A while back I was thumbing through a copy of Astronomy Though the Telescope by Richard Learner, 1981, Harrow House Editions Ltd.  It is one of those coffee table books you generally find on the bargain shelf with the price marked way down.  Since my hero, Galileo, was pictured on one of the opening pages, I bought it.  This was many years ago, when the Keck and Hubble telescopes were still dreams, so the book is dated.  Be that as it may, we generally credit Galileo with being the first to study the sky with a telescope.  This probably isn't true.  However, he sort of snatched the title in March 1610 by being first to publish his observational findings in The Starry Messenger.  It was a sensation.  So, you see, publish or perish is a time honored tradition which goes back to at least the early 17th century.

The fact is, there were three other folks, any one of whom could have been the first.  Johann Fabricius, a Dutchman, was one, Christoph Scheiner from Bavaria was another, and the third was Thomas Harriot, an Englishman. That sounds like the start of a joke: A Dutchman, a Bavarian, and an Englishman went into a bar…  Anyhow, all of these men were engaged in celestial observations at the same time as Galileo, so in truth, any one of them could have been first.

Bear in mind that none of them actually invented the telescope.  Lenses had been ground for magnifying glasses and spectacles for many years.  The honors for putting together the first telescope go to a Dutch eyeglass maker named Hans Lippershey.  He found that by placing a convex lens (the objective) at one end of a tube and a concave lens (eyepiece) at the other, a distant object would be magnified.  Voila!  The telescope was born.  Crude?  You bet.  The optics must have been horrible, but it was a start, and the idea swept Europe in short order.

Fast forward to the year 2000.  I'm at the dining room table as I put this  story together.  Before me are 30, count 'em, 30 sketches of the sun.  They were made during the period from the last few days of February through the first week of April.  I told you I was going to get serious one of these days.  There were relatively few days when I couldn't get an observation because of heavy clouds or rain.  At times I had to move fast so as to take advantage of fleeting opportunities.  The observations didn't take long, usually only a few minutes.  After all, there isn't a whole lot to see in a four-inch telescope.  Basically, you have your big spots, your little spots, the squiggly bits, and a combination thereof.   A can of cream of mushroom soup (Campbell's) was my pattern for the solar disc.  My dear wife, Lynn, was probably wondering what the heck was I doing with a can of soup on my workbench in the garage.  Since that's not the first odd thing she has seen me do in our 43 years of marriage, she did not ask.  I drew an equator and a meridian on the circle to make spot location a bit more accurate.  I did not take into account the seven-degree tilt of the sun or the tilt of the earth.  Further, I did not alter the equator for the mild slope of the driveway.  The Astroscan on my homemade pier was the instrument used throughout the exercise.  I used the Tuthill Solar Skreen arrangement I wrote about in the last issue.  Finally, I employed a 24mm eyepiece, which gave me about 18X.  My observing technique was the same every day.  I kept the telescope erect, that is, with the eyepiece pointing straight up.  I stood directly behind the instrument and looked straight down into the eyepiece from above.  I wanted to see the same image each time I made an observation and sketch so as to eliminate daily variables.

The sun was busy all the time.  There was never a lack of sunspot activity to record and track from day to day.  Some of the spots-or groups of  spots-maintained their integrity pretty well as they moved slowly across the solar disc.  Other spots gradually faded away.  Some were here today and gone tomorrow.  Still others appeared out of nowhere.  A whole quadrant might have been clear one day, and when I made the next observation, there could be a spot or two in evidence.  They did not come around the limb, they just appeared.

My Astroscan is basically a Newtonian reflector built into a ball. It rides on sort of an altazimuth or bastardized dobsonian mount.  How's that for waffling?  In any case, without any equatorial alignment possible, my view through the eyepiece had the sunspots moving generally from northwest to southeast.  But, they did not move in a straight line.  They appeared to move in something of an arc.  The sun rotates, but not at the same rate in all latitudes.

I tried to imagine what Fabricius, Scheiner Harriot, and Galileo were able to deduce when they turned their crude telescopes towards the sun.  "Aha," you say, "That's why he rambled on about those four dead guys."  Well, Scheiner took the safe approach.  He used his telescope to project an image on a sheet of paper.  His recorded observations were probably the best of the lot.  Harriot used a much more risky technique.  He looked directly at the sun through the morning mist.  Once, he even took a look at the sun at noon on a clear day.  He saw a sunspot and noted later that his sight was dim for an hour.  Wow!  All four observers detected sunspots at about the same time.  Galileo noted that the spots changed position from one day to the next and figured that the sun rotated on its axis.  Almost 400 years later, and with far superior equipment, I was able to see sunspots, saw them move across the surface from day to day, and figured out that the sun rotates on its axis.  So, I saw the same thing they did, only better and safer.  Aside from deciding that the sun rotated at different speeds at various latitudes I could not reach any further conclusions.  Thank God for books.  It must have taken years of steady observation to determine the period of rotation-about 25 days around the equator and 35 days near the poles.  I suppose it takes a total eclipse and a look at the corona to determine the sun's seven-degree tilt.

Overall, the exercise was a lot of fun, and now that I have a routine established, I'll try to keep at it.  There is always a measure of excitement when setting up.  Are yesterday's spots where I think they should be?  Are there any new ones?  What surprises are in store for me today?  While we are in this period of sunspot maximum I urge you to take advantage of the  opportunity.  Don't use the Harriot approach though.  Be safe.  Check it out.

I'd like to give Elliott a tip of the hat and a round of applause for his sterling work as newsletter editor.  It is a tough job with lots of worries, but Elliott handled it brilliantly.  From Williamsburg, Lynn and I want to extend our thanks for a job well done.  Michael Mills now has the torch, and I hope everyone will make his job as easy as possible.  Here's one way to help.  I'd like to see a lot more articles by club members.  We have a wealth of talent in this club.  Not only that, but we have more people who actually go out and observe than any other club I know.  We really use our telescopes rather than sitting around talking about them.  Next time out at Crockett, Savage or wherever, take some notes,  read up on what you saw, and write it up.  It isn't that hard, and I think it would be great if we had to fight for space in the newsletter.