QUEST Community Science Blog

In 1968, John Dobson started the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers with the help of two boys who loved astronomy but couldn’t join an amateur astronomy club in the city because they were too young. So the trio created their own club, carting two homemade telescopes onto Jackson and Broderick Streets and inviting curious passersby to take a look at the craters of the moon, the rings of Saturn, the banded clouds of Jupiter.

Forty years later, the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers is still going strong, boasting a web site replete with a monthly star chart, specific for San Francisco, a calendar of monthly amateur astronomy events, a helpful “cheat sheet” of astronomical facts and answers to questions that routinely come up if you set up a telescope on your neighborhood sidewalk, and where to go if you want to borrow, build or donate a telescope.

Another great resource for the budding SF amateur astronomer is the Randall Museum, which hosts star parties, lectures by amateur and professional astronomers and classes for making your own Dobsonian telescope from scratch. The free public lectures at the Randall Museum take place on the third Wednesday of each month, sponsored by the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers.

Since 1952, the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers have been an invaluable resource for stargazers to learn about the choicest observing sites throughout the Bay Area, monthly star parties and make contact with a community of like-minded folks. Be sure to also check out their astrophotography web page, where they have uploaded photos and even videos shot with their telescopes of galaxies, comets, moons, planets and nebulae.

If you can’t get enough of amateur astronomy clubs in the Bay Area, check out the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and the Astronomical Association of Northern California. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific, founded in the 19th century, has members from 70 countries and claims to be the largest astronomy society in the world. It also boasts educational outreach programs, such as Astronomy from the Ground Up, a National Science Foundation-funded program that helps informal science educators such as docents and volunteers by giving them the tools and training to more effectively communicate astronomy information to the public.

If you should need to buy equipment or talk with some very knowledgeable folks about the right telescope, accessories or CCD digital camera to begin your foray into astrophotography, check out Scope City, a retailer in San Francisco specializing in telescopes and binoculars.

Watch the “Amateur Astonomers” TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.


Sheraz Sadiq is an Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

The Allen Telescope Array.When I first began to work on Quest’s SETI: The Search for ET segment, I have to admit that my initial reaction was “are we still looking for ET?” Of course, humans have been gazing up to the heavens for millennia, asking ourselves that interminable question “are we alone?” And of course, there’s been a long line of increasingly sophisticated radio telescopes searching the skies for cosmic signs of intelligence. But hey, don’t we at some point have to call it a day? Though I think most of us don’t actually believe we’re alone, the universe is really, really big. What chance do we have of finding ET?

Well, it turns out our chances are much better than I thought. Grote Reber began conducting sky surveys in the radio frequencies with his newly invented radio telescope in 1937, and detected the first signals from outer space in 1938. In the seven decades since then, we’ve seen a multitude of radio telescope designs pop up all over the world, but we still haven’t gotten signals from any little green men. What I didn’t understand, until I spoke to Jill Tarter and Seth Shostak at the SETI Institute, is that in all that time, we’ve hardly looked at any space at all.

Since SETI’s first experiment in 1960 by Dr. Frank Drake, and until very recently, they’ve only looked at a thousand stars out of about 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and there are 100 billion other galaxies to look at! There are two reasons for this: 1) The radio telescopes they’ve been using can only look at narrow swaths of the sky, and 2) they’ve had to RENT time on other people’s telescopes, which constrains their search and budget. Now, the new Allen Telescope Array is being built just for them, and with it they’ll be able to capture millions of frequencies from multiple star systems simultaneously. It will be the biggest and fastest tool in the world for seeking signs of ET!

To learn why scientists use radio frequencies in the hunt for intelligent life, and to learn more about the history & future of the search, watch our story SETI: The Search for ET. You can also watch our extended interview with Astronomer Jill Tarter. And hey folks, the SETI Institute is a non-profit organization, so if you’d like to help them out with the search, consider adopting a scientist like Jill Tarter or Seth Shostak. Go to Adopt-a-Scientist, or join Jill’s team and become a TeamSETI member at Join TeamSETI.
Also, check out U.C. Berkeley’s SETI@home page and turn your home computer into a tool that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

Watch SETI: The New Search for ET story online, as well as find additional links and resources.
Joan Johnson is an Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

The original Oakland Observatory in the 1880’s,
at Lafayette Square in Oakland. Credit: Chabot Space
& Science Center archives.This year marks an anniversary for the astronomical heritage of Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area: Chabot Observatory turns 125!

Originally established as the Oakland Observatory in 1883, the facility was a unique creature from the very beginning. Conceived by then Oakland Public Schools Superintendent Jewett Gilson, who was inspired by a school observatory he saw in Philadelphia, the observatory was created for use by Oakland schools and the general public at large.

Gilson looked for, and eventually found, a donor to fund the observatory project: Anthony Chabot, a wealthy entrepreneur and philanthropist who made his fortune building municipal water systems in the Bay Area– including Lake Temescal and Lake Chabot. Anthony Chabot stipulated as part of his original $3,000 gift that the telescope shall forever be available for public observation at not cost– a tradition that continues today.

Chabot didn’t want the observatory to be named for him, so in its earliest years it was called the Oakland Observatory. The public, as the story goes, insisted on calling it Chabot Observatory in gratitude for the gift– and eventually the name was made official.

The original location for the observatory and its 8-inch Alvan Clarke and Sons telescope (”Leah”) was close to downtown Oakland in Lafayette Square– which today remains a square block of parkland, at 10th and 11th Streets and Martin Luther King Junior Way and Jefferson Street. In those days, 10 or so visitors on any given night would climb the tower-like structure to the telescope dome and peer at the heavens through the high quality instrument. Reservations had to be made in advance– sometimes as long as a month or two.

As Oakland grew, and particularly as it converted its street lighting from gas-powered lamps to electric lights, the necessity of moving the observatory to a darker spot grew. The observatory’s first director, Charles Burckhalter (who is said to have been the first person in Oakland with an astronomical telescope, set up in a backyard observatory at his home on Chester Street), arranged for the relocation. A number of different sites were considered– including a spot near Redwood Peak, the current location of the observatory– but a small hill next to the Mills College campus was finally adopted.

In 1915, Chabot Observatory opened at its new site, along with a new 20-inch Warner and Swasey telescope (”Rachel”), and continued to wow the public with the astronomical vistas it conveyed. In 1923 the directorship passed to Earle Linsley, a Mills College professor, who expanded the reach of the observatory to the public through outreach to schools and the establishment of an amateur astronomy group (today the Eastbay Astronomical Society).

Having visited this Chabot Observatory as a child in the 1960s, I now appreciate how long and distinguished a career those two telescopes spanned. At the time, I had no idea that Leah, even in 1968, was 85 years old-older than my grandparents! Then the observatory was run by the beloved Kingsley Wightman — “Mr. Science” to a generation or two.

It took the moving Earth to relocate the observatory a second time– literally. Because of Chabot Observatory’s location almost directly on top of the Hayward Fault, and the fact that the aging buildings were not quake– safe in the first place, another site had to be found: the present location of Chabot Space & Science Center, adjacent to Redwood Peak.

Happy 125th to Oakland’s special connection with the stars!

Benjamin Burress is a staff astronomer at The Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.