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Astronomy | ||
Astronomy was once a serious hobby of mine, and I even considered making a career out of it. Things didn't go that way, but you can see the result of my dabblings below.
The Abilene Astronomical Society is an educational and hobby club that has been active for almost 50 years. During the time I was active in the club, we met at Morgan Jones Planetarium on the 3rd Thursday of each month. I was the "Chief Stargaser" (a public mis-spelling of Gazer that stuck) from '76 to '79 when I moved away to college. My job was to hold star parties and public observation sessions. We held many star parties at my house, which had reasonably dark skies, and a few at some property owned or leased by the Abilene Archery Club near Lake Abilene which had very dark skies.
We hosted numerous public observing sessions, but there are two that stand out in my mind. We took telescopes to the Westwood Theater numerous times while Star Wars was showing, and made the local news. The camera man actually shot some footage of the moon through our scopes. I also set up a telescope at my high school with a solar filter to allow direct observing of the sun during a solar eclipse in 1977. That event got my picture in the paper.
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| AAS business card | Club patch | A Star Party circa '78 | My RV6 |
Around '74 or '75 I made my own 8 inch rich field reflector. I built a fork mounting for it from aluminum B-52 ejection seat parts scavenged from the junk yard. Part of the fork arms were made from 2x6s laminated together, and the glue gave out after about 15 years, so sadly the scope has no mount anymore. Its just a stove pipe with an eyepiece.
Oddly, I don't seem to have ever taken a picture of it in its original glory, though I do have several foucograms I made while figuring the mirror (the massive turned-down edge below is not in the finished product).
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| Foucogram | Polishing |
I dabbled a bit with astrophotography. Bear in mind that this was before the digital age. These pictures were taken with that funky stuff called film that you may have heard old people talking about. The photos below were taken at prime focus using a Nikormatt FT2. The moon photos were taken with a 10 inch reflector and the sun photos were taken through my RV-6 using one of those Roger Tuthill solar filters that you couldn't open an astronomy magazine without seeing back in the late 70's.
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| Moon through 10 inch | Moon through 10 inch | Sunspots through RV6 | Sunspots through RV6 |
During the summer of 1980, I worked at the visitor's center of McDonald Observatory. I applied for the job along with a friend of mine, Russell Grantham, who was also from Abilene. I got the job even though I wasn't an Astronomy major almost entirely because of my prior experience and because the two of us had worked together before and the department thought we'd be able to live on the mountain for a summer without killing each other. 
We were very lucky in that a house on top of the mountain came free right about the time we needed to move in, so we lived for 3 months on the top of Mt. Locke a few hundred feet from the 82 inch Otto Struve Telescope.
At that time, the center was located in the base of the 107 inch telescope, and we would take people out onto the floor every hour for a 15 minute presentation about the scope and the observatory's mission. There were walking tours around the top of the moutain twice a day, and weekly star parties at Davis Mountains State Park near Indian Camp Lodge.
The current visitor's center opened at the end of the summer I was there - we drank a champaign toast in the parking lot on the day it opened. I took a photographer who worked on the initial exhibits around the observatory to take pictures of equipment while I pretended to be "an astronomer at work" and consequently my picture was in the visitor's center main exhibits for several years. The building has changed a lot judging from the online pictures - I'm not sure whether this is the same visitor's center with additions, or if a new one has been built in another location.
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| Aluminizing the 107 | Scenes around the observatory |
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