Ancient Web: Herb Johnson Kept His Amateur Astronomy Notebook Online

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Herb Johnson's astronomy page is part observing log, part workbench record, part address book for clubs, and part inventory of equipment. There is even a quilt depicting Jupiter.

Visit Herb's Astro and Optics Stuff

Johnson says he was an active amateur astronomer in the 1990s, when relatively affordable digital cameras began opening new possibilities for serious observers working outside professional observatories. His page has the kind of detail that tends to disappear from glossy histories of scientific instruments.

A sky survey from the repair bench

In 1995, Johnson built a Cookbook CCD Camera for photographing astronomical objects. He later sold it, but kept the account of building and using a device associated with a generation of do-it-yourself digital astronomy.

His notes also explain work on The Amateur Sky Survey, or TASS. Amateur and professional participants used CCD cameras to survey stars near the celestial equator. Johnson describes tests of early Mark IV camera data in November 1999, including dark current, image distortion, and questions of data storage and compression.

That is a specific record of how a scientific collaboration worked. Images did not simply appear in a database. Someone had to build cameras, examine flaws, circulate data on discs, keep mailing lists alive, and write technical notes.

Johnson says he was primarily involved with Mark III and early Mark IV development and had become inactive by 2001. His site points readers to technical material produced by others rather than claiming the work was his alone.

Brass gears, glass mirrors, and one small quilt

The rest of the page is equally tangible. Johnson describes restoring a German equatorial telescope mount with engineer Jerry Avins in 1998–99. The apparatus used an improvised mechanical drive to track the turning sky. He also documents grinding and refiguring eight-inch mirrors, photographing the Orion Nebula, and examining a meteorite sample obtained in 1999.

A local astronomy-club section includes observatory photographs and descriptions of instruments that were already old when Johnson worked on them. The 13-inch quilt of Jupiter, made in 1999 at his wife's encouragement, is a reminder that hobbies do not always stay within tidy categories.

His wider Retrotechnology website covers historic computers, but these pages are a different archive: personal evidence of the analog-to-digital changes happening in amateur astronomy.

The page was still being updated in 2020. It keeps both the technical problems and the people behind them visible.

Explore the original astronomy notebook and its technical links.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.