TGT #25H - Willy Ley - Atlanta's Future Spaceport? - The Palest Saturn - Eta Aquarids, and More
TGT 5/1/25: Astronomy in Real Life--An Airport Near Planet Names; This Just In--Famous Lost Ashes That Need to Go to Space; Sky Planning Calendar--Saturn Without Rings or Shadows, Aquarid Meteors.
Cover Photo - Send Willy Ley to Space!
In This Issue:
Cover Photo — Send Willy Ley to Space!
Welcome to Issue #25H!
This Just In — Ashes to Ashes, or Perhaps Space?
Sky Planning Calendar —
* Moon-Gazing - A Month of Sky
* Observing—Plan-et - Saturn’s Big Day and Other Observations
Astronomy in Everyday Life - Charlie Brown’s Spaceport?
Welcome to The Galactic Times Newsletter-Inbox Magazine #25H!
Greetings, Galactic Timers!
This Issue is a month-long one because yours truly is taking some time off in May, following an exhilarating but exhausting book tour. Publication is expected to resume for June 1st.
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The evening sky is getting sparser of planets but the dawn is active with three clumping in the dawn, for time with the Moon. The Ringed Planet Saturn is both ring-less and said rings don’t even have a shadow!! Why? See below in Sky Planning Calendar.
A long-deceased prolific and influential astronomy writer was long presumed to have gone to his restful place. Nope. He reappeared (or rather his ashes did) and there’s an effort to send him to space. Read about it in This Just In. And help a cause….
Is a commercial airport about to become a spaceport? At least the streets in the industrial area near it seem to indicate that. See Astronomy in Everyday Life.
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Enjoy!
Publisher — Dr. Larry Krumenaker Email: newsletter@thegalactictimes.com
This Just In
Ashes to Ashes, or Perhaps Space?
Those of us ‘of a certain age’ (i.e. o l d) remember when the Space Age was just a dream. We read exciting sci-fi novels and books and magazine stories, but some of the writers were also writing real science and technology, about Man flying to the Moon. One of the most prolific was a German who escaped in time to the United States from increasingly fascist Germany, prior to WWII. That man was Willy Ley and one of his books that excited yours truly was The Conquest of Space, with illustrations by the famous Chesley Bonestell (1949). (See the Cover Photo, the image of this author’s own copy.) Then selling for under $5, it now sells on eBay for $75.
Willy Ley died in 1969, literally days before Armstrong and Aldrin were the first men to walk on the Moon. This past week, he reappeared…..or rather, his ashes did. The ashes got put into a basement, and forgotten. This was reported on in an article appearing in the New York Times by Maureen Cavanagh. Here is the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/nyregion/willy-ley-rocket-ashes.html
At this writing, the remains are in the possession of the building owner, Dawn Nadeau. She feels it is best that Ley be sent not to a grave-site but to the Moon, or at least into space. However, the cost is prohibitive for her, in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Here with permission is a combination of some correspondence this author has had with Ms. Nadeau:
Both of us (Dawn Nadeau and Maureen Cavanagh, writer of the article in the New York Times), have been contacted by many people who have been moved by Willy’s story and asked to help get him to space!
I wanted to follow up and share some updates:
1) In the last few days we have been able to make contact with Philip Ley, who we believe is Willy’s closest living relative and so have wanted to make sure we are in concert with him on any actions taken on behalf of Willy. He is very much in favor of Willy headed to space as a final resting place. We will eventually hand over his remains to his care. They agree his wishes would be to go to space in some way and are all in favor of exploring that avenue. We are in contact about any inquiries that come our way.
2) The company Celestis reached out and their founder, Charles Chafer, has graciously offered to include a symbolic portion of Willy’s remains on a future (2026) lunar launch. Other companies and individuals have reached out as well, and I am putting anyone who reaches out in touch with the family and helping facilitate those connections where possible.
In addition, I have been in contact with a member of the Explorers club and we are looking into other donated options for perhaps a more deep space launch of his remains.
3) I have set up a GoFundMe (with the family’s consent) to hopefully raise some funds to donate to the American Museum of Natural History here in NYC (just 10 blocks from where we found Willy) to create an educational scholarship in his name to inspire future scientists in their interest in space. 100% of the funds will go directly to that organization and for that purpose. The link to the GoFundMe is: https://gofund.me/68e93bfb .
4) I would love to see an exhibit or plaque or other memorial tribute to Willy either at AMNH or in another location meaningful to him, such as the Space Center in Houston or the Smithsonian.
I set up a webpage at https://www.dawnnadeau.com/willyley to capture information and share updates.
Those of us who write about space and astronomy, or just love to read about them or go outside and watch the stars, owe a debt to Willy Ley. If all, even just many, of the readers of this newsletter, and some other authors of contributing Substack newsletters to this effort, pay even just 10 dollars each to the GoFundMe, perhaps he could be launched perhaps into deep space, every bit of ash of him.
Won’t you please contribute? -LK
Sky Planning Calendar
Moon-Gazing
Moon passages by a star, planet or deep sky object are a good way to find a planet or other object if you’ve never located it before.
May 3 Mars is passed by the Moon by 2-degrees to its North. Every day it is moving a half-degree to the East and on the 4th…..
May 4 … Mars passes 0.4 degrees North (above) the Praesepe, a.k.a. The Beehive star cluster. Mars is bright but not especially noteworthy in that, fading below magnitude 1.0 this month. In fact, it is about to fade to being equal to Pollux, a.k.a. Beta Geminiorum, the brighter of the Gemini twins’ stars, despite the fact that usually the brightest star in a constellation is named the Alpha! Mars recently passed South of Pollux heading the normal eastward way, after spending some months in Gemini, and enters the constellation of Cancer, the Crab
It is also the night of the First Quarter Moon.
May 5 The now slightly-fatter-than-half Moon passes the same 2-degrees from an object as it did Mars, only now the passed object is the star Regulus, the Heart of the Lion. It’s also a special day for Saturn, see below.
May 10 The Moon is at Apogee, the farthest it gets from Earth, and that makes this night’s ‘fat’ Moon slightly less ‘fat’ (that’s what Gibbous means) and a Micro-Gibbous! It is celebrating this occasion by hanging 0.4-degrees, slightly less than its diameter, South of the star Spica, in Virgo. If you are in the Southern Hemisphere, it will be even closer, in some places hidden behind the Moon.
May 11 Mother’s Day in the USA (and some places elsewhere). Take Mom out for a stroll under the one-day-before-Full Moon, which happens….
May 12 ….on this evening, a Full Moon known as the Croaking Frogs Moon. For some mothers this might be a more interesting walk in the moonlight if frogs are serenading their own ladies….
May 13 Find the now-shaped-the-same-but-oppositely- directed to the Mother’s Day Moon rising in the Southeast about 2 hours after Sunset and 0.3-degrees away from the red giant Antares, the Scorpion’s heart star.
May 20 Last Quarter Moon.
May 22 Saturn is in the dawn brightness but you can find it 3-degrees South (left) of the fat crescent Moon. Tomorrow….
May 23 …the Moon passes wider from Venus, neither hard to find or see, 4-degrees apart.
May 25 It is Perigee Day, when the Moon is closest to Earth for the month. That makes this morning’s very thin, nearly lost in twilight glow crescent moon a Super-Crescent Moon! (Aren’t these Super and Micro designations so silly?)
May 26 New Moon.
May 28 In North America, Jupiter is below the Moon, widely apart by 5-degrees.
Observing---Plan-et
==Saturn Has a Special Day, Good Pre-dawn Meteors for Some==
Mercury, especially for Southern Hemisphereans, is having a good morning appearance, best of the year, but not so much for Northerners. It rises at month start by not quite an hour ahead of the Sun, to the lower left of Venus by over 10 degrees at the start. It starts getting tough to find by the 13th, rising 45 minutes before the Sun but descending into the twilight gloom and solar conjunction on the 30th.
Venus, having zoomed back into prominence, in brightness and in distance away from the Sun after only about a month, quickly reaches its maximum solar distance on the 31st. Despite that, because in the Northern Hemisphere the Ecliptic it is on is more horizontal than vertical to the horizon, this makes Venus’s elongation also more horizontal, too; that forces the brilliant planet to only just barely rise at the beginning of morning twilight all month. On the 6th, you’ll find nearby Saturn horizontal with Venus, but always nearby all month before Saturn progresses away from Venus and the Sun.
Last month Earth passed through the meteor stream of the Lyrids but it passes through a better one—sort of—this month, the Eta Aquarids. If you are south of our equator you might see up to 50 or 60 meteors each hour before dawn and half that on two days on either side of its May 5th peak day, and even nearly that good on the dawn of the 6th. The just-past-First Quarter Moon will set near midnight and leave you dark skies for meteors coming in low out of the Southeast, which for Northern Hemisphereans cuts down the numbers per hour drastically. Still, with the darkness this is about as good as it can get for us right now.
Mars is the last planet glowing, once Jupiter sets (see next paragraph). On the 28th it finally begins to set at midnight, if you are on Standard Time (it is still 1 AM on Daylight Savings Time/Summer Hours, but just wait). Find it near the Moon on the 3rd, the Beehive star cluster the 4th.
Jupiter, though, is beginning its last hurrah. The Moon passes it by on the 28th to help you out one last evening-time finding it. The planet sets at end of evening twilight on the 21st, and only an hour and some few minutes on the 31st. Jupiter itself passes east of the line connecting the two stars that mark Taurus the Bull’s horn-tips, leaving behind the Bull’s main stars, which actually represents….the god Jupiter!…in a Greek myth.
Saturn hangs out in the dawn with the Moon on the 22nd, and Venus and Mercury. The pale planet can be found horizontally to the right of Venus in mid-northern latitudes in the dawn of the 5th, More special, though is the day before, the 4th, when it has its own autumnal equinox, the Sun passing through the ring plane to the Southern side of the rings. Thus, for this day, and for most some telescopes several days on either side, not only are the rings invisible—no light reflecting off the side facing Earth—but there won’t even be a shadow of the rings on the tops of Saturn’s clouds. The palest Saturn possible. Afterwards, achingly slowly, the thin bright line of the just-now lighting up south side of the rings will appear in telescopes.
Astronomy in Everyday Life
Charlie Brown’s Spaceport?
Yours truly is working on updating and expanding his Atlanta Civil War book Walking the Line (2014). The expansion part is in including some other ‘semi-permanent’ Confederate defense lines. One, called Johnston’s River Line, is famous because of its 36 unique arrow-shaped forts, called Shoupades after the Engineer who designed them, General Francis Shoup. These forts and the Line along 6-miles of the Chattahoochee River were so impressive that Union General William T. Sherman chose not to even attempt to assault the Line.
Shoupade #1 is located north of one of Atlanta’s general aviation airports, known as Brown Field, long popularly re-labeled as Charlie Brown Field. The fort is on a buffer property. While looking to see on a map if there was any way to get to it, the shoupade area was found near a warren of streets, FOUR of which are named for planets. This area is located east of the airport (see part of it in the upper left of the map). Did someone have astronomy as an interest in naming this place? It turns out it isn’t an airport industrial area but a lower-middle class residential area. All four streets were found and their signs photographed.
Find on the map roads named for two inner planets Mercury and Venus, and two of the three outermost ones, Saturn and Neptune. Why the planets Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus are not used is a mystery.
It is interesting that every combination of planetary street corner can be found….except one. Though the map above says otherwise, the intersection of Neptune and Mercury has been removed on Earth. Neptune Road meets a dead end. Well, it IS the end of the planetary part of the solar system.
Could these be the start of an effort to have a spaceport built in Georgia? [Note: this is all real but tongue-in-cheek]. Snoopy, and perhaps Willy Ley, would find that interesting …..