Sky & Telescope - February 2025 - 84

SKY & TELESCOPE
FOCAL POINT by Richard Tresch Fienberg
A Grand
Milestone
With its 1,000th issue, Sky &
Telescope joins an elite club of
long-lived monthly magazines.
YOU'RE READING this magazine's
1,000th issue. This puts S&T in very
rare company. To find out how rare, I
did some online research to generate a
comprehensive list of monthly magazines
that are at least 80 years old and
have been published every month since
their founding without interruption.
I came up with this list: Scientific
American (founded in 1845), Harper's
Magazine (1850), Good Housekeeping
(1885), National Geographic (1888),
Vogue (1892), and Sky & Telescope
(1941). I expected the list to be short,
but not that short.
I was also surprised
to find that half the
magazines on the list
regularly cover science
and that all but S&T
are household names.
Of course, print
magazines are a vanishing
breed. Hardly a
month goes by when
you don't hear of
 From its 1st to its
1,000th issue, S&T has
come a long way.
84 FEBRUARY 2025 * SKY & TELESCOPE
another well-known title going digitalonly
or out of business. S&T faced its
own most dire threat in 2019, when
its then-owner went under. But on my
suggestion and after months of due
diligence, the AAS (for which I worked
at the time) acquired the magazine. So,
thankfully, S&T has lived to join the
shortlist of monthlies that have published
at least 1,000 consecutive issues.
It's tempting to compare the state
of astronomy in November 1941, when
S&T's first issue appeared, with that of
the field today. But I and others have
done that on the magazine's 70th, 75th,
and 80th birthdays in the November
2011, 2016, and 2021 issues, respectively.
But I urge you to examine our
timeline (pages 12-13) and marvel at
some of the key discoveries and events
that S&T has covered since its inception.
Here I want to focus on the future.
While I see both professional and
amateur astronomy facing serious
threats, I remain hopeful that together
we'll find ways to
mitigate them. For
example, worsening
light pollution - from
excessive or poorly
designed lighting
down here and the
rapidly growing population
of artificial
satellites up there -
could render stargazing
from the ground
frustrating or even
virtually impossible,
which might in turn
make much of S&T's content irrelevant.
But astronomers aren't alone in
recognizing that we have to restore dark
night skies. It's now clear that artificial
light at night harms a wide variety
of living things, including humans.
Accordingly, night-sky-friendly lighting
is becoming more common, new lightpollution
filters are cutting through the
skyglow, and satellite operators (some
of them anyway) are cooperating with
astronomers to minimize interference
with telescopic observations. So there
are reasons to be hopeful that future
generations will be as inspired by the
starry night sky as readers of this magazine
have always been.
I'm hopeful, too, about S&T not
being abandoned by astronomy enthusiasts,
who now have so many other ways
to learn about important cosmic discoveries
and upcoming celestial happenings.
Someday the print magazine may
go the way of the dodo, but I expect S&T
to live on in some form and to remain
indispensable to those who appreciate
having authoritative, understandable
astronomical information delivered in a
convenient, affordable package.
With that in mind, I look forward to
reading S&T's 1,437th issue to prepare
for Comet Halley's July 2061 swing
around the Sun. Of course, I'll have to
live to 105, but hope springs eternal.
¢ RICK FIENBERG was S&T's Editor in
Chief from 2001 to 2008. Last year he
received the Astronomical Society of
the Pacific's Klumpke-Roberts Award
(https://is.gd/ASPaward).
https://www.is.gd/ASPaward
Sky & Telescope - February 2025

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky & Telescope - February 2025
