Keep Watching the Skies!: The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age
Starred Review. McCray, professor of history at the Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, has previously written about "big science" in Giant Telescopes: Astronomical Ambition & the Promise of Technology. Here, he examines "small science" at the dawn of the space age: Project Moonwatch, in which groups of non-scientist volunteers dutifully observed the passage of artificial satellites in the sky. The project's mastermind, astronomer Fred Whipple, intended to provide a manual backup for the automated camera system that was meant to track satellites, a huge, multi-national science effort. At a time when very little was known about the ionosphere and upper atmosphere, armchair astronomers of all backgrounds turned out in the thousands to aid the scientific pursuit of knowledge (and, to a lesser extent, fight the Commies); when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, it was the Moonwatchers who provided the first observations to astronomers at the Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory. McCray's history is full of fascinating individuals-not only Whipple, a legend among scientists for his energy and creative engineering, but "citizen heroes" as well. McCray has included a useful bibliography, and a helpful list of acronyms and people, but his text is jargon-free. This pop science takes a fascinating look at a fundamental, and almost-forgotten, moment in Space Age history.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.