The stunning Orion Nebula - The Royal Astronomical Society of ...

a flexible launch vehicle for Apollo, but discovered that a
specially designed one would be cheaper and faster.
Brian May gave a courageous talk about “What are we doing
in space?” in which he made several important points. One is
that the manned space programme in the U.S. has been driven
largely by corporate interests, not science, or even in the spirit
of exploration. And, he worries about the fate of the creatures
who share our planet. While humanity can adapt to climate
change, on an evolutionary timescale, it is being driven too
rapidly for most plants and animals to do the same.
All of the astronauts, Russian and American, commented on
how they entered the space programme as gung-ho nationalists,
almost all from the military, but they left it changed. They no
longer think of countries, but instead think of the whole Earth.
Through My Eyepiece
Logs and Blogs
by Geoff Gaherty, Toronto Centre
(geoff@foxmead.ca)
When I got back into astronomy in 1997,
one of my greatest discoveries was my old
log books. I kept a log of my observations
when I got started in 1957. In retrospect, the comments seem
pretty terse, but reading between the lines, I am able to recapture
much of the joy of my first encounters with astronomy.
Over the years, my log-keeping deteriorated. By December
1957, I stopped typing up my log and reverted to a
hand-written one. In April 1958, I ceased keeping a daily log
and recorded my observations on the various forms used by the
Montreal Centre, mostly designed by the indefatigable Isabel
Williamson. I resumed daily logs in March 1959 and kept at it
through November. My log-keeping came and went sporadically
through September 1963, when it lapsed for an amazing
34 years, resuming only in July 1997, when I got serious about
astronomy again.
Because I derived so much pleasure from my early logs, I
resolved to be more systematic about my log-keeping, and I’ve
pretty much kept to that resolution.
Fast forward to summer of 2011. After filling many volumes
with paper logs, I finally decided to go electronic, and on July 1
started an electronic observing blog on Google’s Blogspot.com.
You can now follow my observing logs at http://geoffsobservingblog.blogspot.com.
At first, I just wrote my electronic log the same way I wrote
my paper log: terse, with lots of cryptic abbreviations. Now
that some of you will be looking over my shoulder, I’ve become
a bit more verbose. I hope you will enjoy sharing my nights
The conference was opened by a wonderfully poised 10-yearold
girl—Katherine Aurora Gray, from New Brunswick—
who earlier this year became the youngest person to discover
a supernova. As I write this on a plane heading back to
Washington, D.C., I am listening to Queen’s “We will rock
you,” that ended the conference with a performance by Brian
May and Tangerine Dream. It was a fitting ending to a conference
that truly did rock all the attendees. V
Leslie J. Sage is Senior Editor, Physical Sciences, for Nature
Magazine and a Research Associate in the Astronomy Department
at the University of Maryland. He grew up in Burlington,
Ontario, where even the bright lights of Toronto did not dim his
enthusiasm for astronomy. Currently he studies molecular gas and
star formation in galaxies, particularly interacting ones, but is not
above looking at a humble planetary object.
under the stars, and get as much pleasure from reading my
logs as I do.
For those of you who don’t keep an observing log, I strongly
urge you to do so. To get started, I highly recommend Paul
Markov’s excellent article on page 96 of your Observer’s
Handbook.
Besides my logbooks, I keep several databases in FileMaker
to track my observations. My deep-sky observations are
recorded in a database based on the Saguaro Astronomy Club’s
extensive database, and my variable-star observations in a
database of my own design. These databases serve as an index
to my logbooks: from the dates in the databases, I can easily
look up the original observing sessions. V
Geoff Gaherty received the Toronto Centre’s Ostrander-Ramsay
Award for excellence in writing, specifically for his JRASC column,
Through My Eyepiece. Despite cold in the winter and mosquitoes
in the summer, he still manages to pursue a variety of observations,
particularly of Jupiter and variable stars. Besides this column,
he contributes regularly to the Starry Night Times and writes a
weekly article on the Space.com web site.
October / octobre 2011 JRASC | Promoting Astronomy in Canada
215