I recently received a certificate and pin acknowledging my completion of the Astronomical League Urban Observing Program. The Astronomical League is an umbrella organization supporting local astronomy clubs and promoting astronomy outreach and education. It has more than 70 different observing programs that create challenges and add structure for amateur astronomers in their observations.
I got interested in the programs after seeing a presentation about them by former Seattle Astronomical Society member Burley Packwood, who has completed a dozen or more of the programs and really touted their value for getting observers out under the stars and not just looking at the same old things.
I decided to give it a try and picked the Urban Observing Program for obvious reasons. I do the vast majority of my observing in the backyard of Seattle Astronomy headquarters in West Seattle, Washington, where it's not only cloudy all the time but also meets the program's requirement that observations be made from light-polluted skies, defined in this case as "any skies where you cannot see the Milky Way with the unaided eye."
The program has a list of one hundred celestial objects that can be spotted from places like West Seattle, though many of them are extremely difficult. Galaxies in particular are challenging. It's often tough to tease out M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, much less some of the smaller, fainter fuzzies. In my observing notes I often referred to my target object as "just a smudge," and often went back out the next night to try to see it again and confirm that the smudge wasn't just where a mosquito sneezed on the optics!
The observing was fun even though, and maybe even because, it was challenging. I completed the observations what I perceived to be a few years ago, but never got around to organizing the observing notes that the paperwork for the program award. Then a few weeks ago the new issue of Reflector, the Astronomical League's magazine, arrived in my mailbox. It made me think that getting that stuff submitted would be a nice little social distancing project. Turns out I made that last of the one hundred observations BACK IN 2011! The first came in 2006, so I spent 14 years on the project, the last nine of which were completely inactive. If there was a certificate for procrastination, I might be in the running.
I had to drop Packwood a note about my achievement. He responded that he is the point person with the Astronomical League for the Sonora Astronomical Society in Green Valley, Arizona where he now lives. He noted that he still has "a lot of respect for those programs" and that he "always learned something when I worked my way through an award."
Packwood, by the way, is a talented astrophotographer who was recently featured in this article from the Green Valley News.
Get out there and look at the stars. You could win a major award!
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