Steve Gottlieb
I live in the small town (1.8 square miles) of Albany, California, just north of Berkeley. We moved here when my daughter entered kindergarten (she's now an Associate Professor in math at San Jose State University) because of the school district's good reputation. We ended up loving the neighborhood and I ended up teaching Calculus at the high school just 4 blocks from home. I retired in 2010 after teaching for 37 years.
I've had the astronomy bug since elementary school in Los Angeles and used to beg my parents to take me up to Griffith Park Observatory and later asked for a telescope (they were hesitant as they figured it was a passing phase). I organized a little astronomy club with the kids on my block when I was 10 years old in 1959. The focus of the club was newspaper clippings I had collected of the early U.S. and Russian space launches as well as lectures I planned to give on the solar system and stars. I think that lasted two meetings before the kids I had corralled ran back to the schoolyard to play sports.
Time passed, other interests flourished and faded until I discovered a 60mm refractor in 1976 languishing in my girlfriend's parents' garage. After a year setting it up in an open field in Lafayette and "discovering" many of the showpieces in Sagittarius, Scorpius, Cygnus, etc. without any guides or charts (and really no idea what they were), I started a subscription to Astronomy magazine and bought a copy of Edmund's mag 5 atlas.
The small refractor was upgraded to a 6-inch reflector on an equatorial-fork mount and I was on my way systematically observing the Messiers and other showpiece deep sky objects in 1977. A year later I was seduced by a shiny orange C-8 with better optics and tracking, joined the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers and made it up a star party on Mt. Tamalpais, where I had my first astonishing view of M51 through a large dobsonian telescope.
Soon afterwards I discovered a darker site and was driving there as often as possible from 1979 to 1983. I met other serious amateurs and was invited to join a group meeting in the Sierra foothills. By that point I was hooked on views through larger scopes and had purchased a 13.1" Odyssey I in late 1981 and by the end of 1984 had replaced it with a humongous 17.5-inch Coulter telescope. Later telescopes included an 18-inch Starmaster and a 24-inch f/3.8 Starstructure.
In the early to mid-1980's it wasn't easy obtaining astronomical information on specific objects, so I thoroughly enjoyed heading over to the UC Berkeley Astronomy library to compare my observations with professional catalogues and actual Palomar Observatory Sky Survey prints. I even purchased several 11×14 contact prints to be used as finder charts of the Virgo, Perseus and Hercules galaxy clusters from the Cal Tech bookstore.
At the same time, I started to run across numerous errors and conflicting data in the professional and amateur literature. So, I began corresponding with a few professional astronomers including Harold Corwin at the University of Texas. As snail-mail evolved into e-mail, several amateurs/pros with a similar interest in historical visual astronomy formed the NGC/IC Project that completed a historically corrected revision of the entire NGC and IC. I decided to dive head-on into the project by visually reobserving the NGC to verify the original observations. My visual notes on all these objects are available on this site.
While helping to correct the NGC errors, I compiled the databases for several computerized digital setting circles (DSCs), including Lumicon and Celestron. Later I selected the list of objects and wrote the descriptions for Orion's popular "DeepMap 600" folding star chart.
Starting in the 1980's I began writing observing articles for Deep Sky magazine and later the "Adventures in Deep Space" website. In 1999 I began writing regularly for Sky & Telescope magazine on a variety of advanced observing projects and am still a regular contributing editor. Thousands of my observations are included in the Night Sky Observer's Guide by George Kepple and Glen Sanner and numerous descriptions are featured in the multi-volume Annals of the Deep Sky: A Survey of Galactic and Extragalactic Objects by Jeff Kanipe and Dennis Webb.
Over the years I've never been enticed to get involved with imaging or amateur telescope making – for me it's always been about the aesthetics of the deep sky in a large scope, pondering the mysteries of the universe, and just relaxing and hanging out with buddies under a velvet-black night sky.
