Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: A Life in Dolls; my Resume

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: A Life in Dolls; my Resume: Here it is October, the month I live for all year. We’ve had at least two months of assorted disasters which have detracted from writing an...

Memoir; Writing your Life Story: We're just past Christmas, and what have I Done?

Memoir; Writing your Life Story: We're just past Christmas, and what have I Done?: Memories assault us at Christmas, and the current year never seems to be as good as Christmas Past. I tried to honor those memories; I bak...

Eulenspiegel Angel

My angel ❤️

Puppet Show by a Legendary Troup

From Eukenspiegel Puppet Theater performance December 16th. We do have a bouple Monica Leo dolls. made a finger puppet at workshop that followed.

Singers are from Bucktownn Christmas Revue.

Skyward Dec 2023 with Dr. David Levy

Skyward for December 2023 By David H. Levy On the fourteenth of October 2023, I witnessed my 99th eclipse. This tally includes everything from barely noticeable penumbral eclipses of the Moon, where one can occasionally distinguish a slight shading of one side ofc the Moon as it wanders past the Earth’s outer shadow, to the dramatic and life-affirming total eclipses of the Sun. The October eclipse was actually an annular eclipse or “ring” eclipse. The annular phase occurs during which the entire Moon covers the Sun, but because the Moon is near its apogee, or farthest point from the Earth in its orbit, then the Moon is surrounded by a ring of sunlight. I was all set to join the group heading to southern Texas to see the annular eclipse, but last month I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Homecoming festival at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. This invitation meant so much to me that I was not about to pass it up. So, I took a big chance, and it paid off. The night of my lecture was clear and starry. I began the lecture with my own definition of what a university can be. The world is as it is; we can try but, in the end, it is difficult if not impossible to change it. A university, however, at its best represents the world as it can be. For me, this represents the ideal of what a university can accomplish. The case of SUNY Plattsburgh is a specific example of that possibility. The not-too-large student population, understandable relationships among students and faculty, careful and interesting course offerings, and even the Plattsburgh Cardinals sporting program, all help to promote this goal. But this University offers one thing more. About 40 miles to the south, within the ancient Adirondack mountains, lies their rural campsite called Twin Valleys. As a youngster I attended the Adirondack Science Camp there in what were three of the happiest summers of my life. And for the past 20 years there has been the Adirondack Astronomy Retreat at this magnificent place. On the eve of the eclipse my friend Ed Guenther and I led a small group of people to observe at our Adirondack Astronomy Retreat site, during which time I did a little comet hunting. The following morning the sky was cloudy but there were plenty of breaks in the clouds so we got a magnificent view of the partial eclipse. We were excited; the crowd was excited, and we thoroughly enjoyed the partial eclipse that lasted about two hours. During this excitement, the solar system continued its inexorable motions, as the Earth, the Moon, and the planets slowly wended their way through space and time.

Edison's talking dolls: child's toy or stuff of nightmares

Happy Hallween!!

Skyward 2023 October by our guest blogger, Dr. David Levy- Pons- Brooks: A Comet for the Centuries

Skyward October 2023 Pons-Brooks: A comet for the centuries.

When David Rossetter and I began our observing session at the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association’s Chiricuaha Astronomy Complex on the evening of August 5, 2023, we did not expect that we would be treated to an evening of cosmic history. That was the night we glimpsed Comet Pons-Brooks, a comet with an orbit that, like Halley’s comet, takes almost a human lifetime to orbit the Sun .I might have spotted it the night before, but on this night David and I saw the same thing, a spot of haze in the darkness. It was a faint misty cloud that bears the names of two of the most famous comet discoverers in all history, a spot of haze with quite a story to tell. Comet Pons-Brooks was first identified by Jean-Louis Pons, the great French comet hunter, during the summer of 1812. In the late summer of 1883, on its subsequent pass around the Sun, it was rediscovered by another famous comet hunter, William Robert Brooks. I first encountered Brooks in a Sky & Telescope article I read in the second issue I received, at age 14, in April 1963. As I digested the story, I learned how Brooks might have politely entertained a visitor to his observatory, and how that visitor eventually learned that Brooks was one of the world’s most famous comet discoverers. As I relished these words, I foresaw myself, some day, also as a hunter of comets. Not a discoverer, because that would be hard. But as a hunter, that’s easy. Those ideas stayed with me until December 17, 1965, when I began my program of searching for comets. Since then, my own life has been punctuated by several sparks of cometary light, as each new comet added brightness to the field of my telescope. I joined a group of people linked not by nation, nor either by continent, but by being citizens of the world united by a love of comets. Emboldened by the offer by Hulbert Harrington Warner of an award of $200 for each comet discovered, Brooks managed to find three comets within five weeks of each other, on April 17, April 30, and May 22 , 1886. He must have known how his colleague Edward Emerson Barnard built his “comet house” partly out of funds also earned from Warner’s award. (The Warner prize has survived through history. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific offered its “Donohoe Comet Medal” for a time, and later Roger Tuthill gave a plaque, and now there exists the Edgar Wilson Award, which is sponsored by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams [CBAT] of the International Astronomical Union.) Like all serious comet hunters, Brooks was far more interested in discovering comets than in the money he could earn from these finds. In later years his success as a a comet hunter earned him a professorship in astronomy at Hobart College in Geneva, New York. With Brian Marsden’s 1979 Catalogue of Comet Orbits as a guide, we can surmise that Brooks discovered a minimum of 22 comets in his lifetime. Despite this remarkable accomplishment, Brooks is only the second most prolific comet finder in world history, The winning ticket goes to Jean-Louis Pons himself, who was “the first “discoverer” of Comet Pons-Brooks. Truly, Pons was also not the first. This comet might have been observed by Chinese astronomers in the late summer of 245 CE, then definitely by the Chinese in 1385, and in 1457 by Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli. Pons today is considered to have discovered about thirty comets. Over the decades I observed a second Pons periodic comet, Pons-Gambart, in January 2013. By the way, Pons had a most humble and trusting nature, and in his younger years he was ridiculed by astronomers who should have known better. These days, it is almost impossible for an individual to discover more than half a dozen comets. My total is 23, but as CBAT director Dan Green (possibly correctly) stated, “he discovered 9 comets and lucked out on 11 more,” before graciously adding Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 to my total. Pons and Brooks shared a passion for telescopes and the fleeting comets they could detect parading about the sky. I like to imagine that finding new comets was secondary to their pure enjoyment of the night sky, its treasures, and the secrets that it infrequently shared with those people who truly lived, and live, for its precious hours of darkness.