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June 2025 Skyward by Dr. David Levy, our Guest Blogger

 

Skyward for June 2025

 

David H. Levy

 

A Tail of Three Comets!

 

 

          In just the last few months, we have enjoyed a parade of no fewer than three comets.  Last fall there was Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory in east China, near Nanjing. The comet sported a very long tail and it was visible without a telescope for several weeks.    It was the highlight of an observing session a local high school shared with its students.  As the students sat and gazed at the sky, they could easily spot the tail stretching proudly across the western heavens.

 

          Just a few weeks later, in December a second ATLAS comet began to brighten significantly. I tried hard to see it as it was apparently visible for less than an hour during evening twilight, but couldn’t find it.

 

          My close friend Steve Edberg, however, did.  He and his family had to evacuate their home in La Canada during to the fires burning at the time.  On the evening of 14 January, while strolling along San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, he spotted Comet Atlas low in the west.  He is one of the very few observers in the northern hemisphere to see it.  He was so excited about it that he called me over the telephone. Our conversation was the first in more than two years but it resumed a friendship that has lasted for decades.  I was proud of him that night over his sighting, and still am.

          Over the next few days, until Comet ATLAS sank below the southern horizon, I attempted unsuccessfully to spot the comet.  But then, on 25 January, I was outside looking at some cirrus clouds.  Behind them, in the southern portion of the sky, there ss something else—strange, misshapen.  It might have been the tail of Comet ATLAS.     I recorded it as a possible sighting.                                 

  When Sky & Telescope’s June issue appeared with its pictures of the great “ghost comet,” meaning that the bhead had disintegrated, the actual tail looked identical to what I saw on photographs taken just two days earlier than my sighting.  I changed my record from “possible” to “probable.”  Comet ATLAS is the 236^th comet I have seen since Comet Ikeya-Seki in 1965.

 

          There was yet a third comet.  Comet Swan (C/2025 F2) was discovered in March 2025.  The discoverers used the Solar and Hemispheric Observatory spacecraft’s SWAN (Solar Wind Anisotropies) instrument.  The SWAN instrument has discovered over five thousand comets.  I saw this lovely comet on the morning of 10 April 2025, andit is the 237^th comet I have seen.  This SWAN instrument aboard SOHO, and SOHO itself, by the way, has discovered more than five thousand comets.

 

Three wonderful comets over just a few months is unusual, interesting, and fun:  But all three have departed. As Hopkins wrote in 1864,

 

 But then her tether calls her; she falls off,

And as she dwindles sheds her smock of gold…

And then goes out into the cavernous dark.

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.”

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Veterans Day

 To all my many students who have served, thanks.

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Imagination and the Astronomical League by David Levy; Preview of a new Children's Book

 From our guest blogger, Dr. David Levy

Skyward for January 2022

 

 

 

Clipper began life in around 1956 as a Bar Mitzvah Present

 

Imagination and the Astronomical League.

 

“A Dragon Lives forever, but not so girls and boys.”

 

Three quarters of a century ago, during the Second World War, the famous Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, along with Charles Federer, founding editor of Sky and Telescope Magazine, launched an association of astronomy clubs across the United States.  It is called the Astronomical League, and it thrives to this day with more than 100 astronomy clubs.  Unlike the national Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, the League is designed to be a more loosely structured organization.  According to Carroll Iorg, its current president, one of its most critical and central goals is to inspire the next generation to enjoy the night sky.     If that goal should fail. The possibility exists that there may be no Astronomy  for future generations.

 

As part of this vital goal, the Junior Astronomical League, a new subset of the Astronomical League, is now meeting every second Sunday over zoom.  But there is something more.  My next book will be devoted to those young stargazers.  It actually began as a typewritten saga I wrote in 1958 when I was ten years old, and of all the 40 plus books I have written, this is Wendee’s favorite.   I am now completing a second edition of this book, in which a small group of children go on a stargazing adventure with Clipper, a magic beagle, and with Eureka, an enchanted reflector telescope.  They go past the Moon and planets, the stars, the distant superclusters of galaxies, and even the great voids in distant empty space.

 

In its final chapter, this book explores the theme articulated in the last verse of Peter, Paul, and Mary’s eminent song “Puff.”   ”A dragon lives forever, but not so girls and boys.”  The children, now grown, go to university.  When they complete their college education, the young woman, adept at math and physics, becomes an astronomer, but the young man goes on to become a lawyer.  He marries, has children who are now grown themselves, and unhappily gets a divorce.  To recover he decides to take a vacation trip to Arizona.,  Driving his rented car one evening, he pulls off the road, gets out of his car, and looks at the stars. As childhood memories flood back, a second car pulls off.  The young woman astronomer gets out of her car.  The two cannot believe they are reuniting, and they catch up for hours.  Then there is a break in their conversation.  As the couple looks up silently at the stars, the magic beagle, and the telescope, appear and take shape.  In that one ultimate celestial adventure,  the  magic of the night has returned.

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This Just In; Costco and Dolls

 I just discovered that Mr. Clean magic erasers work wonders on cleaning marks on modern porcelain dolls and on vinyl, with no harm done.  I got a huge box at Costco.  My stepson takes me there about every three weeks, then I get lunch at Cain's or Portillo's.  Good Times!

The magic eraser doesn't ruin the dolls, either.  Cases getting moved today to the museum, thank goodness.  Here are some photos of dolls recently dressed.

Till next time,

Dolly Hugs

No. 3 Barbie

Orsini ? repor in vintage dress I found

Tiny dolls dressed with vintage bonnets added

Comp in new outfit

Shirley Refurbished; she was only 10.00!!

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Skyward, Faint Fuzzies by David H. Levy

 

Skyward for August 2021

 

 

Faint fuzzies.

 

 

This is the dome for the 18-inch telescope, which Gene and Carolkyn

Shoemaker and I used to  discover tall of the Shoemaker-Levy comets,

including the one that collided with jupiter in 1994.  Photograph by

David H. Levy.

The night before last, a comet named Palomar (actually known as C (for comet)/ 2020 T2 Palomar) was gliding near one of the most beautiful clusters of stars in the entire sky.   It was parading about at about magnitude 11, which means that for my oldish eyes, it would be too faint to see.  In fact, just a few weeks ago I spotted a second comet, named ATLAS.  That comet, at ninth magnitude, was so diffuse that I barely spotted it. So I was not going to try for this other comet.

However, this other comet was named Palomar after one of my favorite observatories!  The mighty 200-inch telescope was opened in 1948, just a couple of weeks before I was born, and the big telescope has been sighting stars for more than 70 years. In 1994, I was allowed to sit in the prime focus cage, that beautiful place where light from what the telescope is seeing comes to a perfect focus.  So sighting a comet with that hallowed name would be special.   The comet was discovered by Dmitry A. Duev on images taken using Palomar’s Oschin Schmidt telescope last October.   As the comet was brightening slowly, I  learned that on Friday evening, May 14, the comet was planning to glide past Messier 3, one of the brightest globular star clusters in the whole sky.

               That was just too much to resist.   Clusters of stars are scattered all over the sky, and our own galaxy has more than a hundred of them.  Globular clusters consist of hundreds of thousands of stars.   Messier 3 was discovered by Charles Messier, the famous Parisian discoverer of comets; it consists of some half a million stars and is more than 32,000 light years away.  At about 11.4 billion years old, it is also one of the oldest things in the universe.

         With the onset of darkness that Friday evening, I set up my telescope in my backyard observatory and pointed it toward Messier 3.  The exquisite star cluster made its appearance. Then I nudged the telescope just a little bit to a nearby field of stars.   Suddenly I spotted  a faint fuzzy spot precisely where Comet Palomar was supposed to be. As I looked around, a meteor scratched the sky to the north.  It was a bright and unusual member of the May Ophiuchid meteor shower, a bonus on this unforgettable night.

 

Comet Palomar is the 219^th comet I have seen during my lifetime.    Most of these comets have also been faint, barely visible spots of haze.  But some have been wondrous.  My first comet, Ikeya-Seki, was the great comet of 1965.  Whether a comet is a faint fuzzy of a magnificent comet with a long tail, they are always welcome visitors to the Earth’s region of the solar system, each one signing, as comet finder Leslie Peltier loved to write, “its sweeping flourish in the guest book of the Sun.”

 

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