Skyward December 2021 by Dr. David Levy, our guest blogger

 

Skyward

 

                                                            The North America
                                                            Nebula, with what I think is the Daffy Duck structure at the top
                                                            center..  Photograph from Hubble Space Telescope, STScI.

December 2021

 

By

 

David H. Levy

 

Daffy Duck

          Agreed, this seems like an awfully daffy title for an astronomy article. But there is method to the madness, and there is a story.  During the late summer of 2019 there was a star party in southeast Arizona that featured a dark sky and five perfect back-to-back nights  As I spent hour after hour hunting for comets, I came across the sprawling North America Nebula in the northern sky constellation of Cygnus the swan.  But this time something different appeared. It was a strange structure, the outline of a dark nebula bordered by a slightly brighter cloud.  The whole feature was rather subtle, so that sometimes it was there, and then it faded so that sometimes it wasn’t.    I spent some time trying to determine a name for it.    It looked like the head of a duck.  I couldn’t call it the wild duck nebula, as there is a cluster with that name.  And Donald Duck is a bit confusing.    So how about calling it the Daffy Duck nebula?  

Thus, the structure is named after Daffy Duck. It is No. 403 in my catalog of interesting things found during my more than 56 years of comet hunting.  I believe it is a small dark construction at the northern tip of the North America Nebula, about where Hudson Bay is not accurately located.  It could have been where the Gulf of Mexico is, but that area is virtually impossible to spot visually, even under a dark sky.  Like the Horsehead Nebula in Orion, it is very difficult to spot and it is best viewed only in a photograph.  The accompanying picture shows it at its top, a little to the left of center.  The accompanying photograph was taken using the Hubble Space Telescope.

There are more than four hundred other celestial objects that have come my way over the years.  Beginning with NGC 1931 which I spotted in January 1966, many of these are already well-known deep sky objects in the night.  But a few are interesting groupings of stars, called asterisms, that no one has pointed out before.  One of my favorites is a structure of faint stars I call “Wendee’s Ring.”

These always welcome objects in the sky are fun to observe and they enhance my enjoyment of my hours under the stars.  When I can see Daffy Duck, it reminds me of the happy hours I spent as a child at Beaver Lake, an artificial pond near the top of Mt. Royal in Montreal, that hosts dozens of mallard ducks.   On clear, moonless nights now, I offer a cosmic hello to Daffy Duck and the many objects in the night sky I have come to treasure as good friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Memoirs of my dolls and my family

Guest Blogger Dr. David Levy, Astroline

 And now, something different.  See below:

Skyward for September.

 

Astronline.

 

By

 

David H. Levy.

 

 

Doveed, and his laptop named Ridley, at the Shaar building of Jarnac
Observatory.

During the last almost two years I have been busier than ever, meeting many new people, giving lectures, quoting poetry, and advocating observing the night sky.

And Wendee and I have barely left home.

Obviously, I have not been able to give lectures in person since the Covid 19 pandemic began.  On the home front for me, our local Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association meets the first Friday of every month online over the Zoom cloud. (see www.tucsonastronomy.org)  But almost every day, I reconnect with friends in astronomy clubs around the world.  On Tuesdays, I am a part of Scott Roberts’ weekly Global Star Party.  (For more about this, visit  https://explorescientificusa.com/products/explore-alliance-global-star-party) Scott has now had more than 60 of these wonderful events, and I enjoy each one.  On Wednesdays and Saturdays, I am part of the Montreal Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, where I meet people I’ve known for years, especially Carl, one of my best friends since we were teenagers in 1964. As a graduate student at Queen’s University in the 1970s, I also was active with the RASC’s Kingston Centre.  I have also reconnected with the Denver Astronomical Society, a group I joined in 1963 when I was a patient at the Jewish National Home for Asthmatic Children.  That experience was precious back then, and it is even more delightful now!

 One of the groups, the Warren Astronomical Society in Michigan, does not use Zoom.  Instead, they have WebEx, which is just as simple to use.   I have even participated in sessions sponsored by Kansas City’s Linda Hall Library, one of the largest science libraries in the world.  

Not all of the online sessions are related to astronomy.  Our local synagogue has a weekly Torah study session, and Wendee and I are regulars there.  They also graciously listen to my poetry quotations, which range from Shakespeare to Chaucer, to this ancient one (from 1556) from Robert Recorde’s The Castle of Knowledge:

 

If Reasons reach transcend the Skie,

  Why should it then to earth be bound?

The wit is wronged and led awrie,

 If mind be married to the ground.

 

When the sessions drag on, as they sometimes do, I can get fatigued since I am not as young as I was in 1963 or 1979.  But it is worth the effort, and I sincerely hope that the Zoom/WebEx experience will outlive the pandemic when it finally ends.  Seeing friends so often like this is wonderful.  And on some occasions, I have joined online meetings from a remote site in southeastern Arizona.  

 

Sometimes, my quote tradition is something from scripture, like this gem from the Book of Isaiah:

Thou stretchest out the heavens as a curtain,

And spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.

 

 

My goodness—I never realized how a few words from the Bible could affect me as much as these do.  They describe my experience perfectly—outside, I am peering at the curtain of the night sky.  Moreover, the observatory out of which I look at the sky, or the observing pad upon which I stand, is the cosmic tent in which I dwell.

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Skyward for September 2021.

 

Rebirth of an Observatory.

 

 

Wendee's beautiful picture of the new Jarnac observatory

“How would you like to go to prison?” was one of the first things that Frank Lopez asked me.  My stunned expression prompted Frank to clarify:  “The Federal prison off Wilmot Road has an astronomy club.”  That was enough: we enjoyed two wonderful evenings down there, and even showed Orion to the group using one of my favorite telescopes.

I dealt with Frank once again in the last few months, as our Jarnac Observatory’s  Shaar house,  the major observatory building in my back yard, threatened to collapse earlier this year. The Shaar name is from the Hebrew word for “gate” or “opening” and I use the name because the structure resembles a miniature version of our Shaar Hashomayim synagogue in Montreal.   The observatory is as much a temple for me as the Shaar was.

  Frank brings a lifetime of experience to the observatories he builds and repairs.  He came up with a plan that would restore my building with a brand new sliding roof.  Working occasionally with assistants but mostly alone, the construction took several months, virtually all last winter and spring. (Actually my sliding roof is the entire top half of the building.) During this time I learned a lot about Frank’s work ethic.  He does not rush things.  He takes his time and works steadily for three days a week with construction and maintenance; the rest of his time he manages his “Stellar Vision” astronomy store in Tucson.  I learned that he built most of the observatory complex for Dr. Tim Hunter’s Grasslands observatory southeast of Tucson near Sonoita, and a large observatory structure for David Rossetter’s 25-inch Dobsonian northeast of the city center.

Throughout most of southern Arizona, Frank’s Stellar Vision observatory business is really the best game in town.  He knows what he is doing and brings his decades of experience to each project.  Frank builds observatories with energy, strength, and even humor.  (https://stellarvisiontucson.com) These structures do a lot more than house telescopes over many years.  They store the memories of a thousand and one nights under the stars.  They offer stories of terrible nights when a telescope fell off its mount, of only slightly less frustrating nights when cameras failed to work.  They protect their telescopes from the winds and the rains that Arizona occasionally goes through.  But mostly they protect memories of precious nights under the stars.  Finally, I like to imagine that long after I have closed up and gone to bed, the telescopes talk to one another about what they have seen, and what they have yet to see.

One recent evening after a big monsoon storm after the Shaar was finally completed, I went out and discovered that the telescopes inside were safe and dry.  On a drier night I went out, opened its big roof, and stared at the stars.  I felt as though I was starting my love of the night sky all over again. 

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Here it is after 17 years of research and constant editing and rewriting; Thank you Dr. Roald Tweet.  This is the story of us, our museum, me, my friends and family, and of course, the dolls.