In 1997, I was finishing high school and dating a young lady that was doing an astronomy project using the 40-Foot telescope. She told me one day that she was doing an all-night observation of some source, changing something in the observation every 5-10 minutes — I can’t recall if it was switching polarization, or between source and calibration signals. Since this was before the 40-Foot had any automation, this switching had to be done manually — literally looking at the clock and throwing a toggle on one of the racks at the correct time. Every ten minutes, for several hours. It was going to be boring, tedious, tiring work in the middle of the night.

Some of you may remember David Heeschen. He was the first astronomer to be hired by the brand-new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in about 1956. He was NRAO director 1962-1978. He facilitated the building of the VLA and is sometimes called the “father of the VLA”, which was completed in 1980. But before that, in about 1962 he was interested in finding if the radio sources that were known at the time varied in brightness. So he had the observatory buy a small off-the-shelf radio dish and had it automated to observe a list of sources every day. After a few years, apparently none of those sources were varying appreciably in brightness, and the project was abandoned and the 40-Foot was idle for many years.

My times with the 40-foot are selfish ones. I’ve been in the bunker hundreds of times, often with teacher groups and student groups, but also many times alone. Those are some of my most cherished 40-Foot memories. Walking through snow from the dorm to the bunker in the early morning hours, sometimes lit by a beautiful moon, hoping to catch Orion. Bicycling towards the telescope late at night, worried about a collision with deer or skunk. Sitting for hours with that old WWII radio, cranking through the frequencies, looking at the Doppler shifted signals from the spiral arms. Working with Deb Hemler, Peg Romeo, and Aimee Govett as we tried to detect the HI from M31 (and finally, that early morning with Aimee when we tuned the local oscillators just right, set the dials correctly, and watched as the chart recorder showed us the extra-galactic neutral hydrogen). Carl, telling me (incorrectly) that I could treat the Sun as a point source. Sue Ann Heatherly explaining how to set the declination for negative declination. Ron explaining how to find the moon using ‘simple spherical trigonometry’ (then we got Stellarium and we no longer needed trig). Walking out of the bunker, looking up, and seeing the Milky Way.

In the midst of celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Observatory at Green Bank, it’s easy to overlook another anniversary. July, 2017 marks the 30th anniversary of educational programs at the Green Bank Observatory. In July 1987, the Green Bank facility opened its doors to 27 teachers in an experimental two-week summer institute, designed to introduce educators to a national research center. I was one of them.