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Meeting Date
Novice Meeting Topic
Globular Cluster Research & Observing Meteor Showers
Novice Meeting Speaker
Turner Woody & Debbie Moran
General Meeting Topic
Edward Emerson Barnard, the Man, the Times and the Science.
General Meeting Speaker
Larry Mitchell

EEB.jpgEE Barnard started his astronomical career as an amateur, and made his name (and a good bit of prize money) discovering several comets. He was an accomplished pioneer in astrophotography and his catalog of dark nebulae, known as Barnard Object’s, were the finest photographs that had been taken of the Milky Way. Barnard perhaps was best known for his incredible eyesight and ability to discern faint detail through an eyepiece that other “gifted observers” had to photograph in order to see. As an observer he truly had no equal in his day and rarely missed a single hour of clear moonless night-sky. He was known as “the man who was never known to sleep.” His endless scouring of the heavens left an astonishing legacy of observations: of planets, satellites, comets, double stars, bright and dark nebulae and globular clusters.

Several of Barnard’s discoveries were made with a telescope as small as 5 inches, yet these objects had been passed up by other visual astronomers with much larger instruments. Barnard would have loved to understand the science of the universe that we all take for granted today. In his day anything that was not composed of stellar objects was classified as “nebulae”, which of course includes those objects we call galaxies today. As amateur astronomers, we are privileged that we get to view these objects that most people do not know even exists and very few human beings have ever visually seen.