Amateur & Amateurs

From a crude shelter in the middle of a cornfield near Delphos, Ohio, one evening last fortnight a 36-year-old amateur astronomer scrutinized the northern sky through his 6-in. telescope. Ten degrees from the North Star he spotted an unfamiliar object, below naked-eye visibility. At that location his charts showed no star, no nebula. Amateur Astronomer Leslie C. Peltier watched the tiny blob of light for five hours. In that time it moved sufficiently far to betray itself as a comet. To Harvard Observatory, whose officials knew his name very well, Peltier sent a telegram. One of Harvard's big telescopes swung up to confirm the find. Back to Delphos went another telegram: "Congratulations!" The Peltier comet was the first discovered in 1936.

Last week, after calculations of its orbit, Harvard announced that the comet was approaching Earth, had already increased in brightness from the ninth magnitude to the eighth. Now 120,000,000 miles distant, it will come within 20,000,000 miles (less than one-quarter of the distance to the Sun) before receding. At its nearest approach late in July, it will have reached the sixth magnitude, will be the first naked-eye comet since 1927.

A onetime farmer and garage mechanic, Leslie C. Peltier is now a commercial draftsman by day. Eighteen years ago, after reading a book called The Friendly Stars, he made his first telescope, a puny two-incher. Both Princeton and Harvard have now lent him larger instruments. He has observed some 47,000 heavenly bodies, is the sole discoverer of two previous comets, co-discoverer of three others. In 1933 Nova Ophiuchi, a variable star which had not flared up since 1898, flared up again. Peltier was the first to see the outburst. Harvard passed on word of it to observatories the world over. Year later Peltier went to Cambridge as honor delegate at the convention of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, whose membership of 350 includes only twelve professionals. There, for his "tremendous contributions" to astronomy, he was given the association's first merit award--a handsome certificate and a cash prize. Someone once asked Astronomer Peltier why he did not join the staff of a big observatory. He replied that 1) he was satisfied to remain a freelance; 2) he had not been invited. The fact is that amateurs render valuable service by "sweeping the sky," a game for which professionals have no time. The professional usually has his research program mapped out for months ahead of time. He is thus not likely to come across any unexpected phenomenon. It was a British amateur named J. P. M. Prentice who discovered Nova Herculis, the spectacular "new star" of 1934 (TIME, Dec. 31, 1934). A British music-hall comedian named Will Hay was among the first to see the great white spot which erupted on the belly of Saturn three years ago (TIME, Aug. 21, 1933). The orbit of Pluto was theoretically predicted by professionals, but that outermost planet was actually discovered by an amateur named Clyde W. Tombaugh while working at Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

It is estimated that U. S. amateurs have built about 10,000 telescopes, have organized some 50 clubs. The Pittsburgh club, formed as a branch of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, has a typical membership: engineers, doctors, dentists, lawyers, a bishop, two nuns.

Biggest amateur telescope is the 22-incher built by George Tauchmann of Berkeley, Calif. Twelve amateurs from California to Massachusetts have built 12-in. instruments, powerful enough to magnify the craters of the moon 500 or 600 times, to make visible the fifth satellite of Jupiter.

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