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Subject: SPACE Digest V9 #589

SPACE Digest                                      Volume 9 : Issue 589

Today's Topics:
    Electronic Journal of the ASA, Vol. I, No. I (part 2)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 22 Jul 89 18:22:59 GMT
From: eedsp!chara![e-mail]  (Donald J. Barry)
Subject: Electronic Journal of the ASA, Vol. I, No. I (part 2)


           -------------------begin part 2------------------


           THE ONE DREAM MAN:  ROBERT H. GODDARD, ROCKET PIONEER

                         Copyright (c) Larry Klaes

        When telescopes were introduced into astronomy during Europe's
    Renaissance, they revolutionized humanity's oldest science.  Earth's
    Moon was shown to be no longer a smooth, reflective disk as once
    believed, but a crater-scarred, mountainous world not far removed in
    constitution from the planet it orbits.  The other planets, once no
    more than bright points of light in the night sky, were now shown to
    be worlds themselves, all displaying discernible disks, some with
    phases, others with surface features, and even possessing retinues of
    moons.

        But as good as Earth-based telescopes have become, they still
    cannot present to us the truly close-up, detailed views of the other
    planets in the Solar System, neither can they give us direct samplings
    of these worlds' atmospheres and minerals, nor can they bring humans
    themselves to these places for exploration and colonization.  Such
    abilities required the advent of the rocket to place our astronomical
    instruments and people in space.  All this came about due to a rather
    private, driven, frequently ill New Englander in the first half of the
    Twentieth Century.

        Robert Hutchings Goddard (1882-1945) is looked upon as one of
    the three main founders of modern rocketry, along with Konstantin
    Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) of the Soviet Union, and Hermann Oberth (born
    1894) of Germany.  What makes Goddard stand out is that he went beyond
    just theorizing about various rocket designs and actually built working
    models.  In fact, Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket (the
    forerunner of most rockets used in today's various space programs) in
    Auburn, Massachusetts, on March 16, 1926.  The flight lasted just 2.5
    seconds, reaching an altitude of 12.3 meters (41 feet) and landing
    (crashing, actually) 55.2 meters (184 feet) from the launch site in
    his Aunt Effie's cabbage patch.  Today the launch site is commemorated
    with a small monument surrounded by a busy street and numerous stores,
    including the Auburn Mall.

        Goddard belonged to the league of misunderstood geniuses who was
    most certainly ahead of his time.  As a teenager growing up in Worcester,
    Massachusetts (about eighty kilometers/fifty miles west of Boston) he
    dreamed of sending spacecraft to orbit and photograph the planet Mars
    at a time when many people didn't even know what Mars was; and sadly
    this is still true in some cases today.

        Goddard attended and eventually graduated from Clark University
    in Worcester, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering.
    Later he taught physics at Clark and began to assemble, from among
    his students, those who would work with him later on.  Goddard
    sustained his rocketry work with grants from the Smithsonian
    Institution in Washington, D.C..  He always preferred to think of
    rockets in terms of space exploration.  However, to stay viable,
    he also attempted to sell the idea of rocket-borne weapons to the
    United States Army.

        In 1920, the Smithsonian Institution published Goddard's paper
    on rocket concepts, "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes", in the
    Smithsonian's Miscellaneous Collections (Volume 71, Number 2).

        Always concerned about being rejected as an "outlandish misfit",
    Goddard tried to protect his meager funding by remaining very
    conservative in print.  After discussing some rocket fundamentals,
    he described the rocket's potential for exploring Earth's upper
    atmosphere directly.

        Towards the end of his article, Goddard began to hint at his
    thoughts for the future by detailing his plans for launching a small,
    unmanned rocket that would be sent to Earth's Moon, wherein it would
    strike the surface and explode its payload of flash powder, so that
    observers with telescopes could see where the rocket had landed.
    Goddard was cautious not to mention flights to Mars or any other
    planet, as any celestial object beyond the Moon was considered by
    many scientists at that time to be too far away from Earth to ever
    be reached by humans, and general opinion on journeys to the Moon
    fared little better.

        Although published in a journal virtually unknown to the general
    public, "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes" did not go unnoticed,
    but it brought about the kind of attention Goddard did not want at all:
    Regular daily newspapers grabbed his ideas and practically announced
    that the Massachusetts scientist would be sending a manned expedition
    to the Moon within a few years!  The prestigious NEW YORK TIMES
    dismissed Goddard's ideas and said that he didn't even possess an
    elementary knowledge of physics.  The TIMES' editor incorrectly thought
    that rockets could not work in space.  He thought the exhaust from the
    vehicle would have nothing to push against; he did not realize that the
    rocket exhaust would be acting against the inner walls of the rocket
    itself, thus creating the required reaction (The TIMES did not make a
    retraction of this error on their part until the day APOLLO 11 landed
    Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin on the Moon in July of 1969!).

        Mary Pickford, the famous silent screen film actress, asked if she
    could put a letter in the non-existant Moon rocket; one man insisted
    that if Goddard paid ten thousand dollars for the insurance, he would
    fly to either the Moon or Mars without any other provisions.

        Goddard was a very private man.  This overblown attention was
    one of his worst fears come true.  He was also justly concerned of
    rivals stealing his ideas and claiming them for their own.  Goddard
    later commented that he should have written about his plans for a
    Mars mission, as then it would have been deemed ridiculous and he
    would have been left in peace.  Although it came close to causing
    him to lose his funding, eventually the publicity would reach the
    right people who would help Goddard finance his dream of rocket
    research.

        In 1929, a particularly loud rocket test in Auburn, Massachusetts
    had neighbors believing an airplane had crashed, so they called the
    police and fire department, who - along with the press - rushed to the
    scene, only to find Goddard and his assistants gathering up the pieces
    of a wrecked rocket and putting out small grass fires.

        Even though the incident was really a test with the crash of
    the rocket fully expected by Goddard and his team, the press had a
    different point of view and played it much differently:  One of the
    most painful headlines told about Goddard's rocket missing the Moon
    by "only 238,799 1/2 miles!"  After this event, Goddard was asked by
    the local authorities not to fly rockets in the area again, as it was
    deemed far too dangerous, particularly in a residential area (this
    was a legitimate concern).  Goddard reluctantly took his project to
    Hell Pond, a desolate federal artillery range at Camp (now Fort) Devens
    in Ayer, Massachusetts, where he conducted a number of static firing
    tests for several months.

        Fortunately for Goddard, he did not have to dwell at the range
    for long:  Aviator Charles Lindberg - who had become quite famous
    for crossing the Atlantic Ocean on his own in an airplane two years
    earlier - took an interest in Goddard's concepts and decided to
    help finance his work on rockets.  As an interesting note, Lindberg
    was introduced to Goddard by one of the rocket pioneer's own students
    and a former associate of the Wright Brothers:  Edwin Aldrin, Sr.,
    father of Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr., the astronaut who landed on the
    Moon with Neil Armstrong in APOLLO 11 on July 20, 1969, and became
    the second human being to directly explore another world.

        Lindberg also convinced philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim to help
    fund Goddard and move his entire operation to Eden Valley near Roswell,
    New Mexico.  There Goddard could test his new developments in the
    comparative safety and peace of the wide open desert.  Goddard's
    research would be a prelude to the thousands of rocket tests which
    would be conducted in that part of the United States in the decades
    to follow, all descended from the launch of that primitive liquid-
    fueled rocket on a farm in Auburn in 1926.

        Here in the desert, Goddard did some of his best work, testing
    parachute systems to recover rockets and their payloads, constructing
    stabilizing fins and gyroscopes to keep rockets flying straight, and
    even putting simple meteorological instruments aboard some flights to
    study the weather.  During this entire time, Goddard's staff never
    numbered more than seven people:  Five machinists (some of whom hadn't
    even graduated from high school), his wife Esther (who took the
    photographs and extinguished fires), and Goddard himself.  The man
    who wrote about rockets to the Moon never got any of his rockets higher
    than 2,250 meters (7,500 feet), though distance was only one of many
    important aspects of his rocket development.

        Despite all this work, Goddard and his rockets were generally
    unknown to the American public, and many of his ideas went unrecognized
    until several decades after his death in 1945.  Ironically, his ideas
    did not go unnoticed by the Germans, particularly Wernher von Braun,
    who took Goddard's plans from various journals and incorporated them
    into building the A-4 series of rockets - better known as the V-2 -
    which constantly struck at Europe in the last two years of World War
    Two.  The Army also adopted only one major and direct facet of Goddard's
    concepts in his lifetime, the antitank weapon known as the bazooka.
    Eventually, the United States Patent Office would posthumously recognize
    214 patents in all for various rocket designs invented by Goddard.

        Goddard was visionary in his dreams for space travel:  Nuclear and
    ion-powered rockets, solar-powered satellites, solar sails, even methods
    for communicating with extraterrestrial intelligences.  The proposed
    (but never built) American probe to Comet Halley in 1986 had incorporated
    in two of its design plans ion power and solar sails as possible methods
    of propulsion to reach the comet.  Goddard even felt that rockets would
    also pave the way to save the human race in the far distant future when
    Earth's Sun will begin to expand into a red giant star and envelope Earth,
    vaporizing it along with Mercury and Venus.  He proposed that humanity
    use its no doubt advanced skills to construct habitats inside large
    planetoids (less correctly known as asteroids) and then propel them out
    of the Solar System using some distant descendants of his primitive
    rockets to other, still viable star systems, where humans could find
    new planets to live on and continue the existence of the species.

        Today, Goddard's designs and dreams have either become realities
    or at least well-used plot concepts in science fiction.  Because of
    his work, we have been able to study lunar minerals first hand, search
    Mars for signs of life, find active volcanoes and frozen oceans on the
    moons of Jupiter, and view the Milky Way and other galaxies with a
    clarity unavailable within the turbulent atmosphere of Earth.  As
    rocket expert Jerome Hunsaker said of the man from Worcester, "Every
    liquid-fueled rocket that flies is a Goddard rocket."

        Some recommended reading:

        Anne Perkins Dewey, ROBERT GODDARD: SPACE PIONEER, Little, Brown
    and Company, Boston, 1962, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number
    62-8309 (hardcover).

        Milton Lehman's 1963 biography on Goddard, THIS HIGH MAN, was
    reprinted in 1988 by Da Capo Press, New York, with the title ROBERT
    H. GODDARD: PIONEER OF SPACE RESEARCH, ISBN 0-306-80331-3 (paperback).

        Another book (actually a multi-volume work) on Goddard's work
    is THE PAPERS OF ROBERT H. GODDARD, edited by G. Edward Pendray
    and Esther C. Goddard, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1970.


                    THE CHARA MULTI-TELESCOPE TELESCOPE

                             by Hal McAlister

         Astronomers at Georgia State University's (GSU) Center for High
    Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) have developed a novel approach
    to the design of inexpensive telescopes having significant light
    collecting power.  The new design concept calls for nine
    32.75-centimeter (13.1-inch) diameter parabolic mirrors to be arranged
    in a 3x3 configuration.  All nine mirrors are carried on a common
    mount, but each mirror directs its collected light to a separate
    focus - hence the name Multi-Telescope Telescope, or MTT.  At each
    of the nine foci is located an optical fiber to carry the collected
    light to a spectrograph, or other instrument, located indoors away
    from the telescope.  Because the nine optical fibers feed the same
    instrument, the MTT acts as if it were a larger single-mirror telescope.
    A standard telescope with equivalent light collecting power would cost
    $500,000, but because of the low cost and weight of small mirrors, the
    CHARA MTT, including spectrograph, solid state detector system, and
    shelter is estimated to cost about one-tenth that amount.

         The MTT design was originated by CHARA astronomer William G.
    Bagnuolo.  With the collaboration of Georgia Tech faculty members
    William Russell of the College of Architecture and John Dorsey of the
    School of Electrical Engineering, a design concept combining rigid
    light weight mechanical support structures with inexpensive real-time
    electronic control systems has been developed.  Dr. Bagnuolo's
    interest in telescope design grew out of the CHARA Array project, in
    which considerable effort was expended to take advantage of modern
    technology to develop inexpensive telescopes.

         CHARA members Douglas Gies, Ingemar Furenlid, and Don Barry, all
    members of the Society, are also participants in the project, which
    has been proposed for funding to the National Science Foundation
    (NSF).  Accompanying the telescope would be a dedicated spectrograph
    similar to one designed by Dr. Furenlid and built for use with the
    210-centimeter (84-inch) telescope operated by the Mexican government
    in Sonora, Mexico.  The MTT with its spectrograph will give CHARA a
    powerful new capability for carrying out programs of high signal-to-
    noise stellar spectroscopy.  Planned research programs include the
    accurate measurement of Doppler velocity orbital motions in binary
    star systems that are also under scrutiny in CHARA's programs of
    speckle interferometry and the study of emission features arising in
    the spectra of so-called Be stars in order to determine whether
    pulsations in the stellar atmosphere are responsible for the disk-like
    gaseous envelopes surrounding the stars.

         Because of the minimal obscuration of light by the fiber support
    structure and the ability to use very high reflectivity coatings on
    the 32.75-centimeter (13.1-inch) mirrors, the MTT, when used for
    spectroscopy, will have the effective light gathering power of a
    135-centimeter (54-inch) telescope.  The CHARA MTT will thus be the
    largest telescope in the southeastern U.S.  It is hoped that the new
    facility can be operational before the end of 1990.


                    A VIEW FROM TAIWAN: WEAN-SHUN TSAY

                   An interview by Edmund G. Dombrowski

         Editor's Note:  Wean-Shun Tsay recently completed his thesis
    work for his Ph.D. in astronomy, the first such degree to be
    bestowed in the history of Georgia.

         Society member Wean-Shun Tsay is an astrophysics graduate student
    at Georgia State University under the direction of Dr. Harold A.
    McAlister of CHARA.  He entered the GSU Ph.D. program in the fall of
    1986 after obtaining a Masters degree from Yale.

         Currently completing his doctoral dissertation, Wean will soon
    graduate, and then return to his homeland of Taiwan to continue
    research in astrophysics.  I interviewed Wean on the morning of
    June 15, 1989:

         Ed:  I guess a good place to start is your educational background.
    You obtained a bachelor's degree in physics from the National Central
    University in Taiwan.  Then you came over to the United States to
    attend Yale University at which you earned your Masters degree.   What
    was that transition like, first of all, coming from Taiwan to the U.S.?

         Wean:  There was a big difference, because during the first half of
    the year when I arrived the language was a big problem; but it was
    fortunate that I had a couple of classmates who really helped me a lot.

         Ed:  How was your experience at Yale University and the Department
    of Astronomy there?

         Wean:  Yale was my first exposure to the U.S.  It was quite
    different from what I expected before I came.  As you know, the Yale
    Astronomy Department has a very strong background in galactic and
    globular cluster research, and I believe half of the students are
    working on theoretical research.  Most of them are Pierre Demarque's
    students.  [Editor's Note:  Pierre Demarque is a well known
    astrophysicist who has contributed much to the field of stellar
    dynamics and evolution].

         Ed:  So you were concentrating more on the experimental.

         Wean:  Yes, it's a big difference.  I wasn't expecting to do much
    theoretical work when I went there.

         Ed:  Whom did you end up working with for your degree?  And what
    was your master's research?

         Wean:  van Altena, [Dr. William van Altena].  Most of the research
    I was working on dealt with a PDS machine.  I studied there two years
    and after I graduated I worked for Van Altena for one year, working on
    the PDS, scanning 21 or 22 4-meter plates, from Kitt Peak.

         Ed:  What is the PDS machine?

         Wean:  The PDS machine was designed by van Altena; he improved
    the commercial type of PDS machine created by the Perkin Elmer company.
    The original design allowed hospitals to scan x-ray pictures.  The
    machine scans a 20x20 inch (50x50 centimeter) area.  van Altena
    purchased this one in order to do proper motion studies on big plates.
    Since the original accuracy of this machine is only 5 microns, he tried
    to improve it.  The first step involved using a micrometer which had a
    micron separation between each mark, so the best accuracy with the older
    device was 0.8 micron after several scans.  Later he used a laser
    interferometer to improve this machine.  I went to Yale just at this
    time, so I did a lot with the laser interferometer, making many
    adjustments, scanning data,  and later on improving the machine to
    about the limitation of the grain noise of the plate, which is about
    0.2 to 0.3 micron.

         Ed:  By a photographic plate, I suppose you mean the machine scans
    over the plate and detects a dark, exposed source.  What specifically
    are you recording?

         Wean:  The plates I was working on were 8x10 inches in size.
    The active area was about 8 inches in diameter, and each plate
    contained more than a million star images.  The brightest stars were
    about twelfth magnitude, and went down to magnitude 21-22.  The first
    step of analysis uses a fast scanning mode to search through the whole
    plate to create a scanning catalogue.  After this, the results were
    added to the original catalogue which holds about 20,000 stars.  If
    you go down much fainter than 21 or 22 magnitudes, you get many more
    stars, but the signal to noise of these are poor.  Then you take out
    the brighter objects and fit them to two-dimensional profiles, because
    experience shows that this method gives the most accurate positions
    compared with other types.  Maybe other types of fitting can do better,
    but they can't offer higher accuracy on the position.  van Altena was
    interested in astrometry, or accurately fitting the positions of these
    stars.

         Ed:  While you were working for him, how many stars do you think
    you personally measured?

         Wean:  After the first scan I reduced the search catalogue to
    about 9,000 stars.  I used the first five plates for trigonometric
    purposes.  For this you need to take one picture every half year.  For
    best results you must take five pictures every half year over two and
    one half years to get five points of data.  This data gives you the
    parallax information.  That's the basic idea, and I took the best
    plates on each epoch, and scanned through those for 9,000 stars and
    ran them through the parallax program.  From this information, I
    deleted some more data which were poor spots.  The final catalogue is
    around 5,000 stars on a small plate.  It's only half a degree in the
    sky over the whole region.

         Ed:  After this, you eventually got your Master's degree from Yale
    and came down to Georgia to attend GSU.  It's a big enough move from
    Taiwan to the U.S., but now you had to move from a northern state to a
    southern state.  What was that like?  Did you notice a different life
    style between the North and the South?

         Wean:  The big difference between GSU and Yale is that Yale is a
    big university town.  GSU has only a few buildings and is a smaller
    place.  That was a big difference for me.  You have to rent off campus
    here, and use transportation.  The weather is also quite different
    between the North and the South.

         Ed:  Which do you like better?

         Wean:  I like both, but Atlanta has weather which is much like
    my home country.

         Ed:  Yes, I can see how that would be easier to get used to.
    Could you describe basically your work at GSU which has led to your
    thesis under Hal McAlister.

         Wean:  Right now, my topic for dissertation is trying to find a
    site for the future CHARA interferometer array.  That's the basic
    purpose.  This is also very interesting to me because I am working
    with various instruments and technical equipment.  I especially like
    the  CCD camera work.  Even though I used a commercial one, with high
    resolution and low price, I still learned a lot about CCD cameras.
    Also since I am planning to go back to my home country, I believe this
    site survey project is very useful for me for my later research in
    Taiwan.

         Ed:  Your writing your thesis now, and finishing your dissertation.
    You are expecting to graduate by the end of this summer.  I know you
    have a wife and son, and they have both constantly moved back and
    forth between here and Taiwan:  How has this been for them?

         Wean:  For the first two years when my wife came to the US while
    we were still at Yale, she was not very comfortable with the
    environment there, because she has a very large family in Taiwan, and
    here there were only her and myself, before we had our baby; but when
    we moved down here, her brother joined us.  He is studying here at
    GSU.  In Atlanta, there are more Chinese people and there is the
    Chinese Community Center, and the Farmer's Market where we can buy
    authentic Chinese food.

         Ed:  It was more difficult in Connecticut?

         Wean:  Yes, because we had to drive one and a half hours to New
    York City or two and a half hours to Boston.

         Ed:  Was the cost of living that different?

         Wean:  We paid more rent up there than here, but the
    transportation is more expensive here than there.

         Ed:  You mentioned that there's a big Chinese community down here
    in Atlanta, and there are a lot of Chinese students here.  In light of
    what's happened recently in China, do you think that that's going to
    put a damper on Chinese students coming over here to the United States?

         Wean:  I think in the near future the students who have already
    applied and have been approved will have some problems coming in, or
    maybe unfortunately they have already died.

         Ed:  Do you think we'll probably see a withdrawal of the Chinese
    student population for a while?

         Wean:  I hope that this will be finished in about half of a year.

         Ed:  Do you think things will improve now?

         Wean:  I don't know, because the Communists are trying to
    disconnect all the information to the free world.

         Ed:  What do you think Taiwan's role will be in any of this in the
    future.  Do you think they'll have more of a role than they have now?

         Wean:  I think Taiwan will keep going on like right now.  As you
    know, currently, Taiwan doesn't officially support the students at
    Tinianmen Square, and most of the supplies go through the Red Cross
    association, through the patient's branch.  So most of the work is
    done through the government.  The Taiwan government is trying to keep
    some distance from the situation to somehow avoid the problems between
    China and Taiwan.

         Ed:  It could still be a very tense situation when you return.
    When you do go back to Taiwan, you'll have your Ph.D. in Astrophysics.
    Where will you be working?

         Wean:  I'll be working at my home university, the National Central
    University.  I'll be going in as an Associate Professor in Astronomy.
    The system is different from the university system here.  In the
    coming two years, however, the university law will change, and we'll
    adapt some kind of system like in the US.

         Ed:  What kind of work do you plan to do in astronomy?

         Wean:  I think I will continue the site surveying because in
    Taiwan we only have a 24-inch (60-centimeter) telescope for research
    and education.  The site is very close to the city, about 30 miles
    (48 kilometers) south from Taipei.  The population there is probably
    30,000 people at the site, so there are lots of city lights and light
    pollution there.

         Ed:  So you'll take your knowledge from here and apply it there?
    What essentially were you doing here?  What was your setup like?

         Wean:  The seeing monitor was designed by Nat White of Lowell
    Observatory, and Bill Bagnuolo here at CHARA.  The basic idea is to
    use a CCD camera attached on a C-14 telescope and then take the star
    image at a fast speed.  This kind of technology lets one directly take
    the image profile from the CCD array and find the width to determine
    the seeing during the moment.

         Ed:  To describe it, you're taking a star image and looking at the
    image profile you get which is highly dependent on the turbulence in
    the atmosphere.  And so, based on fitting Gaussian profiles to these
    you can tell what the seeing is like at that time.  I guess a good
    description of the seeing would be how the star images vary over a
    certain period of time.

         Wean:  Yes.  For this kind of seeing test you have two or three
    ways of doing this.  The first way is the direct image profile
    measurement, which involves trying to fit the profile to a Gaussian or
    some other kind of model profile, and to determine the full width at
    half maximum.  The other two ways use the image motion to describe how
    the atmospheric turbulence affects the plane wave when the light
    passes through it, that is, how the light is disturbed.

         Ed:  A lot of readers are observers in this area.  Recently I was
    looking at a chart Bill Bagnuolo prepared for the Georgia area which
    showed a plot of mean cloud cover versus time.  The mean cloud cover
    looks almost the same as the plot for Arizona, with Arizona being
    better by only 20 percent.  At a site such as the Hard Labor Creek
    observatory, what do you think the prospects are for seeing and good
    observing?

         Wean:  I think in the future before I go back to Taiwan, and after
    I have done my dissertation, I may spend some time doing some tests
    there.  It looks like a pretty good site. I expect good results.

         Ed:  After you go back to Taiwan, you'll do more site surveys.
    Do you think you'll ever travel back to the US?

         Wean:  I think so.  Presently, the National Central University has
    very generous funding.  They have 400,000 dollars for setting up an
    instrument there.  I think I have a very good chance to get some money
    to do this particular research.  I would like to cooperate with CHARA
    to do some kind of site testing both here and in Taiwan.  Maybe we
    will need help from the CHARA group.  I would also like to invite the
    amateur astronomers here to visit Taiwan because Taiwan is about two-
    thirds mountainous area, and more than 16 mountains are higher than
    10,000 feet (3,000 meters).  I have seen some pictures that amateur
    astronomers took from these areas and they show pretty good seeing.

         Ed:  Speaking of amateurs, are there many groups over there that
    are really interested in astronomy?

         Wean:  Most of them are in the university astronomy club.

         Ed:  But, in general, is there a big interest in astronomy in Taiwan?

         Wean:  Right now the economics in Taiwan is much better than ten
    or twenty years ago, and the young people are playing with their
    personal computers because right now Taiwan is one of the most
    important suppliers of personal computers.  Many people also have
    the money to purchase telescopes.

         Ed:  At one time China was one of the dominant civilizations
    contributing to astronomy.  It was a distinct part of the Chinese
    culture and folklore.  Do you think that presently astronomy is
    making a resurgence in both China and Taiwan?

         Wean:  Yes.  That's another reason I'm going back to Taiwan,
    because most of the money at the university is from the government,
    and the Education Administration is trying to develop the astronomy
    program.  They are well aware that the Chinese have about 4,000 or
    5,000 years of recorded history of celestial objects.  Many people are
    also interested in astrology, but people still confuse this with
    astronomy.  That may be another purpose for developing an astronomy
    program, so that we can educate people with more astronomical common
    sense.

         Ed:  That's good.  You're trying to get across the idea that there
    is a big difference between astrology and astronomy, and bring the
    science up to where it should be.  Well, I'm sure you'll do well no
    matter what pursuit you tackle first.  Thank you very much for your
    time and we wish you all the luck and good fortune when you return to
    Taiwan.

         Wean:  Thank you.

     THE ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF THE ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY OF THE ATLANTIC

                        August 1989 - Vol. 1, No. 1.

                         Copyright (c) 1989 - ASA


--
Donald J. Barry       [phone]         | [e-mail]
Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy | President, Astronomical
Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303  | Society of the Atlantic

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End of SPACE Digest V9 #589
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