Sky and Telescope - November 2016 - 32

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75 Years of S &T

opened S&T to discover the ﬁnding of Pluto's big moon
and the rings of Uranus. Cosmic gamma-ray bursts, ﬁrst
detected by satellites watching for nuclear weapons tests,
became an intractable, but clearly important, puzzle. A
binary pulsar losing orbital energy indirectly proved the
existence of gravitational waves, another triumph for
general relativity. The nature of the dark matter showing
its inﬂuence all over the cosmos became a top problem.
And in 1975, a network of clubs began the public-outreach tradition of Astronomy Day.

The 1980s: Halley
Public interest in astronomy took a permanent leap
forward in 1980 with Carl Sagan's hit series Cosmos on
public television. Less visibly, physicist Alan Guth that
year had his "spectacular revelation" of how the Big Bang
likely worked - whereby known physics could account
for the eruption of everything from essentially nothing
and explain several other "impossible" features of today's
cosmos all at once. Writing about the emerging concept
in my ﬁrst big article after being hired at S&T, I came
within a hair of inventing the term multiverse for the
vastly larger ensemble of separate universes, now disconnected from ours, that the theory seemed to imply.
The ﬁrst Space Shuttle, Columbia, launched in 1981.
Challenger blew up in 1986. Halley's Comet, anticipated by everyone who'd had even a passing interest in

Above: When Comet Halley was at its best in early 1986,
naked-eye searchers found it only a little easier to detect
than the Lagoon Nebula, M8 (the small pink patch far to the
comet's right).

November 2016 sky & telescope

astronomy since 1910, proved in 1985 and 1986 to be the
distant, poorly placed dud that we had more or less predicted. At least our skilled chart-users could ﬁnd it with
their scopes to show to a disappointed public.
In February 1987, Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud erupted to magnitude 2.9; it was the closest and brightest supernova seen since before the invention of the telescope. A 13-second burst of neutrinos,
detected at several places around the globe right about
when the explosion should have initiated, conﬁrmed that
Type II supernovae result from the sudden collapse of a
massive star's core.
The Very Large Array in New Mexico began full
operation in 1980, opening today's era of high-resolution,
multi-dish radio astronomy. The Dobsonian revolution
continued to spread among amateurs. The price of large
amateur scopes kept declining in real terms, undercutting amateur telescope making but rendering the hobby
ever more accessible.
Alarmists predicted the imminent end of amateur
astronomy if light pollution continued to worsen at the
rate it was doing. But for the ﬁrst time, night-sky enthusiasts began gaining the knowledge and organization
to do more than wring their hands about it. In Tucson,
Arizona, astronomers at Kitt Peak National Observatory
met with startling success in getting the city to reduce
its waste light beaming sideways and upward. This

This Hubble image, taken 24 years after the explosion of
Supernova 1987A, shows a faint, oblong debris remnant at
center, a ring of much earlier ejecta shining under the impact
of the supernova's still-expanding blast wave, and two larger,
fainter rings of earlier ejecta. The three rings are part of an
hourglass-shaped shell of gas blown oﬀ by the progenitor
star as it neared the end of its life.

Sky and Telescope - November 2016

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