Emily Levesque

Who knew that the life of an astronomer was so much fun?

In her 2020 book Emily Levesque relates amusing and amazing stories of professional stargazers. It's not a book about deep concepts of astrophysics, it's a book about how astronomy is actually done and a peek into the lives of astronomers.

The focus of the book is on "observing". For us non-astronomers, "observing" is what an astronomer does when they get in front of a telescope. Observing is the actual search through the night sky to locate objects of study.

Astronomers then take the results of their observing, whether recorded to photographic plates as in the past, or to digital data stores today, and do analysis to understand celestial phenomena like black holes and supernovas and pulsars and such.

The book contains a mix of stories. Some of it is memoir as Levesque relates her love of the night sky and her own journey to a career in astronomy. Some of it is the story of the development of the tools of modern astronomy - the ways and means to observe the night sky, along with stories of some of the personalities that have used those tools to make astronomy happen. Some of it is relating interesting and humorous stories of observing that she's gathered from the over 100 other astronomers she interviewed for this book. All of it is well told.

Most of the observing in astronomy is at telescopes located in very remote mountainous regions of the world. One of my favorite stories in the book is about the viscachas seen at many observatories in Chile.

Viscachas are small furry relatives of chinchillas who Levesque describes as "wise rabbit grandfathers" with "tall ears, long curled tails, sleepy eyes, and long, drooping whiskers". The thing about these animals is that, like the astronomers who come to their mountaintops to observe, they like to watch sunsets. Picture the astronomer and the wise rabbit grandfather perched on the mountain summit as the sun fades into the distance outside the observatory. Both watching the sky, taking in the show and "watching our planet turn".

It's stories like this throughout the book that humanize astronomers as they go about observing.

Part of the reason why Levesque wrote this book is that her field is changing. As telescopes becomes more and more automated, allowing astronomers more time to focus on the analysis and understanding of our universe, a perverse thing is happening. People who've devoted their lives to the study of the night sky find themselves actually observing it less and less. Their world is evolving from one where data was scarce and observing was a time consuming necessity, to one where observing is automated, does not require their presence, and provides masses of data by email for analysis. The time to be an "explorer" in the old sense is fading away.

I'm very glad I read this book, and would highly recommend it for anyone scientifically minded or interested in astronomy. Five Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ for The Last Stargazers.… (mais)

Fantastic. Not so much about astronomical science as about the experience of an astronomer. Full of illuminating anecdotes. Hard to put down. Perhaps the weakest parts were the brief discussions of sexism, aliens and funding limits—but overall a huge treat.

> I had a couple of observers at Cerro Tololo in Chile swear by the presence or absence of Andean condors, immense birds that can regularly be spotted soaring practically at eye level around the summits of most Chilean observatories. According to these observers, spotting condors in the afternoon meant you’d get bad seeing that night

> The 3:00 a.m. haze in particular is what makes music choice utterly critical to observing runs. Almost any astronomer you ask will tell you that playing the right music is a vitally important ingredient for any observing run, to the point that it acquires an almost talismanic quality. Many observers have music that they only play at the telescope or set up playlists matched to the various steps of the night. Generally, most observers tend toward more energetic music as the night gets later. Someone who might have queued up Bob Dylan at the start of the night will have moved on to AC/DC by the time the early morning hours roll around.

> multiple observatories have settled on what has been nicknamed “the mothinator,” a simple but effective combination of a lamp, a fan, and an industrial-sized garbage bucket that can fill to the brim with moth carcasses in a matter of days during peak moth season.

> a funny quirk of these little creatures: they seem to love watching sunsets. Invariably, when a group of astronomers gathers on a Chilean observatory summit to watch the sun go down, we can spot a viscacha or two somewhere along the hillside

> One recent and amusing source of noise in [LIGO] Washington had stemmed from the liquid nitrogen tanks used to cool the detector. In warm weather, ice would form on the pipes leading to the tanks, and enterprising ravens would start pecking at the ice as a handy source of water on a hot day. That tap-tap-tap was enough to launch a full-scale investigation into what was causing noise in the detector.

> On July 4, 1054, the supernova death of a star only 6,500 light-years away grew so bright that it outshone every other object in the sky besides the sun and the moon. It was visible in the daytime sky for two weeks and was immortalized in Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic historical records and in an Ancestral Puebloan pictograph in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. The remnant of that supernova, the Crab Nebula, is one of the most famous and well-photographed objects in today’s sky.

> The astronomy community got a handy published table listing the key elements present in the spectrum of a match, the Haute-Provence spectrograph room was declared nonsmoking, and the mystery was solved.

> In 2018, an astronomer excitedly posted on the Astronomer’s Telegram website to report a “very bright” new object that had appeared in the constellation Sagittarius. Forty minutes later, he sheepishly circulated an update: the bright object was simply Mars… (mais)

Emily Levesque, an astronomer who studies red supergiants, gives lay readers a window into the wild and woolly world of astronomy and astronomers, from the history of using photographic plates in telescopes to the future of celestial science as more and more digital means of observation become reality.

The Last Stargazers is a tough book to categorize. Part memoir, part history, and part science book, this accessible and sometimes humorous book gives readers all sorts of stories about a fascinating and pretty rare job. She never gets over-heavy on the math/science aspects while still sharing a lot of fascinating tidbits about stars, telescopes, and how an observatory works. Interviewing dozens of fellow astronomers, Emily shares her own and others' stories of the work, and delves into hairier aspects such as inequalities and the challenges of the future with an even-handed approach.… (mais)