The Prairie Astronomy Club: Fifty Years of Amateur Astronomy documents this Midwest astronomy club's past and will probably trigger many great memories of readers' own relationships with the night sky. Chris Raymond photo
In this book (dare I say “work of love”?), you’ll find a chronology of the club, a brief history, a complete listing of officers, newsletter designs, road-trip reports, newspaper articles, observing reports, and lots and lots of photographs. There’s even a section of cartoons the club ran in many of its newsletters. And you can read a 98-page chapter about the Nebraska Star Party, which the Prairie Astronomy Club runs.
Time and again, a story would trigger a memory about similar events I participated in with a different astronomy club — eclipses of all kinds, grazing occultations, visits to museums, public observing sessions, even building observatories. If it happened in amateur astronomy, someone in the Prairie Astronomy Club probably recorded something similar.
What fun! In an e-mail to me, Mark described his thought process: “In addition to being the club’s 50th anniversary, I wanted to try to capture some of the stories from founding members and also include the newsletter reports that document key events within the life of the club, such as the founding of Hyde Observatory and buying the old Atlas Missile site as a club observing site. Most club members weren’t around back then and don’t have a sense of how things came about or who was involved. I discovered many interesting things reading through 50 years of newsletters — and how some ideas just keep recycling themselves about every decade. I thought that when we started the pre-Christmas ‘how to buy a telescope’ program that it was a new idea, but the club used to do that back in the ’80s. Even reading old reports of Mid-States Region of the Astronomical League (MSRAL) conventions from 1970 and 1993 was helpful when planning for MSRAL 2010.
“In the process of putting together the book, I also scanned all the old newsletters — 2,000+ pages, and I am putting together a DVD archive. We were really lucky that (10-time club president) Earl Moser collected and saved all of them — only a few issues are still missing. He also saved a whole box full of clippings and letters related to Astronomical League and MSRAL conventions, going back to the early ’60s.”
Thanks, Mark, for recording a slice of the history of amateur astronomy. Who knows? Your book may inspire others to document their club’s past.