1997 opened with great anticipation for two celestial events: the hoped-for spectacle of Comet Hale-Bopp and a northerly opposition of Mars. Closer to home, NASA was planning for the second servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, and there was much excitement as the best images of the Galileo mission to Jupiter and its moons poured in.

Several issues of Sky & Telescope featured articles on electronic imaging. Robert Wise recounted his start in electronic imaging with a home-builtCCD camera in the May issue. His images clearly have that Cookbook camera look, pixel-ly and lacking in dynamic range, but amazing for amateurs of the day. More tutorials followed: “less is more” in electronic imaging (use a focal reducer to match a telescope’s focal length to a chip’s small pixels), and Jerry Lodriguss described how to digitally enhance scanned astrophotos. Meade Instruments introduced two low cost CCD cameras, the Pictor 208XT and 216XT.

More news from space: the Hipparcos satellite measured the distance to over 100,000 nearby stars, calibrating the cosmic yardstick with unprecedented accuracy. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey got underway from a perch on Apache Point, New Mexico, promising a multispectral 3-D map of 100,000,000 galaxies. 

What about our solar system? NASA did have the "right stuff" and proved it with the spectacular 4th of July landing and successful mission of Mars Pathfinder and rover Sojourner. Cassini-Huygens departed for Saturn and its methane cloud-shrouded moon, Titan. But other questions have proven much harder to answer: Is there life beyond Earth? Does Europa harbor lifeforms beneath its frozen, icy surface? And featured on December’s cover: What's the best telescope for you?

In 1997, amateur astronomy wasn’t as different as I’d imagined. You’d be hard pressed to pick a ten-year old issue of Sky & Telescope from today's, although the cover price of $3.95 would be a good tip-off. Inside, there’s the familiar list of columnists. Digital imaging, just ramping up back then, is mainstream now, of course, but the best images, spectacular and in full color, still anchor the "Gallery" at the back of each issue. Comet Hale-Bopp certainly lived up to all expectations, Hubble continues to amaze us, and space and ground-based astronomy have continued to drive the limits of our knowledge. And headlines from the magazine covers have as much relevance today as ten years ago. So much of the world has changed in that time, but at least according to this limited peek at our hobby, the universe of amateur astronomy has remained surprisingly very much the same. 

And one more thing about 1997: Frank Sheldon took the helm as newsletter editor, and soon thereafter I contributed the first of these Moondarks. This issue makes number 120, and each and every one of them is available online. Now that that’s done and summer 2007 is nearly here, there’s many more boxes and bins to sort in my attic: I need to find room for this year’s magazines.

Moondark is written by Doug Miller, published at the Moondark web site, and printed in the Delmarva Star Gazers' Star Gazer News. This document was last revised on 27 May 2007. Text and images copyright © 2007 by Douglas C. Miller, All Rights Reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without prior permission.