Sky & Telescope - April 2019 - 7

objects to be viewed, and for pointing me to many deep-sky objects that I
looked for with my Orion 6-inch Dob.

astro-logbook in which I record key
information from my observations,
imaging, and magazine perusal, and
this issue proved to be a fount of such
information. Bravo to your staff!

Caroline "Siffy" Torkildson
Grand Marais, Minnesota

Frank Puzycki
Long Valley, New Jersey

Lost Kingdom

Adieu to Sue
I was sad to read that Sue French is
retiring from her column in your magazine. I remember that when it debuted, I
was excited to see a column written by a
woman. I had started subscribing to Sky
& Telescope as a teenager in 1980 when
the only women I saw in the magazine
were models in the advertisements. But
I've always thought S&T does a great
job being inclusive and appreciate that
you use gender-neutral language. And
of course I was thrilled when Camille
Carlisle and Monica Young began writing columns and became editors.
Thank you, Sue, for your wit and
inspiration, for information about the

Re "The Great American Lunar Eclipse"
(S&T: Jan. 2019), speciﬁcally the map
on page 19:
I'm sure you must be as bored as we
Brits with all the nonsense about us
leaving the European Union, but it's
only the EU we're leaving, not the Earth
nor even our current location on it.
So, please, make sure you use a map
which shows the British Isles (a small
group of islands off the north coast of
France) for your future lunar eclipse
paths and timings. This isn't the ﬁrst
time you Yanks have "disappeared" your
mother country, and whilst we may be

1969

1994

Brian Martindale
Ledbury, United Kingdom

Peter Tyson replies: We'd like to
say we knew clouds would cover the
entire archipelago on eclipse day, so why
disappoint potential viewers? The truth is,
the British Isles somehow went missing from
that map, and we didn't catch it. Apologies
from our side of the pond.

FOR THE RECORD

* In the lunar eclipse table (S&T: Jan. 2019,
pp. 20-21), the entry for Total Eclipse Ends
in the Eastern Standard Time zone should
be 12:44 a.m.

* On the 2019 Skygazer's Almanac 40°
North version, the hours from 5:00 p.m. to
midnight on the timeline at the top should
be labeled "Evening."

SUBMISSIONS: Write to Sky & Telescope, 90 Sherman St., Cambridge, MA 02140-3264, U.S.A. or email: letters@
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75, 50 & 25 YEARS AGO by Roger W. Sinnott
1944

small, we are not insigniﬁcant, particularly in astronomical terms.

º April 1944
Maksutov Scope "In the Moscow
News of September 11th and 22nd,
1943, [we read:] A new invention,
not generally known as yet, will be
the subject of a paper by Professor D. Maksutov. This scientist has
designed a new type of reflector
telescope with a correction lens,
which, according to [conference
organizer A. A.] Mikhailov, will
effect a revolution in astronomical optics. Thanks to it, telescope
lengths may now be reduced nearly
eight times. Moreover, the quality
of the images is even improved.
"The reflectors proposed by
Professor Maksutov are also said
to be easier to produce than existing ones."
These claims weren't too
exaggerated, at least for small
apertures. Soon after the war,
Maksutov's design appeared in the
popular 3.5-inch Questar, and in
1956 a Maksutov craze took hold
among amateur telescope mak-

ers. One of their mentors, John
Gregory, engineered the 22-inch
Maksutov at the Stamford Observatory in Connecticut.
º April 1969
Pulsar Flashes "One of the
most important events in recent
astronomy has been the discovery
of strong pulses of light coming
from the pulsating radio source NP
0532 inside the Crab nebula. . . . At
Lick Observatory in California, J.
S. Miller and E. J. Wampler carried
out special observations on the
evening of February 3rd to determine more accurately the position
of the optical flashes. At the coudé
focus of the 120-inch reflector, a
Westinghouse television camera
used an image intensifier coupled
to an SEC camera tube. . . .
"In all, 46 photographs were
obtained from the video tape,
which confirm that the southwest
star of the double is in fact the seat
of the light flashes."
Back in the 1960s, a secondary
electron conduction tube and TV

camera were a small step on the
road to the CCD imagers of today.
º April 1994
Hubble's Fix "When space shuttle
Endeavour touched down at the
Kennedy Space Center in predawn darkness last December
13th, astronomers . . . had no
idea whether the corrective optics
installed to sharpen the telescope's
vision actually worked. . . .
"The suspense finally ended
on January 13th, when the first
corrected images from Hubble
were unveiled at a crowded press
conference held at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. . . .
'The trouble with Hubble is over!'
[Maryland senator Barbara] Mikulski
declared. 'Now we know that NASA
has the right stuff.' . . . These words
rang especially sweet coming from
her. In June 1990, upon learning
that Hubble couldn't be focused
properly because of a manufacturing defect, Mikulski had . . . cast
grave doubts on the future of space
astronomy at NASA."
sk yandtele scope.com * A PR I L 2 019

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Sky & Telescope - April 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky & Telescope - April 2019