Highland Road Observatory celebrates discovery, telescope

• By JARED JANES
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Sep 28, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

Amateur astronomer Walter Cooney estimates he’s literally spent hundreds of hours staring through the eyepiece of telescopes, but nothing compares to a discovery he helped make one September night 10 years ago.

Cooney, a chemical engineer by profession who at that time spent many of his evenings at the Highland Road Park Observatory, spotted an asteroid orbiting outside the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, one of hundreds of thousands of the chunks of rock currently known in the belt.

The asteroid discovery by Cooney and then-LSU graduate student Matt Collier just before clouds from Hurricane Georges obscured the sky overhead  on Sept. 24, 1998, was the first of its kind using the observatory’s telescope since the facility’s opening the year before.

It also put Baton Rouge on the interstellar map: Cooney, when given an opportunity to christen the asteroid, designated it “11739 Baton Rouge.”

Since then, Cooney has discovered about 60 more asteroids, identified more than 50 variable stars and published about 20 papers, but he still considers his first asteroid the highlight of his achievements in astronomy to date.

“Nothing else has come close,” he wrote in an e-mail. “None compare to the thrill of discovering an asteroid for the first time.”

The observatory celebrated the 10th anniversary of the discovery of 11739 Baton Rouge at a small party Saturday evening. The gathering also marked the return of its 20-inch reflector, the telescope  which was used to discover the asteroids, after it was sent to Pennsylvania for cleaning and resurfacing.

The refurbished telescope is now almost good as when it was purchased more than 10 years ago, said Christopher Kersey, the observatory manager.

While celebrating the big reflector’s reinstallation, Kersey said, he also wanted to mark the first asteroid discovery, which he said is the most important scientific observation at the observatory that is sponsored by BREC, LSU’s department of physics and the Baton Rouge Astronomical Society.

After co-discovering 11739 Baton Rouge on Sept. 24, 1998, Cooney helped discover 54 more asteroids using the Highland Road Park Observatory’s telescope, Kersey said. The same device also has been used to scientifically measure about 200 other asteroids.

No new asteroids have been discovered at the observatory  since May 2000, Kersey said, but he added that he has spoken with astronomy society members about getting back in the asteroid-hunting business.

Since 2000, professional programs that are more efficient and capable than amateur efforts have taken up the search for asteroids, Cooney said. Amateurs are still called upon to track and provide measurements for asteroids — including tracking near-Earth asteroids that pose a collision danger — that are discovered by professional observatories.

He said amateur astronomers also contribute to the discovery of binary asteroids — pairs of asteroids that rotate around each other — and variable stars, which are stars that change in brightness instead of remaining constant.