in my life, but how two of them were good.  The best decision was marrying Wendee, which I did in 1997 and with whom I have had 22 happy years.   The other one was to begin, on December 17, 1965, a search for comets. 

It took me nineteen years, searching with telescopes for 917 hours 28 minutes, before I finally found my first comet in 1984.  Since then I have found 22 more.  One was an electronic find shared with Tom Glinos in 2010.  Thirteen were photographic film discoveries shared with Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker (including Shoemaker-Levy 9 which collided with Jupiter in 1994) and there were nine visual comet finds.  If the first seventy-one years of my life had been just staring through the eyepiece of a telescope, however, there would not have been much to write about.  What happened on the road less travelled by, like Robert Frost, has made all the difference. 

Comets, I learned, are not just for viewing.  They are for reading and for studying. At first, I did some high school reading about the discovery of Comet Ikeya-Seki, the brightest comet of the twentieth century.  Years later in graduate school at Canada’s Queen’s University, I prepared a master’s thesis based on the 19^th century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who observed Comet Tempel in 1864 and subsequently wrote a beautiful poem about it.  But the writer who seemed to be most into astronomy, and whose love of the sky I turned into my Ph.D., was none other than the great William Shakespeare, whose collected works contain more than two hundred references to the sky, including the opening lines to I Henry VI, one of his earliest plays:

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!

Comets, importing change of times and states,

Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky.

Even now, when I spend an evening or all night under the stars, I am amazed to be able to share my experiences with so many people, in all walks of life, who have come before me.    Taking a road “that was grassy and wanted wear” might have been risky, but it did point me toward many adventures I’ll never forget.

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