HP Lovecraft
August 2005 |
“On October 9th I attended a meeting of the local organization of amateur astronomers – “The Skyscrapers”’ which function more or less under the auspices of Brown University – and was astonished at its degree of development. Some of the members are really serious scientific observers, and the society has recently purchased a well known private observatory (that of the late F.E. Seagrave – whom Charles A. A. Parker once knew – with an 8” refracting telescope) in the western part of the state. It has separate meteor, variable star, planet, etc. sections, which hold meetings of their own and report as units, and enjoys the use of the college observatory. At the recent meeting there was address on early Rhode Island astronomy, and the reflecting telescope of Joseph Brown – used to observe the transit of Venus here on June 3, 1769 and owned by the college since 1780 – was exhibited. Oddly enough this meeting proved a prelude to another wholly unrelated revival of my old astronomical interests. Down in DeLand, my friend Charles B. Johnston has become connected with Stetson University and its astronomical society, and has asked me for a series of elementary articles on the heavens for the local paper. I had an old series – published twenty two years ago – which seemed about the right sort; but when I got them out, their obsoleteness completely bowled me over. The progress of science in the last twenty or thirty years had left me utterly behind, and I saw that I had to do a helluva lot of brushing up if I ever expected to bridge the last decades and give the ancient articles an intelligent revision to date. Well, I decided to try, hence began an intermittent reading course with which I’m still busy. Our public library has some excellent new books on the subject – the textbook by J.C. Duncan and the layman’s manuals by Bartky and Stokeley being the best short cuts for the non-mathematical amateur. Curious how one’s early interests crop up again in one’s sunset years.”H.P. Lovecraft
Unfinished letter to James Morton
March 1937
