Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: American Doll and Toy Museum: Teaching a Class on...

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: American Doll and Toy Museum: Teaching a Class on...: American Doll and Toy Museum: Teaching a Class on Barbie :     Below is the catalog page some of you asked for re my course on Barbie.   ...

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Fall

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Fall:  Happy First Day Of Fall!!!!!

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Fall

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Fall:  Happy First Day Of Fall!!!!!

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: American Doll and Toy Museum: September is for Co...

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: American Doll and Toy Museum: September is for Co...: American Doll and Toy Museum: September is for Collectors; Why Collect Dolls? :   Today, the first of September, used to be the kick off of...

Our guest blogger, Dr. David Levy October Skyward

 With prayers and healing for Wendee Levy.

SSkyward

 

  October  2022

An obituary for Donald Edward Machholz

 

 

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 you in mind.  You were born on October 7, 1952, in Portsmouth, Virginia.  I first heard of you during the 1970s, when you were popularizing a program to observe all (or almost all) the Messier objects in the sky, in a single night.  I did not take the idea seriously for a long time.  I have seen all the Messier objects, but I found them over a relaxing period of five years, from Messier 45 (The Pleiades  star cluster) during the summer of 1962, to the distant and ethereal galaxy Messier 83, in the spring of 1987.   Your idea was to learn the sky far more thoroughly than I did, and catch all the clusters,  clouds of gas and dust, and distant galaxies that Charles Messier carefully recorded.    (Messier himself was an 18^th century hunter of comets, but he is known more for his catalogue.) 

 

Thank you for inspiring me.  By the mid-1980s, I was more proficient in observing than I was in earlier decades.  One clear night in the early spring of 1983,  I successfully observed all but one of the Messier objects. Messier 30 was the only one I missed that night.

 

By that time, Don, you were already famous.  In 1978, after some 1700 hours of searching, you discovered your first comet using your simple telescope.  (You never gave up, did you?) I thought of your success on that beautiful quiet night.  In 1985, on the final night of the Riverside Telescope Maker’s Conference that year,  you discovered a second comet after another 1700 hours. You used a beautiful 10-inch cardboard and glass telescope for that second comet.(You really never gave up, did you.)    Luck began to go your way after that.  Your third comet arrived in 1986.    You used a pair of 29 x 130 binoculars for that one.  Right in between the passages of your second and third comets, Comet Halley, the most important and famous comet of them all, rounded the Sun on February 9, 1986.  I like to think that as the great Halley’s comet made its pass through the inner solar system, it was guarded by these two other comets discovered by you.

 

Don, you never ever quit.  No one would have criticized you if you had.  Instead, you spent the remaining years of your life searching the sky.  You spent almost nine thousand hours over the course of your life comet hunting.  Through it all, you never lost your passion for watching the sky.   You and I share that one important aspect, Don.  As many comets as you and I might have  found,  it was the search that was so important, for “in no better way,” as Leslie Peltier wrote, “can we come face to face, night after night, with such a wealth of riches as old Croesus never dreamed of.”

 

 

In recent years the professional astronomers have taken over comet discoveries.   But still you kept on searching.   Despite their great big telescopes, you kept going, always searching, with a series of small telescopes.    You found two new comets in 1994, one of which broke apart into several pieces.

 

By the start of the new millennium,  amateur astronomers had pretty much given up.  Visual comet hunting, was passé.  No more.  Only not for you.    You discovered not one, not two, but three comets since the year 2004 and as of August 2022, you were the leading discoverer of comets by visual means in the world.

 

Don, I wish I had known you better.   I do know I shall miss you, and our friendship which has evolved over the years, very much.  I conclude this letter, this obituary, with the end of the Hopkins poem:

 

“But then her tether calls her.  She falls off,

And as she dwindles sheds her smock of gold…

So I go out.  My little sweet is done.

I have drawn heat from this contagious sun,

To not ungentle death now forth I run.

 

 

Rest in peace my friend.

 

David H. Levy

 

Flowers and Fall

 Lately, I've watched a lot of TV shows on flowers and gardening, picking up tips here and there.  I bought cemetery flowers, gerbera daisies, died pink, and blue, some white.  I am not a master gardener, but o parents our plants, trees, flowers, shrubs, even a few weeds, mean a lot.  My grandfather loved flowers; my parents bought his house and I grew up there.  We have many plants still that he is responsible for; some of our lilies of the valley (the rest were a gift from my mom's friend Doris), white violets, honey suckle, peonies, lilacs.  The wild violets show up in April, but we sometimes get a new crop in October.

We had rose bushes for may years, and I occasionally planted radishes, which flowered, zinnias, and coral belles that come up.  We had a locust tree my uncle transplanted from our ravine and a Russian olive tree.  My grandparents planted evergreens that have withstood the test of time, and a red bud bush once graced our back yard.  Another grew in front.  My mother's favorite was a hibiscus bush with purple flowers. I loved our snowball hydrangeas and pansies.

Occasionally, we had mulberry bushes.  There are some at our museum, and I had a taste of them this year for the first time since I was eight.  The birds love them, as they love the wild cherries that grow on trees in my parents' ravine.

In our beloved California house, there were topiaries, roses all year, and birds of paradise. No matter where we lived, we made May baskets when I was small, and brought fresh flowers to our teachers

In the fall collecting leaves was a favorite pastime, as well as planting tulip bulbs.  I've planted and harvested my own gourds and pumpkins, and have holly bushes which are my pride and joy.  

Every spring, I scatter wild flower seeds; this year, I planted cosmos with success.  Even as I plant annuals like my black petunias and Dracula flowers, I look for my perennials to return.  While I'm not an expert, I pick up tips here and there, some from Dr. Tweet, who was my mentor in all things and who loved plants, some from my mother who had a begonia forever, and who had a Christmas cactus at school named Freddie, some from my piano teacher who has a real talent and can make anything grow.

With the chill of all in the air, I think about Christmas plants but also fall with its colors and fallen leaves.  Around late July, when cattails bloom and sumac begins to turn red, I'm happy because autumn is coming.

You don't have to be a master gardener; there is satisfaction in making bouquets of Queen Anne's Lace and your  own, and in planting a few seeds and watching  them take root.  They are all beautiful Taking photos of my flowers,  making fairy gardens, tending to my pot gardens which sometime involve tomatoes and vegetables, all these are important.  They are enjoyable things to do, and stress relievers.

I also have memories of gardening with my mother and raking leaves with my Dad. Happy fall, happy planting, harvest, happy spring when it comes, happy bees that buzz around the flowers.