It’s no secret that many (most?) of us model railroaders have more than one hobby. I love amateur astronomy as well, and if I recall correctly there are a few others on this forum who share these hobbies. Perhaps it’s not just a coincidence that Kalmbach publishes Astronomy magazine as well as MR.
What prompted my thoughts was that I received the new issue of Sky And Telescope tonight, and the lead-off letter to the editor is from a model railroading/astronomy enthusiast who combined his hobbies by building an astronomical observatory on his layout, complete with a model of a one-meter telescope. On his background he used glow-in-the-dark paints to add constellations and the Milky Way, and a black light along the back for dramatic effect with the room darkened. He say he enjoys running his trains at “night”, enjoying the simulated glow of stars in a summer night. He says he’s glad he could combine both his hobbies on his layout. S&T even included a nice picture of his layout.
I wonder if he’s a member of this forum? He’s Brian Spradlin, of Harbor City, CA. Well done, Brian!
I don’t go to their site as often as I have done in years past but I still sneak a peak when I think about it. Quite interesting viewing. Today’s picture is Spitzer’s Trifid.
Mike, I could be mis-remembering it (is that really a word?!). I thought it was in a post or posts in which people talked about other hobbies, and how some of them were even more expensive than model railroading. Amateur astronomy certainly can be, but I’m pretty thrifty with both. I feel you can do a lot with a little in both hobbies.
You are right that we don’t usually reveal our full names on the forum, and that’s just a well. I just thought I would give a shout-out just in case.
I should add that the writer describes it as a small HO layout built in his garage. From the picture it looks nice, with well done trackwork, scenery, and structures. An Atlas D&H RS-36 is pulling a freight in the background.
I’m not really an amateur astronomer, but just your average stargazer, aided by enough time at summer camp in the scouts to remember a few constellations. I did use a bit of astronomy by using an online star chart to paint in some luminous stars that commemorate things of personal interest on the layout.
Behind Silverton, the stars are from the date that the Rio Grande finally reaching the town back in the early 1880s.
Another wall has the stars on the date of my wife and mine’s wedding.
I had a Tasco telescope and saw the rings of Saturn. By the time I got my parents out to the telescope, things had moved and I never found it again. Was also a subscriber to S&T.
Although I grew up during the Apollo program, I thought the prospects for future astronomic discoveries rather limited.
I also thought the first craft brew pub in Baltimore saturated the market.
Friend of mine lives in a somewhat isolated area outside of San Diego and has a pretty impressive telescope setup at his house. He gets these amazing professional quality images of galaxies and such - I really want prints to frame and hang on the wall.
I’m not so much into astronomy per se, but space in general. I don;t really remember the Apollo missions, I was not yet 3 when Neil and Buzz stepped on to the moon for the first time, but my parents did wake me up to watch it. There’s a display at the SAC Museum in Omaha of a typical 1969 household watching the moon landing, and I had an odd sense of deja vu looking at it, but some of the things in that display lasted in our house well into the 70’s.
I’m fascinated how we can still talk to Voyager - there’s a great set of videos on Dave Jones’ alternate YouTube chaneel (his main one is EEVBlog) where he got to tour the ground facility in Australia. Both the big dish outside and then inside with the communications equipment - including live audio of the signal coming in.
I was actually a professional radio astronomer in my early years. I was operations manager at Haystack Observatory, a 120 foot dish antenna in Tyngsboro, MA.
That was long before I had the resurrection of my trains, which I had since my early teens, but they were boxed up for all those years.
After rereading this, I think I’ve decided I might try to build something like that. I have a desert mountain on the layout that is basically a blank space.
At one time, I thought about putting a crashed flying saucer there, but I really like the idea of an observatory.
Thanks for posting this. It will give me a good project.
One of the things I did was worked on the performance assessments of what they called high risk missions. Mainly, I was in meetings in bland offices. After I left, they started taking contractors on the hardware tours, which I only got to do once and never to the west coast. Disappointing.
I had the opportunity to take some kapton that was trimmed from the James Webb Space Telescope, but declined. Sort of regret that.
If you do enough railfanning in the right places you have opportunities to be trackside in areas that qualify as “dark sky” and can really admire the night sky in ways that are harder to do in the city.
I remember a friend and I were trackside west of Galesburg IL on the Santa Fe late of a June evening and there was minimal light pollution. Beautiful. We even saw a weather* satellite moving across the sky.
And a headlight on the horizon was a LONG ways away.
*edited post - read MisterBeasley’s comment. It was a satellite and we could even see it tumbling (using the telephoto lens on the cameras we had with us - too dark for photography). For all I know it may have been space junk.
Most of the light that we did see was from the abundant fireflies.
I experience that dark sky thing at our place up north, on summer evenings. It is amazing what you can see. You don’t have to look to hard to see various objects moving across the sky.
In general, weather satellites are placed in geosynchronous orbits, about 22000 miles above the equator. So, when you see them, they do not appear to be moving against the star background.
It all started out looking for info on this Brain Spradlin guy’s layout, and the observatory he built, and that’s as far in line as it went…it quickly went sideways…and continues in a sideways direction.
He probably can’t post any pictures from the magazine the OP mentions, with the guys layout pictured, because of all the copyright mumbo jumbo, so I guess it will go …
