44 AUSTRALIAN SKY & TELESCOPE January 2018
UNDER THE STARS by Fred SchaafLifetimes spent in awe of
celestial curiosities
The new year prompts reminiscences of stellar adventures past.
T
his column is a potpourri
of astronomy, as we take an
excursion into the wonders of
a starry sky and also look at three of
the 20th-century’s greatest amateur
astronomers — variable star lovers all.
I once described to a friend the
scene in the movie The Right Stuff in
which pilot Chuck Yeager is at almost
30 kilometres 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, my friend 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 eye-
patch were worn before totality
in order to dark-adapt.
Back in the 1970s, at the
home where I still live, 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.
In our previous issue Iprofiled three classic variable stars
(Delta Cephei, Mira, and Algol)
and mentioned that three of the
20th-century’s greatest amateur
astronomers were avidly enthusiastic
variable star observers. Let’s take a brief
look at them: William Tyler Olcott,
Leslie Peltier and Walter Scott Houston.
Olcott helped found the American
Association of Variable Star Observers,
the world’s largest organisation
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’
21st-century 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 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 the US edition
of 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.FRED SCHAAF is the sole
author of a dozen books and
co-author of one other. AAVSOLeslie Peltier, discoverer
of many comets and
avid observer of variable
stars, at his observatory
in July 1968