Sky & Telescope - February 2021 - 7

the lead author asked me if I could
recommend resources for teachers who want to showcase authentic
voices from the Black community
among astronomers at this important moment in the progress of the
Black Lives Matter movement.
I have put together such a
resource and wanted to let you and
your readers know about it, since it
may be of interest to amateurs as
well. You can ﬁnd it free of charge
at https://bit.ly/blackastro.

of color to learn to love science and
to envision fulﬁ lling and successful
careers for themselves as professional
scientists or astronomers.
The area local to the magazine's
ofﬁces has no shortage of scientists to
inspire local youth, so the magazine
could actively connect with them and
local schools to ﬁnd ways to engage
youth with science. Partner with local
or regional clubs like the Amateur
Telescope Makers of Boston to enhance
both the " in-school " science courses
with discussions on practical observing, then help get kids involved in real
observing with local amateurs.
Also, make connections with local
academic/professional astronomers to
create opportunities for kids to visit Harvard College Observatory, for example,
and to be introduced to young astronomers and hear about the pathway to,
and excitement of, a career in science.

Thank you for " Astronomy for All. " I
appreciate that you are concerned with
bringing inclusion to astronomy; after
all, we all live under the stars!
As I am white, I might not be the
best person to give advice. But perhaps
having a column dedicated to inclusion
would be a good thing. Guest writers
writing about diversity in astronomy
or something like that? And, of course,
there is Neil deGrasse Tyson - maybe a
guest column from him talking about
the issues.
We need to include Native American, Asian, and Hispanic, not just
Black and white. I like all your ideas in
your column.

Andrew Fraknoi
Professor of Astronomy
Fromm Institute, University of San Francisco
San Francisco, California

Caroline Torkildson
Hovland, Minnesota

FOR THE RECORD

Several adopters of the OpenStax
astronomy textbook for which I am

*The Moon's closest perigee this year
(S&T: Oct. 2020, p. 47) was on April 7th at
17:59 UT.

Gary Shaw
Watertown, Massachusetts

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75, 50 & 25 YEARS AGO by Roger W. Sinnott
1946

1971

1996

February 1946
200-inch Views " 'The telescope,'
explains Dr. John A. Anderson . . .
'will not be used for work that can
be done equally well by existing
instruments. Always the object will
be to reserve it for those observations which require its greater
light-gathering power . . .'
" But wait, there will be at least
one exception. Russell W. Porter,
architect of Palomar Observatory,
has been promised his hour [at] an
eyepiece of the 200-inch while it is
pointed at the moon. He will make
pencil sketches of lunar marvels
and try to record details so delicate that ordinarily they escape
the grasp of photographic plates.
" In revealing this arrangement,
Mr. Porter, sometime shepherd of
amateur astronomers and co-promoter of the present-day amateur
mirror making hobby, lifted his
pipe from his mouth and smiled. "
Porter, it seems, never got his
hour of telescope time. He did per-

form star tests during ﬁnal adjustments of the 200-inch telescope in
1948 but died early the next year.
February 1971
Bird Navigation " Indigo buntings
fly primarily by night during their
long-distance migrations between
the eastern United States and
Central America. . . . Stephen T.
Emlen [of Cornell University] handraised 26 buntings in a laboratory
with a diffusely illuminated ceiling,
where they never saw the sky.
Two months before the autumn
migration season, he divided them
into three groups. Birds in group
A remained in the same laboratory and never experienced point
sources of light. Group B birds
were placed three nights a week
under a planetarium sky oriented
just like the actual sky outside and
rotating with it. The third group, C,
also had planetarium sessions, but
with the rotation about a false axis
that made [Orion] a brilliant circumpolar star pattern around which the
other constellations wheeled. . . .

" These experiments provide
strong evidence these young birds
initially acquire their orientation
from the rotation of the night sky.
Afterward, Dr. Emlen suggests,
the birds learn to recognize stars
or star groups . . . to locate the
north-south direction. "
February 1996
Jovian Plunge " Thursday, December 7th, was a day of anxiety, then
elation, for engineers and scientists
gathered at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. Six years after being
dispatched from Earth, the Galileo
probe slammed into Jupiter's atmosphere at 38 kilometers per second
and endured an estimated 215-g
deceleration force. The instrumentpacked capsule then transmitted
data to the Galileo orbiter for 57
minutes, eventually succumbing
about 160 kilometers below the
tops of Jupiter's clouds . . .
" Minutes later the orbiter's braking rocket came to life . . . slowing
the craft enough for it to become
Jupiter's first artificial satellite. "

sk yandtelescope.org * FEBRUARY 2 021

https://www.bit.ly/blackastro http://www.skyandtelescope.org

Sky & Telescope - February 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky & Telescope - February 2021