Posts
Skyward for July 2020.
Join Your Local Astronomy Club.
By a long
shot, the best way to get into and enjoy astronomy is to become affiliated with
your local astronomy club. Not only do
you get access to a ton of knowledge about how to find constellations, and to
choose and use your first telescope, but also you get a firsthand look at what
is happening at the sky from the people who love it the most.
When I was
a young teenager, one had to be sixteen years of age to join the society in
Montreal. (Thank goodness, that rule no
longer applies.) But younger people
could indeed attend most of the meetings, and on October 8, 1960, I attended my
first meeting. Isabel K. Williamson was in charge, and she gave me my first
assignment, to create a map of the Moon based on my own observations. Even
though I couldn’t be a member yet, I embarked on a project that took me 3 years
to complete. (The map is pictured in
figure 1.) In Canada, most of the astronomy clubs are under the single banner
of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.
There are “centers” within most major Canadian cities. In the United States, the local clubs are
independent, and I have a member of the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association
(TAAA) since 1979, and served as its President from 1980 to 1983.
The observatory that Wendee
and I operate from our home is called Jarnac Observatory. Unlike almost everything NASA does, Jarnac is
not an acronym. But if it were, Jarnac
could be short for Join A Really Neat Astronomy Club.
In recent months, astronomy
clubs have stopped having in-person meetings because of the Coronavirus
pandemic. But that hasn’t stopped them
from indulging in online events. Using
platforms like Zoom cloud, Cisco Webex, or Facebook, online meetings have had
an explosion in popularity. I’ve been
attending one meeting or another almost every night this week. They have been so successful that when the
pandemic is over, they may continue in some manner.
The most important thing you
can get out of an astronomy club is friends.
Almost all of my friends are members of one astronomy club or
another. They enrich my life and increase
my own enjoyment of the night sky a millionfold. I cherish their always welcome
insights. In fact, Tim Hunter, one of my
closest friends, recently made an independent discovery of a supernova, or
exploding star, in the faraway galaxy labelled UGC 10509 and which is hundreds
of millions of light years away from us.
He may not have been the first to spot it, but his observation has added
important new information about the Universe.
That star blew up a very long time ago. Its light travelled across space
and time until it landed as a speck on one of his pictures, and it is now
called Supernova 2020 LQL. This is one of the best things about astronomy. It is an area of study where amateur
astronomers can add to our understanding of how the Universe works. Nice work,
my friend.
When you next go outside to
look at the night sky, enjoy your eyeful of stars. The time after that, try it with your local
astronomy club. You couldn’t give
yourself a better gift.
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| Figure 2. The Montreal Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada used to meet in this observatory. I took this photo of my friend Carl Jorgensen, and his daughter Christine, standing in front of it. |
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| Figure 1) This is a drawing of the Moon that I did between 1960 and the ASummer of 1964. Ituis based on my own observations of the Moon using my first telescope, Echo, at that time. |
