Category: MAS-History-General-Post

As soon as the Madison Astronomical Society was officially formed in early 1935, one of the first things its founders did was establish a newsletter. They recognized the significance of communication with members, the ability to share information, and the creation of a lasting record that would recount the group’s story to future generations. The first page of the inaugural issue, as shown here, provides a brief overview of the group’s formation, which was inspired by an astronomy class offered at the UW Extension in early 1935.

The very first newsletter of the MAS, published when the club was only a few months old. You can read the entire four-page issue here.

Over the years, publishing a newsletter has been an integral part of the club’s activities. However, our records are incomplete, and many of those early newsletters may be lost forever. A comprehensive list of our archived newsletters is included below. All of these historical issues are now accessible in our historical archive (click here to view).

MAS Newsletter Archives include:

• Madison Bulletin, 1935: 8 issues
• Amateur Astronomy, 1936-38: 13 issues (published by the American Amateur Astronomical Association, a precursor to the Astronomical League)
• Star Trails, 1964-67: 9 issues (published by the Junior Astronomical Society of Madison, Wisconsin)
• Armchair Astronomer, 1978-79 (published by the Explorer Scout troop, 2 issues)
• Capitol Skies, 1976-2016: 100 issues (note: “Capitol Skies” was first used as the title in the November 1988 issue. Prior to that it was called “M.A.S. Newsletter,” “Monthly Letter,” and other various titles.
• Capitol Skies, 2024-present: just 5 issues so far (as of September, 2025).

In December 2024, Capitol Skies resumed its publication after a hiatus of nine years. Now a digital-only volume, the new Capitol Skies will join the existing lineup as the electronic continuation of the MAS publications record. Thanks to the leadership of Jack Fitzmier (with assistance from me and the other MAS members whose names can be found herein), the newsletter has been officially revived for a new generation.

You can find all of the new electronic edition Capitol Skies at our newsletter page.

(Posted by John Rummel, November, 2025).

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The star/moon party on the rooftop of Monona Terrace Convention Center has been an essential event for MAS for nearly 30 years now. How did it get started?

The origins of the Moon Over Monona Event go back to October 1998 when the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences (AAS-DPS) held its annual convention in Madison. DPS is a Big Deal, attracting scientists from all over the world for the planetary science community’s biggest event. Hosting DPS in Madison was seen as a huge opportunity for the UW Madison’s relevant departments (Space Sciences and Engineering Center, and, to a lesser degree, Astronomy).

The venue for the big convention was the shiny new Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Monona Terrace Convention Center. Monona Terrace had just opened the previous fall and had been one of the biggest news stories in Madison for the previous decade. Nearly everything about it was controversial – the design (how much of it was really designed by Wright?), its cost to taxpayers, and the land-acquisition necessary to put it in a prime location on Lake Monona, just SE of the Capitol. Convention Center staff were keen to throw an event that would be popular with the public.

To help make the DPS convention more successful, the UW-based organizers wanted to make sure there would be events open to the public. The scientists would need to present a strong public-facing effort to engage the local populace. One of the ways they did this was to enlist the partnership of the Madison Astronomical Society. SSEC professor Sanjay Limaye and staffer Rosalyn Pertzborn created an array of events that would be open to the public. One of the exhibits prepared by the organizers featured scale models of two cutting-edge spacecraft: Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner, which had become the first celebrity mission of the internet age the year before. Limaye also reached out to MAS for help.

Member Tim Ellestad was the first to suggest that MAS could host a star party on the roof of the Convention Center. Tim knew that a star party in the heart of downtown was a stretch. Light pollution would make it impossible to view most of the sky, but the planets were bright enough to see through the glare.

Left: Oct 15, 1998, Wisconsin State Journal

The dates available to do this event were limited by the DPS calendar, which unfortunately was very close to new moon. So the moon was out as a target, but the event was on! Jupiter was brilliant and Saturn came up just an hour or so later. We could do this! Tim Ellestad worked with Convention Center event staff to make it happen.

The first Monona Terrace/MAS star party was held on October 15, 1998 and was a huge success. More importantly, the Monona Terrace event staff loved it and recognized that it could potentially be a regular event to engage the public. They asked if we could do it again in 1999 (of course we would). Monona Terrace event coordinator Sharon Neylon came up with the “Moon Over Monona Terrace” moniker, and a yearly tradition and strong partnership was born. MAS has never looked back.

In the “more than you wanted to know” category, here are the stats:
Since MAS and Monona Terrace Convention Center initiated this event at the 1998 DPS convention in Madison, October 2025 was the 33rd such event we’ve attempted:

• The first event, on 10/15/1998, was not called Moon Over Monona Terrace since the event which inspired it (the AAS DPS convention) took place near new moon. Instead, Jupiter and Saturn were the stars of the show. It was just called “Public Star Party” on the rooftop, sponsored by the MAS.
• Of these 33 events, only 9 have been canceled due to adverse weather and/or the lack of a backup date. 
• For five years, we experimented with doing MOMT twice annually, once in the fall and again in the spring (2014-2018 inclusive).
• 3 events were moved to the backup date (and attendance suffered at all three)
• 3 events were moved to inside spaces in MT and MAS did indoor activities instead of star gazing.
• 2 events were held virtually due to COVID restrictions (2020 and 2021)
• Our best attended events were 2011 (over 2000 attendees), April 2016 (1700 attendees), and 2025 (1329 attendees)

(Posted by John Rummel, September, 2025)

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It was January of 1936 and the Madison Astronomical Society—not yet a year old—joined a brand new affiliation of astronomy clubs called the American Amateur Astronomical Association. The AAAA was founded in 1935 and was the brainchild of Edward Halbach of Milwaukee. Halbach is a legend in the world of amateur astronomy and had been instrumental in the founding of the Milwaukee Astronomical Society in 1932. Though it had the support of more than a dozen astronomy clubs at its peak in 1938, the AAAA proved to be untenable, or perhaps just ahead of its time. After 1938, it ceased activities.

The loose affiliation of astronomy clubs would continue to meet and organize for most of the next decade and at a Detroit meeting in 1946, the final plans for what would become the Astronomical League were in put in place. At a meeting in Philadelphia in July of 1947, the Astronomical League was officially launched.

The Madison society was involved from the very start. MAS members Harold Porterfield and Charles Huffer were instrumental in the formation of the North Central Region (NCRAL) and hosted the first NCRAL conference in 1949. It would host another in 1960, and Madison would go on to host no fewer than three national conventions (1954, 1978 and 1993). Many other MAS members served as delegates to the League over the years including the influential Paula Birner Carey, who helped found the MAS and would do the same for the Racine Astronomical Society in 1956. For nearly fifty years, MAS and the AL enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship. 

During these decades, MAS itself thrived. The club enjoyed an unusually close relationship with the Astronomy department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The previously mentioned Charles Huffer was a professor there and served as the MAS board secretary for over 20 years, until his retirement in 1961. This relationship provided our club with a steady flow of first-rate speakers for MAS meetings—a tradition that continues to this day. In the early years, MAS meetings took place on the UW campus proper, and today we continue to meet at an off-campus facility, UW’s Space Place, located on Park Street in Madison. 

The University of Wisconsin-Madison, through a donation, also provided MAS with its first observatory in 1960. UW-Madison’s on-campus observatory—The Washburn Observatory—had a second domed building known as the “Student Observatory.” Originally built in 1880, it was intended as a place for graduate students to sharpen their skills without infringing upon their mentors’ use of the larger scope in the main observatory. By the 1950s, research in both observatories was on the wane because of increasing light pollution and industrial haze in rapidly growing Madison. The UW-Madison, like most research universities, was moving its astronomical observing to mountain tops in the American southwest and elsewhere. The university needed to get rid of the smaller building, and Dr. Huffer recommended that it be donated to the MAS, provided that the club make arrangements to move it off campus.

Funds were raised, volunteer labor recruited, and in July 1960, the building was hauled about 5 miles south of Madison to land the club leased from a local chemical corporation, and the building was rechristened the “Oscar Mayer Observatory” for the meat-magnate Oscar Mayer, himself an astronomy enthusiast who donated money to help with the move. The OMO was MAS’s observing home until the mid-1980s, when development and light pollution extended well beyond the 5-mile buffer the club had acquired when the observatory was moved in 1960. In the mid-1980s the club acquired land in Green County, an additional 15 miles to the south. Named for the land donor, the Yanna Research Station became the club’s dark sky home.  It has been developed and expanded over the years and hopefully will continue to serve the club’s needs for many years to come.

Unfortunately, by the 1990s, the relationship between MAS and the AL fell on hard times. In 1993, the club hosted the AL’s national convention. Though by all accounts the event was a huge success, feelings were strained and words were exchanged between the two organizations. It’s not completely clear exactly what transpired but there were evidently disagreements about the format of that convention, where MAS, as the host society, wanted to break with tradition and use a workshop format instead of the traditional reading of papers. That and apparent disagreements over the disbursements of profits led the board of MAS to vote the following fall to withdraw from the AL after nearly a half-century of association. The vote to leave was not without controversy. The decision required concurrence by the general membership, and the board brought it up at 3 or 4 consecutive meetings before they achieved a majority decision to sever the ties.

From the mid-1990’s on, the topic of rejoining the League would surface every few years and members who recalled the 1993 convention would reiterate their reasons for leaving (or their regrets) but after a few years, NOT being an AL affiliate became the norm. By the second decade of the 21st century, few members remained who knew anything about the debate. Today, many MAS members are simply unfamiliar with the AL’s mission and programs and know nothing of the deep ties and traditions the two organizations share.

As is often the case, however, a seemingly small event can lead to much bigger change. That is just what happened this spring. MAS hosts an email list that we use to alert our members to upcoming opportunities. One of our members noted that the NCRAL was hosting its annual meeting in Wisconsin (De Pere) in May of 2024. The email chatter went something like this:  

“Is anyone planning to attend?”  

“No, MAS is not a member of the Astronomical League.”  (It had long since been forgotten the NCRAL conventions were open to the public!). 

“Well why don’t we belong?  It looks like something our members would enjoy.”

Another member rehearses the hazy history of MAS’s decision to leave the AL.

“Well, that’s ancient history. MAS should offer these sorts of things as member benefits!”

Though the same discussion had taken place many times over the years, something was different this time. A threshold had been reached. In the previous several years, MAS had gained a handful of new members (recent retirees who had moved to the area) who had been happily involved AL-affiliated clubs far from Madison. These folks joined the conversation and spoke convincingly about the benefits of AL membership. Our Board tasked one of the authors to research the AL and report what the advantages of rejoining might look like. Happily, in early August, the MAS Board voted unanimously to rejoin the AL on the “partial club” plan. Beginning with our next membership renewal notice, and after nearly thirty years, MAS members will once again have to opportunity to participate in the AL and NCRAL. It’s good to be home!

(posted by John Rummel and Jack Fitzmier, September 2026)

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John M. “Jack” English, (1901-1958)

English was part of the small group of MAS founders. He was an avid telescope maker and served as the club’s first secretary/treasurer in 1935-36. And his grandkids vividly remembered the telescope that stood in his yard.

1940 photo from his grandchildren

Jack English was born in Platteville and earned his teaching degree from the Platteville Normal School (now UW Platteville) in 1923. He taught in several school districts around southern Wisconsin before taking a position at the Madison Vocational School teaching chemistry. He would stay at the vocational school for 29 years.

In the early 1930s, English was actively sharing his hobby of telescope making with the public and mentoring others in the craft. His friendship with Bill Binney (another founder) led him to be part of the core group that formed MAS. Because of his position at the vocational school (later, MATC), many early MAS meetings took place in classrooms or meeting rooms at their building on S. Carroll St. in downtown Madison.

In 2021, as the MAS history project was in full swing, I got in touch with a couple of Jack’s grandchildren, who live in Michigan and Ohio. They provided many memories and details of their grandfather’s life and love of astronomy, and shared with me the historical photos that appear in this post.

As we were talking about English’s love of astronomy, they said, “Have you been to his house? His telescope is still in the yard.” I gently explained to them that telescopes that were set up in the out-of-doors 70 years ago were surely long gone. But they stood firm, telling me that they had all visited Madison the previous year and drove by Grandpa’s old house. “The telescope is still there!” they insisted.

So they gave me the address and I made the pilgrimage to Monona Drive on Madison’s east side.

Jack and Gladys English raised their son in this house.

And Jack’s telescope is still there.

Note the highlighted region in the side yard. English’s telescope is not in great shape, and obviously hasn’t been functional in many years, but it’s still standing. (These pictures were taken in the fall of 2021 but I’ve been back as recently as the summer of 2025. I’m happy to report that it’s still there.)

Based on the condition of the tube, mount and pier, it’s been exposed to the elements since it was built in 1930s (see photo below). The tube is empty, there’s no mirror cell, secondary assembly, or focuser. And the equatorial mount is not aligned to north.

The house on Monona Drive is not the English’s—or the telescope’s—first home.

A close examination of this photo reveals that the same telescope, pier, and mount are present, but the location is not the Monona Drive house. From this, we can infer that English constructed the telescope and pier sometime in the 1930s, most likely at his previous home on Oakridge Ave. He subsequently relocated it with him to Monona Drive. Although only the optical tube, elements of the equatorial mount, and pier remain today, it’s evident that this device was meticulously crafted.

Jack English’s telescope is roughly the same age as the MAS, and bears a metaphorical resemblance to it. Their shared origin story lies in English’s co-founding of the Society and his passion for telescope making. Both survived the years (and Madison’s harsh climate) because they were well-designed and carefully made.

I managed to track down the current owner of the Monona Drive property. The people who own the house now are the children and grandchildren of a Mr. Goff, who purchased the property from the English family upon Jack’s death in 1958. The story that came down through the Goff family during their long tenure there is that the original owner of the house was a professor of astronomy at the UW-Madison. I was able to offer a correction to the legend of the telescope and let them know that the real story is even better – that of a humble teacher, amateur astronomer, and telescope maker – and co-founder of the Madison Astronomical Society.

(Posted by John Rummel, September, 2025. Parts of this post are recycled from the biographical sketch written for the MAS History.)

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In the September, 2023 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, I was lucky enough to have my article about the history of MAS published. It was my biographical profile of the extraordinary Paula Birner Carey, a co-founder of MAS. The full text of the article is reproduced below.

Almost Forgotten

A little-known past member enriches the history of Madison’s local astronomy club.

by John Rummel

MY ASTRONOMY CLUB, the Madison Astronomical Society, got its start in the 1930s. As with most such clubs in those days, it was a man’s world. But as I researched its beginnings, one woman stood out in the crowd of men.

Paula Birner, an elementary school teacher, was new to Madison in the fall of 1934. A year before the club’s birth, she had appeared on local radio stations doing a program called “Watchers of the Sky.” Birner went on to be a key member as our club organized the following year, and she was omnipresent in it for the next 14 years. In an age when a woman’s role in clubs like ours was largely that of spouse to their husbands — the members — Birner was giving talks and, later in the 1930s, authoring a series of columns for the Wisconsin State Journal on astronomy and practical observing.

Birner was married in the mid-1940s but soon widowed. She left Madison and continued her teaching career in Racine, Wisconsin, now under her married name, Paula Birner Carey. Her life was busy: Carey was active in the teacher’s union and the PTA, and she anchored various writing workshops and classes.

But her love of astronomy beckoned. In the fall of 1956, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Racine Journal Times appealing to others who shared her passion for astronomy. “Somewhere in Racine, or thereabouts, there must be kindred souls,” she wrote. “Wish they would communicate with me. We could form a club and have some fun!”

STELLAR ACHIEVER Paula Birner Carey was a founding member of two Wisconsin astronomy clubs — one in Madison, the other in Racine. She appears here in the mid-1940s.

Carey’s letter worked. Within months a Racine astronomy club was formed, and she would later serve on its board. In 1963, the club built a formidable observatory — the Modine-Benstead Observatory — and in May 1964 Sky & Telescope published an article highlighting the achievement. Its author, of course, was Paula Birner Carey.

Her technical know-how shines through in the article. “As a Newtonian of short focal length (80 inches),” she wrote about the observatory’s convertible 16-inch reflector, “it is suitable for deep-sky viewing and photography; as a Cassegrain (320 inches), it can be used for lunar and planetary studies.”

I never got to meet her — she died in 1993 — but I relate to her attachment to the hobby. I imagine her playing up astronomy with her students but longing for a group of adults to share her interest in the stars. She wanted to recapture the community she’d found in Madison around observing the heavens, and she succeeded brilliantly, helping to found not just one but two vibrant astronomy clubs in Wisconsin.

Carey never remarried after her husband died in 1948, and she had no children. Details of her life and love of the hobby were hard to come by. Sometime after her retirement from teaching in Racine in the late 1960s or early 1970s, she returned to Madison. She must have lived out her retirement in the city where she first helped organize an astronomy club four decades before. She rejoined our Madison club and attended meetings, and she continued to serve on the board of the Astronomical League. She would have been in her 70s by then.

I questioned older members of our Madison club, trying to find anyone who recognized the name or met the person. Only one or two recalled her. They remembered her attending meetings — the nice gray-haired woman sitting in the back. One of them recalls her speaking of the Racine club. But I bet nobody at the time suspected that this kind older lady sitting among them was a founder of their club.

Carey’s last recorded activity in the Madison club was a donation she made in her mid-80s to our new observatory. To the end, she thought of the club — her club — and wanted to see it grow.

JOHN RUMMEL is a Madison, Wisconsin-based amateur astronomer, retired school psychologist, and current historian for the Madison Astronomical Society.

Published in the September, 2023 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, page 84 (Focal Point column).

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In 1991, MAS celebrated its 60th birthday as a club. We threw a party, organized various special events, and generally made a big deal of the occasion. And we received some significant coverage in the local newspaper. The club rightly regarded its 60th birthday as an important moment.

We were mistaken, though. The club was not established in 1930-31. We can forgive the error, however. In the 90s, the club leaders had compelling reasons to accept the 1930 date, and there was little evidence available to them to suggest otherwise.

By 2020, the club had seriously taken up the task of writing its own history. The author spent a few hours in some online newspaper databases and found that in the 1930s, the events surrounding the formation of MAS had been extensively covered in the same local papers. By the 2020s, tracking down those documents could be done in minutes without leaving home. Prior to the internet, accessing old newspapers was not easy. Newspaper archives existed only in libraries on microfiche, and indexes—when they existed—were incomplete and difficult to access.

But in under an hour, I had found documentary evidence of our actual birthday (spoiler alert, it was in early 1935). At the same time, we were collecting many other primary source club documents that further fleshed out MAS’s origin story. We now know the full story.

The History of the Madison Astronomical Society exists in two volumes, available from this website as PDF downloads (find them here).

The club still has a few print copies floating around but they’re harder to find. If you’re interested, ask us if we can sell you one.

The story of the club’s history can be found in the volumes linked above. The first chapter of the 1935-1988 volume is all about nailing down the date and circumstances of the club’s founding. It’s all there and it’s a good read, but here’s a quick summary.

Around 1934, there were several serious telescope makers and amateur astronomers in Madison. Though some of them knew each other casually, there was no attempt to form a a club until UW astronomy professor Dr. C. M. Huffer offered an astronomy class through the UW Extension. The class was quite popular thanks to Huffer’s personable nature and the accessibility of his instruction. As the class was coming to an end, a group of the students approached him and asked if there was a way they could continue to meet. Huffer told them that they were describing an astronomy club, and he encouraged them to form one. Huffer knew of a few of the telescope makers and put them all in touch with one another. By the end of February, 1935, they had organized a first meeting, drafted a constitution, and elected officers.

A few months later one of them, Dr. Jack Supernaw (elected president of the new group), would write in its first newsletter:

It is significant, when the Extension Department of our State University announces a twelve-week course in popular astronomy, to have forty-seven in attendance for the first lecture. It is significant that among these forty-seven were housewives, grade and vocational teachers, nurses, oil station attendants, doctors, store-keepers, lawyers, and ministers—a cross section of diverse interests and tastes but a lay group with the common desire to know more about the mystery of the universe . . . The common need for discussion and “mutual benefits that evolve from congenial associations” gave rise to the organization of our present group.

There’s more to it than this, of course, and the story is a good one. The club they formed in early 1935 still exists today. Reading about their activities, interests, and dreams will sound familiar to today’s members. There are differences, of course. Technology has put a much different twist on the hobby, but it still comes down to the people you’ll get to know when you visit a meeting. We’re still a group of housewives, teachers, nurses, storekeepers, lawyers, and ministers—and much more.

By the way, in 2025, we celebrated the club’s 90th anniversary!

(Posted by John Rummel, September, 2025).

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