Operation Moonwatch!! Sept. 4, 2019 Meeting

Watch the skies -- Lansing enters the space-age with Operation Moonwatch Speaker: Horace Smith

July saw the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. More than a decade before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, there was the excitement of Sputnik and the first artificial satellites, set against the background of the Cold War. When these first satellites were lofted into orbit, they needed to be tracked and their orbits found. However, in 1957, they could not be tracked by radar. Nor were the giant Baker-Nunn tracking cameras yet in operation when the first satellites went up. Amateur astronomers, citizen-scientists, stepped in to fill the gap under Operation Moonwatch. One such Moonwatch team was formed by Lansing amateur astronomers, observing satellites from the roof of what was then the MSU Physics and Mathematics Building. When the Moonwatch program eventually ended, astronomer Fred Whipple would proclaim: "They said it couldn't be done. And they were dead wrong!"

Horace will tell what he has learned of this nearly forgotten episode in local science history

Wednesday Sept. 4 at 7:00pm at Abrams Planetarium

Volunteer satellite trackers in Pretoria, South Africa, for Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Moonwatch Network, one of more than 100 teams worldwide.

A historical marker placed by the city of Cincinnati and sponsored by the Cincinnati Astronomical Society, giving an account of the Project Moonwatch team that operated there.