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Christmas in July

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RIP Dr. Ruth and Richard Simmons

Two pop culture icons passed away within hours of each other, both lovers of dolls and doll houses. While the expert guide for doll collecting at about.com, I wrote an article an article on Dr. Ruth and her doll houses. Richard Simmons had a company that made dolls, active during the nineties. He collected dalmations figures and some dolls. He also appeared in Doll Reader magazine. May they both rest in peace.

Comet Olber by David Levi, Guest Blogger

Skyward for July 2024. By David H. Levy The wonderful visit of Olbers’s Comet. On Tuesday, June 4, 2024, David Rossetter and I headed out for our monthly observing session at the Chirichuaha astronomy complex, the dark site of the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association. In addition to the normal 2 hours of comet searching I did that evening, David located Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS, a bright 10th magnitude comet with a pretty dust tail. I wish I had paid more attention that evening to the other comets that would be visible that night. If I had been more careful, I would have noticed that Comet Olbers was returning for the first time since 1956. There is no way I would have seen this comet then since I was only eight years old at the time. Since it was already pretty bright, I tried to locate it from my observatory on the following Friday evening. But the comet’s position low in the northwest made that impossible. On Saturday evening I tried it again from my front porch which does have an excellent view to the northwest, but is looking over Tucson. I used a brand-new telescope, a 6-inch diameter telescope from the Sky-Watcher company. This new telescope, presented to me by Dean Koenig of Starizona, was destined to go to Robin Chapell. Robin has been cleaning my home for many years, first for Wendee and me, and more recently just me, and a few weeks ago she expressed an interest in getting a telescope. To test the new telescope, I tried to use it to find Comet Olbers. I didn’t catch it Saturday or Sunday evening, although I might have gone right over it Sunday without spotting it. On Monday, June 10, I drove to David and Pamela Rossetter’s home to find him setting up Archimedes, his 12-inch reflector, in his driveway, which had an excellent view to the northwest except for a Palo Verde tree. After carefully aligning the 12-inch telescope on Polaris, then Spica, then Pollux and finally Castor, he put in the comet’s position and moved the telescope. Lo, the comet was in the middle of the tree! David looked anyway, and saw two faint stars in the telescope’s field. Toward the left of one of the stars, he detected a faint fuzzy spot. Then it was my turn. Immediately I also detected the fuzzy spot. It was real. For the first time in both our lives, we saw Comet Olbers. Pam joined us for a brief visit. Heinrich Olbers discovered this comet on March 6, 1815. The comet is named for him as 13P/Olbers. But the comet is not what he is famous for. His magnum opus is Olbers’ Paradox. In 1823 he proposed that with stars spread out to infinity in the sky, there should be no point in the sky that does not fall upon the surface of a distant star. Olbers then suggested that because of this, every inch of sky should be as bright as the Sun. The Nobel prize-winning physicist George Wald went further a fee decades ago, adding that the sky should be so bright that life on Earth would be impossible. “But the night sky is dark; therefore, life here is possible.” One would expect that some famous scientist was the first person to resolve Olbers’s Paradox. Not quite. An American writer famous for his poetry and short stories, Edgar Allan Poe’s is one of the truly great American writers. His poem The Raven, written in 1845, is one of the World’s most famous pieces of literature, brought to life when two ravens adopted Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker, who dutifully named them Never and More: Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, "Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you"—here I opened wide the door;— Darkness there, and nothing more. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore!" This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" Merely this and nothing more. … Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore,—Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." As delightful as The Raven is, and as often as the word darkness appears in it, the poem does not explain why the night sky is dark. But three years later, Poe’s final major piece of writing, “Eureka”, solves the paradox perfectly: “Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy—since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.” That this is correct was not really confirmed until Edwin Hubble described the expanding universe around 1929, and these observations were confirmed by modern work by the Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes. It is a simple, beautiful, and even loving sentence. “The night sky is dark; therefore life is possible on Earth.” And on one lovely evening during that life, I got to enjoy the little comet he found, ands which was paying us a welcoming visit from the outer reaches of the solar system where our lives transpire.

Rocks and Dolls

Eleanor St. George, a famous doll author and collector of the late forties and fifties, wrote that doll collectors are seldom single minded people. She mentioned a collector with fabulous gold coins, and d that bred quarter horses. A few years ago, I had the honored pleasure of speaking with the daughter of a famous doll author and collector who was a founding member of the UFDC. Jan's father was an expert in stamps, but she told me that besides dolls, they collected rocks and all kinds of things. Then, this week on Facebook, two of my doll collecting friends posted pictures of their crystals and pebbles. Rock hounds and doll collectors are kindred spirits. My dear friend, the late Rochelle Murray, was as fascinated witch dolls as I am. She also volunteered at the local rock and gem show. Another woman I know who does estate sales has also volunteered there. A former doll show promoter was a gemologist in her other life. My own mother was a huge rock hound. Her family had a rock garden made of stones and even shells collected on their trips throughout the United States and Mexico. When my mom and dad and I took trips, we collected rocks, shells, petrified wood and drift wood along with dolls. These were from all over the world; from seashores and deserts, from craggy paths. One pebbble, a gift from my teacher and mentor in college, came from a path Darwin took during the Voyage of The Beagle.

Six years ago we Began

Museum timeline over twenty years sgo, I started writing s business plan for my future doll museum. I also drafted articles of incorporation and bylaws. I have axsketch books with display designs and ideas, hand drawn. After some stops and starts, we got tax numbers for not for profits and filed all the paperwork. That will be six years ago this July. Almost five years ago, we opened in a small rented space. we stayed one year. during that time, we won the bid on our ild branch library building I started working on moving things immediately after a derecbo where we lost power. I was hot, but light enough. still our parking lot was littered with doll shoes and toy parts. It took a year to get it all up, and we still are a work in progress. We keep at it with help from the rest of our awesome board. Thanks to all our supporters and to the memory of my famuly, who made all this possible.

Skyward from our guest blogger, Dr. David Levy on the Northern Lights

Skyward for June 2024. By David H. Levy

Aurora Borealis over Arctic Circle 2020

is The Aurora Boreali, East Jordan MI, photo by David Levy For the last few nights I have been looking in one particular direction of the sky: the northeast. Over a period of four nights, I have noticed a faint glow in that direction. It wasn’t bright, certainly nothing about which to write home, but it was the aurora borealis. It is a direct message from the Sun to us, a cosmic hello to we the people here on Earth. I also was aware that this aurora was a direct result of a gigantic group of at least 60 sunspots that had been rowing across the surface of the Sun. The Northern lights and I have been good friends since my first view of a small display, back in 1961 when I was just beginning my teenage years. I duly informed Louis Duchow, the person in charge of aurora reports at the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Montreal Centre. “Did you write up a report on it?” he asked. When I answered in the negative, he said, “Then you really haven’t seen it.” It was a silly answer but there was a morsel of truth in it. I began filling out Aurora reports pretty religiously after that. The night of July 8, 1966, was the night without a dusk. The Sun set, and as I watched the darkening sky, the sky just didn’t get dark. Instead, the post-sunset glow slowly shifted from the northwest to the north, and then just stayed there. The sky also gradually turned a bright green as the auroral glow grew brighter. Then the first bright ray appeared, and within an hour, rays were growing all over the sky. Two months later, a even better display lit up the whole sky from Montreal. I was waiting for a bus to go to the Observatory for their typical Saturday night meeting when I saw a giant coronal arc at the zenith of the sky. I just turned around and walked home to watch this mighty show. Over the years I have seen other displays of the northern lights, some from the northeast, and several from my current home in southern Arizona. Possibly the nicest one took place from the great auroral arc around the Arctic circle. Our airplane took off from Whitehorse, in Canada’s Yukon territory, and the instant pur plane rose above the clouds the sky was covered with aurora. The Northern Lights are best seen without any optical aid at all, without binoculars, without a telescope. When the display appears, just open your eyes and relish the sight. Next to a total eclipse of the Sun, about which I wrote last month, the aurora is one of Nature’s grandest spectacles.