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View ProfilesPublished April 3, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.
When the moon blocks the light of the sun on Monday, April 8, and Earthlings look skyward to behold the cosmic convergence, I'll be thinking of my late father, Paul Routly — an astrophysicist who ran the exploratory division of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. I remember when I was little, stretching out together on a backyard chaise so he could point out the night-sky constellations. When I got older, he took me inside an observatory to look through a real telescope. It was a thrill to be under the dome when it rotated to the right spot, then parted to expose the heavens. I think I remember the floor moving up and down, too, and the sound of the moving metal. Pretty awesome, indeed.
My dad got his PhD at New Jersey's Princeton University in the late 1940s and early '50s, when brainiacs like Albert Einstein, John Nash and J. Robert Oppenheimer were strolling around campus. Another luminary there was astronomer Lyman Spitzer Jr., who recruited my dad into the graduate astrophysics program with a fellowship and then mentored him. Spitzer went on to invent the first telescope in space; he found that the views are a lot better from the other side of the Earth's atmosphere. Spitzer, who was also an accomplished mountaineer, died in 1997. The planetarium at the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury is named after him.
My dad never attained Spitzer's career heights. He taught astronomy at Pomona College in California and cofounded a summer science program for gifted high school students, which exists to this day. When I was 3, he brought the family back to Princeton and became the first executive director of the American Astronomical Society. He attended conventions around the world, including one in Prague — "behind the Iron Curtain," as Dad phrased it — in 1967. For years I imagined a giant, immovable drape dividing Europe. But my dad looked beyond borders: He viewed astronomy as a universal challenge that should transcend nations and politics, a scientific mystery with the potential to bring people of all persuasions together.
We should expect nothing less when thousands of people from across New England — and beyond — flock to Vermont this week for a glimpse of the first total solar eclipse in these parts for almost a century. Ninety-six-year-old Morris Pike is one of the few people alive today who remembers the last one, in 1932. Find his story and others in our special eclipse guide, along with an eclipse-themed cartoon, crossword puzzle, calendar of events and playlist, to help you make the most of this cosmic convergence.
I think I'm going to stay close to home on Burlington's Lakeview Terrace on Monday. At the edge of my backyard, overlooking Lake Champlain, I erected a memorial to my dead parents: a large glass circle "magiscopio" with smaller spheres carved into it, creating multiple images. The statue is set in Vermont red stone, chiseled with the words: "Angie and Paul. Together in Life and the Great Beyond." It looks like a cross between a viewfinder, a kaleidoscope and a telescope — at least, that's how I see it.
I witnessed one eclipse with my dad — in 1970, one year after he gathered us up to watch Apollo 11 land on the moon. Maybe, with a little cosmic magic, we can share another one.
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