Sky & Telescope May 1998 [antikvár]

April 1963 10,000th pageSpectrum50,000 Pages and CountingThanks to the staggering arithmetic skills of last summer's editorial intern. Will Dane, we know that this is ST's 50,000th published page. It's a trivial milestone, really, but it gives me another excuse to pontificate.As you learned in the February issue, 1 suffer from a bad case of time compression. Events are blending together as never before. Will's page count explains why. It took ST 21 years to publish its 10,000th page; the next milestones came at 12-, 9-, 8-, and 6-year intervals. (1 wilted badly upon realizing that I've helped produce 80 percent of those 50,000 pages.) What this compression confirms is that astronomy is dramatically maturing as a science, so there is ever more neat stuff to report. It also says that the amateur community is buying ever more goods, so venders and ad pages are growing too.The surest way to damnation is to make a prediction. So what the hell I'll say that amateur astronomy has its best nights still ahead. The quality of education in the U.S. seems to have passed its nadir, and an uptick is bound to be good for cerebral hobbies like astronomy. I'm also counting on gaining defectors from consumers who've tired of increasingly patronizing TV news and "entertainment." Here's one arcane datum that suggests I'm right: over the last decade attendance by the "twenty-something" crowd at grand-opera performances has grown about 20 percent and opera is exploding nationwide!When I look back at S&T's 50,000 pages, I see a societal enigma. Among professionals, the number of female astronomers has swelled dramatically. Yet there's been no comparable infusion of women into the amateur ranks that community remains pretty much a fraternity of white, middle-aged males making big bucks. I'm confident astronomy will continue to flourish as a science. But, if I'm not to lose myself to the devil, we've got to get women, minorities, and underprivileged persons more involved in the hobby.It's not that folks haven't tried hard for change the side-walk-astronomy movement. Astronomy Day, and a host of other efforts have been exemplary. Yet, despite these evangelistic programs, astronomy hasn't percolated into new markets. Maybe we are a very odd lot people who think it's fim to be intellectually challenged. Maybe the broader public, in this age of banal commonality, sees that attitude as something to avoid.My sincere hope is that by the time we publish our 60,000th page in 2003 somebody will have come up with an outreach program that begins to diversify participants as it grows the hobby And, by the time we publish our 100,000th in 2021, 1 hope the mix of amateur astronomers mimics folks everywhere.July 1975 20,000th pageTelescb^SKY- TELESCOPE siscESK""mM1sisft'si.,tUIBMay 1998 50,000th page