Blogtrek

Committment

Today I went to a meeting of our local astronomy society, where I am the President. Tonight's talk was a tape recording of the talk to the astronomy society ten years ago, on 1992 May 11. The talk was about the building of our 7-inch refractor telescope that started around 1962 May; it was completed in 1963 October, or just in time for a regional astronomy meeting. It took a lot of weekends digging, bricklaying, and accurate positioning of materials to build this observatory, and it was a volunteer effort. Today the scope is ruined by the lights of an expanding city, especially those of a shopping center that was built right next to the observatory in the mid 1980's. In today's day of the instant sound bite and self-actualization, could the same project be accomplished today? Would people have the commitment? According to Strauss and Howe, (www.fourthturning.com), maybe not. It's a question of building our own large telescope or each of us go out and buy our own medium-sized scope and being satisfied with that.