Dr. Levy has been a guest blogger for our blogs for over two years. Our museum is one of the meeting places for the Popular Astronomy Club, and we include space toys and telescopes among our collection. Dr. Levy has discovered more comets than anyone alive; he is also a Shakespeare scholar and noted author.
Skyward for December 2020
David H. Levy
December 17.
The night
of December 17, 1965 changed my life.
That was the night I began a search for comets that this goes on to this
day. It represents the second most
important decision I have ever made, to begin a visual search for comets and
exploding stars that are called novae.
The first most important decision, of course, was to marry Wendee. Both decisions made my life what it is
today.
Usually in Montreal,
November, December, and April are the cloudiest months. Therefore I wasn’t counting on a clear sky
that evening. After a Friday evening
dinner with my family, I walked over to my friend Tom Meyer’s home and we
visited for a while. Afterwards, around
11 pm. I took Clipper, our little beagle, for a walk towards the summit of the
hill on which we lived.
It was during this little
stroll with Clipper that things began to change. Towards the west there appeared to be some
lightening of cloud cover, and soon after, clearing. Within about 15 minutes large swaths of sky
were showing some stars. I couldn’t
believe it. I turned toward home, and
for a few seconds Clipper and I enjoyed a tug-of-war until he gave up and
walked back home with me. Just before
midnight on the 17th, I began my first comet hunting and I scanned
the sky between Pollux and Castor, in the constellation of Gemini. The clouds returned after that.
As the famous ABC news
reporter Jules Bergman said on the launch of Telstar, the world’s first active
telecommunications satellite in 1962, “And it all began today.” For me, it surely did. In December 2020, fifty-five years will have
passed, and I still am searching almost every clear night. There are 22 comets roaming about the solar
system with the Levy name on them, plus one named Jarnac. Jarnac Observatory is the name of our
observing site here in Vail, Arizona and is named in turn after my grandfather’s
cottage, Jarnac, near Ripon, Quebec. An
object was found and automatically reported by Tom Glinos, who once had an
automated telescope here. Because he
incorrectly identified the object as an asteroid, when it turned out that it
sported a tail and was reclassified as a comet, it was named, following the
rules, for the observatory, not for the discoverer. Thus, my total is now 23 comets. If my grandfather knew that his beloved
cottage (and later observatory) now had a comet with its name on it, he would
be dancing all over heaven. It is a
happy story that still goes on today.
"I have owned and used Pegasus, an 8-inch diameter Cave reflector, for
more than half a century. In this picture, camper Andy Bauman and I
are pointing Pegasus to project the Sun, at the Adirondack Science
Camp, in 1966.I used this telescope on my first night of comet hunting
in 1965. Photograph by Joe Howard."
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