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Skyward Jan. 2020 by Guest Blogger David Levy

Skyward for January 2020.

By David H. Levy.

First Light.

For those of us who are not astronomers, the phrase first light means dawn.   If we are up early to go fishing, hunting, or to search for a missing person, we awake at first light.  For skywatchers, first light has an entirely different meaning.    Instead, it celebrates the first time starlight enters a new telescope or the inside walls of a new observatory.  On Sunday evening, December 15,  David Rossetter, one of the United States’s most famous amateur astronomers, celebrated first light for his new observatory, completed  after he relocated to the Tucson area.  Wendee and I were there, along with some neighbors, friends, and the new executive director of the International Dark Sky Association.

          The object David selected as the first thing to be observed from his brand-new observatory was Messier 15, one of the grandest globular star clusters in the entire sky.  It is different from the object I traditionally use for my new telescopes, the planet Jupiter.  Last fall, for example, I pointed Eureka, a brand new telescope, at Jupiter for its first light ceremony.

        Jupiter shines at us from about 50 light minutes away, meaning that light reflected from the Sun leaves it and takes about 50 minutes to reach us. The globular cluster Messier 15, is much much farther away. It shines at us from well beyond the stars of its home constellation of Pegasus, from a distance of at least 33,000 light years, and at magnitude 6.2, it is barely visible to the unaided eye on a very dark night. 

          I was very glad to see M15 using David’s giant 25-inch diameter reflector from his new observatory, for I recall seeing it frequently at our Adirondack Astronomy Retreat. At the first Star Night of the Montreal Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, my first one since becoming a member, I was assigned Messier 15, the globular star cluster that was discovered by Jean-Dominique Miraldi in 1746, and added by the comet hunter Charles Messier to his catalogue in 1764.  I recently wrote about that experience in my autobiography:

“At Star Night that September I was assigned to point my telescope at M15, the beautiful globular cluster in Pegasus.  I recall doing my homework about that cluster. I learned that its distance was listed at about 33,000 light years.  We now know that M15 is also one of the oldest globular star clusters in the Milky Way, dating from at least 12 billion years ago.  We also suspect now that the central portion of M15 underwent a collapse of its core deep in the past, and that its central core consists of a huge number of stars orbiting a massive black hole.  Most of this information is more recent.  Back then the pertinent facts were that the cluster had a membership of upwards of a hundred thousand stars.”  (A Nightwatchman’s Journey, p. 68.)

Years later, I wrote: “On a beautiful clear night at one of our Adirondack Astronomy Retreats, I peered through Fritz, David Rossetter’s 25-inch Obsession Dobsonian reflector.  The telescope was pointing at Messier 15 in the Pegasus constellation, but what I had was not just a view.  It was an extended leisurely stroll among the stars of this cluster. I made some left turns, walked up hills, crossed bridges and explored valleys all decked with uncountable stars.”  (A Nightwatchman’s Journey, p. 289.)

          I thoroughly enjoyed another look at the beautiful and mysterious Messier 15 from David’s new observatory on that night.  I especially enjoy showing younger people this fabulous cluster of so many stars.  As each new generation is introduced to it, may Messier 15’s myriad stars shine for a distant and newer generation, or from another observatory as it undergoes its first light.

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My Something to Love; The Doll Museum Progresses

So, I’m back!  Trying to keep up, but setting up the museum takes all I’ve got these days.  It is a small, but temporary space, a chance for us to begin while we pursue a larger building for our permanent home. As Pym wrote, though, we all need something to love.

My friends have stepped up in unimaginable ways, from Michele, who made the building available, to Diane, her business partner who has helped with supplies, and costumes, and doll accessories, to Dick and Nancy who have offered their help in so many ways. 

Gloria, Caroline, Clara, Jill, Marie, Kathy, and Nancy S., and everyone else who has donated dolls to us, to the Friedken family for the little trike, and to everyone at Good Will, Salvation Army, Erin at Rescued, Dennis of The Treasure Chest, and our many friends in the antique and thrift community who have helped me, and given me encouragement and advice.  I wish my Mom and Dad were here, and my doll friends now gone, Mary Hillier, Stephanie Hammonds, Mikki Brantley, and so many more wonderful writers and doll artists, my friend and pen pal, R. Lane Herron who currently writes for Doll Castle News, and so many others.

Believe in your passion, follow it, and you will be happy.  Success is measured not by monetary gain, but by true happiness.  It has taken me my entire life to get here; I started collecting when I was three, and I never met a doll, or toy, I didn’t like.  I studied, my folks helped me travel, my Dad carried home dolls from all over the world, even one given to me from executives of Mitsubishi.    My mother made them, repaired them, dressed them, and put up with old things, which she really didn’t like.  At least, not at first; she changed her mind later.  My husband, Dino, has been a huge help, my editor, my best friend, my navigator in this journey. Our friend Greg, gone too soon, believed in me, and Mark, our other friend, contributed a lot.

I’ve had antique adventures with my friends Rosie, Lori, Nancy T, Danyelle, and more.  My Aunt Rosie and Uncle Tony looked everywhere for old dolls for me, and Rosie made them in her ceramics studio for me.  My Uncle Tom brought one home each week for me, and my Uncle George cruised Berkley and Lost Gatos looking for stores that sold dolls. My grandma’s collection of international dolls inspired my collection; two of them began it.  She also dressed dolls, sometimes over night.  Doll nudity offended her.

We hope to open November 30, 2019, Small Business Saturday; for the first time in a long time, I’m looking forward to something, and the sun is shining again.  Thank you to all who read me blogs and postings, and to those who have bought and read my books.

Thinking outside the Doll House, A Memoir, will be out soon.  You can read my entire doll story there.  Thank you, and I love you all!

Guest Blogger; Dr. David Levy with Skyward, California and the Universe

Skyward

October 2019

California and the Universe

Since early in the last century, astronomers dreamed of the clear sky over California as a place to unlock our imaginations and study the Universe.    In 1917, the 100-inch Hooker telescope was opened to the poetry of Alfred Noyes, who wrote:

          We creep to power by inches. …Even to-night

          Our own old sixty has its work to do;

           And now our hundred-inch: I hardly dare

           To think what this new muzzle of ours may find.

The Seth Nicholson Dome

The one hundred inch telescope

And just think what the telescope did find;  among many other things, it revealed that our Universe was double the size we thought it was.  Despite the fact that I have visited Mount Wilson many times, my most recent visit in September gave me an insight I hadn’t experienced before. I was a guest of Scott Roberts, whose Explore Scientific telescope company had organized an observing party there. The place literally oozes history through every stone, piece of wood, and gear revealing the progress of our understanding of the Universe as it increased during the 112 years since the observatory’s founding in 1907. 

During my visit there I felt as though I was standing next to some of these great astronomers, now long gone.  I was standing next to George Ellery Hale as he struggled to build the Snow solar telescope, the mighty 60-inch, and the 100-inch Hooker telescope.  I was standing next to Fritz Zwicky as he used the 100-inch on so many nights.  Zwicky had quite the reputation as a curmudgeon.  He might have included me among the many colleagues he called “spherical bastards” – meaning a bastard no matter which angle or prism you choose to look through.

I was standing next to Walter Baade.  There is a story that, at the outbreak of the second world war, he was declared an enemy alien and ordered to stay near his Pasadena home.  Since he, or someone, allowed the vicinity of Pasadena to include Mount Wilson, Baade essentially enjoyed three years of uninterrupted observing time on the 100-inch.  With Los Angeles under occasional blackout conditions that darkened the Mount Wilson sky still further, Baade made his crucial observations of individual variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy that he, and Bart Bok, later used to determine the size and shape of our own Milky Way Galaxy.

George Ellery Hale was unsatisfied with the size and abilities of the big 100-inch telescope, and he longed for a much larger one.  He hired Russell Porter, the amateur astronomer who had founded the Stellafane telescope makers meeting in 1925, to work on a 300-inch telescope. When that was deemed impractical, a 200-inch telescope was built instead.   Porter’s drawings of the 200-inch were stupendous.  Realizing that the 100 was unable to reach the north celestial pole due to its English double yoke mount design, he envisaged a beautiful and elegant horseshoe design so that the 200-inch could point right at the pole if needed.    Even the lowly 18-inch Schmidt camera telescope, the first telescope at Paliomar, made history as the instrument Zwicky used to discover 100 supernovae in distant galaxies, and, near the end of its useful life, it was the telescope used in the discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.

I close with a variation of a quotation by Sir Kenneth Clark.  What defines the great observatories that look to the stars and revolutionize our understanding of them? I don’t know.  But I know them when I see them.  And the observatories at Mounts Wilson and Palomar are them.

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