Our second telescope: a 60mm refractor.
(note the 8-track player in the background!)
It’s true: we destroyed our first telescope before its first night out.
Flashback to the summer 1977, and our ninth birthday. Returning home from church, I was greeted by a shiny new Newtonian reflecting telescope, lovingly assembled by my Mom in my bedroom. [Read more...]
Tracking Tales of Transits in Lewes, Delaware
Seen in Lewes, Delaware… photo by author.
I had to stop.
As we always love to say, astronomy and history is where you find it, even in a graveyard in Delaware beside the road.
The Delaware coast is an unlikely birthplace for modern American science. But back in the mid-18th century, it was the site of cutting edge astronomy. At the time, measuring the distance from the Earth to the Sun was the gold standard, a key to unlocking the scale and size of the solar system using Kepler’s laws. A transit of Venus across the the face of the Sun represented just such an opportunity to make a parallax measurement at the precise moments of ingress and egress as the black inky disk of the planet slips across the face of the Sun. This was one of the first truly international efforts in science, as several observations had to be made from multiple geographically separate locations. [Read more...]