Dr. Bruce P. Sidell, DDS. - longtime member of the GRAAA - passed away unexpectedly on Thursday, September 21, 2006. He had just turned 58 the past month. It is a loss felt especially hard by those of us who have known him for many years, and he will be sorely missed.
Bruce joined the GRAAA in 1986, and quickly became a fixture in the dark nights at the Veen Observatory. He was always looking for the "faint fuzzies" and quickly amassed a huge observation log of galaxies.
For quite a while those of us at the observatory only knew him by a voice in the dark, which prompted Gary Ross to bestow upon him the moniker "The Great Enigma" as he was never seen in the light, but just a shadowy figure in the darkness. When Bruce finally attended his first meeting and spoke up, we all turned to look and see just who matched the (now familiar) voice we had been hearing in the dark.
Bruce was a gifted ATM (Amateur Telescope Maker) and made/remade several telescopes over the years. His recent scopes included a 16-inch dobsonian, and his favorite: a 10-inch dob he made over a few times. The 10-inch was the one he would truck out to the observatory most frequently for visitors' nights and just observing.
Bruce also gained notoriety by developing the excellent astronomical program “Moonrise.” It became a project for him, and he went through several rewrites, software revisions, and even rewriting it in a new code.
Here is what Bruce had to say about himself, and the development of Moonrise…
| Hi. My name is Bruce Sidell and I live in Grand Rapids, MI. I am an amateur astronomer, bicyclist, programmer, and dentist. I live with my cats Dorothy, Wendy, and NewCat. I have three kids scattered about.
When Halley's Comet came through in 1986, it rekindled a longstanding interest in astronomy. My son Mike and I got a book on telescope making and built a 10" reflector. I immediately became fascinated with galaxies and decided to see as many as possible. I started an observing program to see if I could track down 1000 galaxies, and within a couple years had logged over 2000. I am now slowly working on the next 1000, but they're getting pretty faint and I think a bigger scope is in order. It soon became apparent that the moon was the enemy, as the faint galaxies can't be seen when the moon is up. For a while, I used the generalized information in Sky and Telescope magazine to figure out when the moon was gone, but I knew there was a better way. Then I discovered the book Astronomical Formulae for Calculators by Jean Meeus. A mere mortal could actually jerk some numbers around and come with the time of moonrise. AMAZING. I bought myself a Casio fx-7500G calculator with a very limited amount of memory for programming. By condensing and shortening and condensing again, I was actually able to get the thing to tell me what time the moon came up. I was in heaven! Heaven lasted until I discovered the Hewlett Packard 48SX calculator. This baby had 132 K of memory with an expansion card. I could do anything in the world with 132 K. I eventually got it to do moonrise and position calculations, planetary positions, comet and asteroid ephemerides, and eclipse tracks on a world map that I plotted myself. I also stuffed half the NGC into it, with coordinates, sizes, magnitudes, and constellations. I couldn't imagine anything better than this until I dropped it one day and completely lost six months worth of programming. That's when I decided it was finally time to look at computers. At first, I used my friend Terry's computer just to store my calculator programs. I didn't want to repeat the experience of completely rewriting everything. Then I discovered QuickBasic and was able to convert some of my work to computer language. This resulted in tenfold speed increases, but I was never able to come up with a convenient way to enter data and move around in the program. In 1996 I decided to try Visual Basic. Moonrise was originally written in VB 4.0. I wrote it for my own use, but it was so easy to use that I thought there might me some interest in it. So I spent a few months working on making it useable by anybody - adding menus and help among other things. I released it in June '96. The first week, I not only had a few registrations, but I found out decimal points don't work in Finland and text is stored differently in Hong Kong among other things. So it was back to work for a few months working out some international issues. In November '96 I did a complete rewrite of Moonrise. I had written a working version of a very accurate planetary and eclipse program based on the math in the book Astronomical Algorithms, also by Meeus, so I decided to change all the math in Moonrise to the even more accurate math of the other program. While I was at it, I changed the original moon icon to a more accurate calculated graphic and added the monthly list. Within a week of releasing this masterpiece, someone in Australia told me they see the moon upside-down and other people had trouble with the graphic, so it was back to work to straighten these things out. So Moonrise has been continuously evolving. It's been a lot of fun corresponding with people all over the world. I had expected to hear from amateur astronomers like myself, but the varied interests of people registering the program has been a surprise. I have heard from a number of pilots, photographers, bass fishermen, hunters, military people (where's my big fat government contract?), and one witch. One golfer bought it so he could always check to see if he had time to get nine more holes in. A lot of people like myself, just love the moon and want to know more about what it's up to. |
So many members of the club were touched by Bruce, have many stories, anecdotes, and miscellaneous tidbits about him. Please use the links to read some stories and see some images of Dr. Sidell.