D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
November
2008
Gary Emerson's Dark Skies
Page: 2After selling his home in Boulder and dismantling his observatory there, Emerson turned to the construction of a new observatory here in Grant County. Construction was completed in September, and most of his telescopes, cameras and scientific instruments are up and running.
He says, "I'm an amateur now, and a lot of really important work has been done by amateurs. Nearly all the supernovas were found by amateurs. I'm still interested in challenging conventional wisdom in the field of astronomy, and look forward to taking on projects the big telescopes just can't get around to doing because of limited funding."
As if Emerson's life in outer space weren't exciting enough, he also has a few things going on down here on terra firma. He's produced a couple of award-winning documentary films, on the history of wind power in America ("Windsong") and the environmentally sensitive reclamation of a mine in Colorado ("Sand and Gravel Is for the Birds"). Besides taking three gold medals at major film festivals, the wind-power documentary was chosen as one of only 10 films of its kind to be shown at Cannes, and has aired on PBS many times.
Emerson's world travels have left him with thousands of photographs of foreign lands and exotic peoples. Some of those images can be seen from time to time on the walls of local business establishments in the Silver City area.
In the coming year, Emerson will be teaching some short astronomy courses for the Western Institute for Lifelong Learning (WILL), at WNMU. See www.will-learning.com for course information.
In retirement, years after that initial burst of enthusiasm as Sputnik orbited overhead, Gary Emerson remains cautiously optimistic about the future of space exploration. "There are still some great minds in the world, doing great work," he says. "It's all harder to do now, but we need to keep asking the big questions like 'Who are we?' and 'Where did we come from?' instead of just making statements. We need to do science for the sake of science itself."
To learn more about the Hubble Space Telescope, see hubblesite.org
Jim Kelly is a retired journalist who's also
relocated to Silver City, in his case from California.