Skyward for October 2021
David H. Levy
Fond memories of Carolyn Shoemaker
One clear
evening during the summer of 2019, I was using Pegasus, one of my childhood
friend Carl’s telescopes, at our annual Adirondack Astronomy Retreat. When my cellphone began to ring, I picked it
up with some surprise. At the other end
of the line was Carolyn Shoemaker. I was
thrilled to hear from her, as it had been some time since our last contact.
Carolyn was doing well, except for a mild loss of hearing. She had called to say that since her daughter
and son-in-law had moved to New Mexico, she would be living at the Peaks, a
comfortable assisted living facility in Flagstaff. My colleague Brent Archinal gave me her cell
phone number. I was able to speak with
her again a few months later. I wanted to find a way to increase the frequency
of our conversations. “You speak with
your brother Richard every Monday,” Wendee commented, and suggested, “Why not call Carolyn every Monday as well?
For the next 18
months that’s what I did. Carolyn would
pick up the phone and announce, “It is David. It must be Monday!” Wendee would often join the discussion as
well. But when I called on Monday,
August 9, no one answered. After
repeated tries, her daughter Linda called to say that Carolyn had had a minor
fall and was in the hospital. On
Thursday evening, August 12, she went into respiratory arrest. Carolyn died the next morning at 10:40 A.M.
Arizona time.
With her husband Gene and the five-year comet and asteroid
program we shared, Carolyn was responsible for a very rich period in my life.
In fact, virtually every article one reads about the Shoemakers will agree that
the discovery and impacts of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 were the most significant
part of our professional lives.
Carolyn began her observing project a few years after her
husband Gene was disqualified as a potential astronaut because of Addison’s
disease. He decided to go at the problem
of impacts, not from studying craters as he walked about on the Moon, but from
the opposite direction of the comets and asteroids that collide with the Moon,
and with the Earth. Carolyn quickly
learned to become proficient at using the stereomicroscope. She would place two
films into the microscope; they were identical except that the second plate
would be about 45 minutes later than the first.
The films were almost always identical, except that when an asteroid was
moving slowly, it would appear to float above the starry background. Carolyn discovered 377 asteroids this way,
each one charted until its orbit round the Sun could be determined
accurately. When one included the
asteroids for which orbits have not yet been determined, that number rose
significantly, according to Carolyn, to about 800.
In 1983 Carolyn discovered the first of her 32 comets. When their colleague Henry Holt joined the
following year, the number of new comets rose rapidly. It was only a year or
two after that when she surpassed the number of comets another famous
astronomer, Caroline Herschel, discovered, and Sky & Telescope
published a news note about “Carolyn passing Caroline.” I joined the team in
1989. In a sense, passing Herschel’s
record might have been Carolyn’s golden moment, but it wasn’t. That came later on a cloudy and dull day on
March 25, 1993. Two nights earlier I had
taken two exposures that she was scanning. Suddenly looking up, she announced
“I don’t know what I have, but it looks like a squashed comet.” That was the discovery moment of Comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9. Sixteen months later,
when the 21 pieces of this fragmented collided with Jupiter, we got to meet
President Clinton and chat amiably with Vice President Gore and share the
world’s excitement over the first collision of a comet and a planet ever
witnessed by humans. It was a satisfying
peak to all our careers.
After Gene died in a car accident in Australia, Carolyn
continued observing with Wendee and me for several years. One evening she
confided that sometimes she wished she had died with Gene. But she did not and the world was able to
enjoy her company for more than 24 more years.
The weekly telephone calls began much later. I shall miss the deep friendship I enjoyed
with Carolyn Shoemaker, the woman whose energy, intelligence, and terrific
sense of humor brightened our lives and made the night sky a happier place.
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