Photo: Dan Duriscoe / NPS · Public domain
Stories
Some stories stick with you long after the telescope is packed away. These are ours.
Photo: Dan Duriscoe / NPS · Public domain
Some stories stick with you long after the telescope is packed away. These are ours.
My daughter makes the case for the ninth planet. The 2006 vote that demoted Pluto, what New Horizons actually found — and the children’s book that quietly rewrote its own rhyme to drop it.
A telescope built from a Buick axle and a cream separator, two glass plates exposed six nights apart, and a machine that blinked three times a second. How Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto in 1930 — and why the search that found it was built on a mistake.
Carl Zambuto ground some 3,500 telescope mirrors in a small Washington shop, and famous telescope makers built their best instruments around them. Why he closed his order book on his own terms, in his words.
The red light stargazers use was invented in 1984 by an astronomer whose flashlight kept dying at 3am — and he’s still building it by hand. The Rigel Systems story, in Dr. Leon Palmer’s own words.
In 2011 the National Reconnaissance Office told NASA it had two unused Hubble-class telescopes sitting in a clean room in Rochester. One of those mirrors launches as the Roman Space Telescope — the other is still in storage.
In 1999 I measured one planet crossing one star from my college observatory. There are more than 6,300 known now — and the map of all of them turns out to be a map of where we pointed the telescopes.
Looking for the practical side? The guides cover what to buy and how to observe it, and See Space Now is where the stargazing starts.