Sky and Telescope - December 2017 - 45

Under the Stars by Fred Schaaf

A Cornucopia of Celestial Curios
Curiosities
The year's end prompts reminiscences of stellar things
ngs past.

A AVSO

his column for the ﬁnal issue of Sky
& Telescope for 2017 is a potpourri
of astronomy. In this - the year of an
awesome total eclipse of the Sun - we
take one last excursion into the realm
of totality and into the wonders of a
starry sky. We also look at three of
the 20th-century's greatest amateur
astronomers - variable star lovers all.
Akin to 20 miles high. I once
described to my friend Steve Albers the
scene in the movie The Right Stuff in
which pilot Chuck Yeager is at almost
20 miles altitude when his jet's engine
gives out. Yeager gazes longingly at a
few stars shining in broad daylight
before he begins his epic fall. Could
he really have witnessed such a view?
After a few quick calculations, Albers
said that the limiting magnitude at that
altitude in daylight should be about
4th magnitude. Interestingly, that's the
claimed magnitude for the faintest stars
seen with the naked eye during a total
eclipse - provided sunglasses or an eyepatch were worn before totality in order
to dark-adapt.
Fear not the stars. Back in the
1970s, at the home where I still live in
New Jersey, we had pristine dark skies
and no streetlights near the house. So
it was with great anticipation back then
that we took my very young niece, who
was quite shy and not very talkative, out
to look at the stars on a perfect night.
We had been outside a short while when
suddenly the girl insisted on going back
indoors. Why? Back inside she said,
"I'm afraid of the stars." But just a few
seconds later she said, "I want to see the
stars." And we took her back out, for it
wasn't really fear she had been experiencing. It was awe.
Three greats for variable stars.
Last month I proﬁled three classic variable stars prominently visible in fall
(Delta Cephei, Mira, and Algol) and

p Leslie Peltier, discoverer of many comets and
avid observer of variable stars, at his observatory in July 1968

mentioned that three of the 20thcentury's greatest amateur astronomers
were avidly enthusiastic variable star
observers. Let's take a brief look at the
three: William Tyler Olcott, Leslie Peltier, and Walter Scott Houston.
Olcott helped found the American
Association of Variable Star Observers, the world's premier organization
dedicated to the study of variable
stars, back in 1911. But he was better
known for writing the most important
observer's handbook of the ﬁrst half
of the 20th century, Field Book of the

Skies (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1929). I have
always cherished my copy of this book,
and I was fortunate enough to write the
forward to Dover Publications' 21stcentury reprint of Olcott's Star Lore:
Myths, Legends, and Facts (2012).
Leslie Peltier was called the "world's
greatest non-professional astronomer"
by one of the world's greatest professional astronomers, Harlow Shapley.
Peltier is famed for his many comet
discoveries and his lovely autobiography
Starlight Nights (1965). I stumbled upon
my copy of the book while browsing
through a delightfully cluttered old
bookstore in Allentown, Pennsylvania,
in the 1970s. But Peltier is also remembered for his exceptional lifetime tally
of variable star observations - and his
wistful regret at having just missed discovering the 1946 outburst of T Coronae Borealis, the "Blaze Star."
Walter Scott Houston was the father
of deep-sky observing and author of
the "Deep-Sky Wonders" column in
this magazine spanning six decades. A
book of the same name collects some
of the best writing of these columns.
Scotty surely loved the clusters, nebulae, and galaxies of deep-sky observing,
but he was also a dedicated variable
star observer. One year he even missed
Stellafane, the star party to which he
was so very devoted, in order to attend
a meeting of variable star observers
elsewhere.
Hot and cold. You can never tell
what kind of weather December will
bring you. One year I watched December's great meteor shower, the Geminids, in air hovering near 0°F. The following year, I witnessed them in clear
skies with the midnight temperature
near 60°F.
¢ FRED SCHAAF is the sole author of a
dozen books and co-author of one other.
s k y a n d t e l e s c o p e . c o m * D E C E M B E R 2 0 17

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Sky and Telescope - December 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky and Telescope - December 2017