By David H. Levy
As a youngster growing up in Montreal, Canada in the early 1950s, I was impressed by the seeming simplicity of Montreal’s weather. It appeared to me as though there were just two kinds of weather, in wintertime a grey sky, and in summertime a blue sky. I wasn’t completely wrong about this. In 1961, while trying to run a small astronomy club for young people, I counted an unbroken string of cloudy Friday nights that lasted for months. And sure enough, when the weather began to moderate the following spring, we were treated to, at last, a clear night.
As I grew older, my thoughts turned to finding a different locale where the sky would be clear more often. In September 1979, I packed my bags and telescopes and headed for the American southwest. I was rewarded immediately. My first season here, the Autumn of 1979, was punctuated by a virtually unbroken string of more than 50 clear nights in a row.
There was a specific reason for my wanting more clear nights. In the fall of 1965 I was planning a search program for comets, and it began on December 17 of that year, just before midnight. I used the largest telescope I had at the time, the 8-inch reflector named Pegasus. Less than a year later, Miss Isabel K. Williamson, director of observations of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Montreal Centre, wrote this in the November 1966 issue of the center’s newsletter Skyward: “The increase in the number of observations over the previous year can be attributed to David Levy who has made the search for and observation of comets and novae his main astronomical project. In addition to patrolling assigned areas, he has made a total of 360 observations of the dome, the twilight horizon and the sky in the sun’s vicinity, and on 33 nights spent a total of 48 hours at the eyepiece of his telescope, sweeping the sky for comets.”
Miss Williamson’s words from all those years ago remain among the highest compliment I have received from anyone. And I still use Pegasus for some of my comet hunting, including the evening of October 11, 1987, when I used Pegasus to find my third comet, 1987 T1. In fact, to celebrate the completion of this article, I went outdoors and used Pegasus for a short comet search this very evening.
I may have been right about my childhood weather forecast. Southern Arizona offers many more clear nights than one can appreciate from the frequently cloudy sky over Montreal, Canada. And from the Chiricuaha Astronomy Complex, a two-hour drive southeast of my Vail, Arizona home, observers are treated to one of the darkest sky locations in the world. It is well worth loading Pegasus into a van and using it at that wonderful CAC dark site. Whether I am down there or right here, placing my eye at the eyepiece of this beloved telescope warms my heart and pierces my soul.
