Dr. Bryan Shumaker and his wife, Linda, were winter residents in Southern Arizona for six or seven years before becoming full-time residents in November. They sold their house in northern Michigan and settled into a home in Dove Mountain.
Southern Arizona’s dark skies and its astronomy community are a huge part of the attraction for Shumaker, an avid amateur astronomer who is a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, doing outreach astronomy education.
“It’s kind of astronomy heaven out here,” says Shumaker, who will present “Look Up! What’s in the Night Sky?” at a Northwest Tucson Jewish Community lunch and learn on Jan. 23.
Shumaker will give an overview of the many objects people can see in the night sky without any viewing aids. He will also discuss the use of telescopes and binoculars, “which are great little telescopes; there’s tons of stuff to see if you know where to look,” he says.
He’ll review basics such as the difference between meteors and comets and show some of his best photos of celestial objects.
“There’s biblical references, too, to things in the sky, in the Old Testament particularly,” Shumaker says, noting that there are objects in the sky that have been around “literally longer than any other recorded human history.”
He’s fascinated by the similarities in myths based on the star cluster known as The Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. From the Inuit in Alaska to the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rain forest, he says, the myth always centers on seven women fleeing someone with bad intentions.
“The weird thing is that there aren’t seven, there’s only six” that can be seen with the naked eye, he says, explaining that one theory is that the seventh star died in a supernova explosion.
A retired urologist, Shumaker has long been fascinated by devices for remote viewing, from telescopes to microscopes.
When he was 12, an uncle helped him build his first telescope.
“We ground the mirror together,” he says, noting that he still has that small reflecting telescope.
Astronomy and astrophotography have come a long way since his youth, he says, explaining that now, cameras can be set on a mount that moves along with the earth’s rotation, so photos aren’t blurry.
“Some of the images we view take hours and hours to accumulate,” he says, with hundreds of snapshots stacked electronically to form the final photograph.
Shumaker used lasers and optics in his urology practice and mentored the first Ph.D. student at Michigan’s Oakland University.
“I helped him build this device to detect reflected wavelengths and we turned them into a sound signal” that helped him pick up bladder cancers that were otherwise undetectable,” says Shumaker, who also briefly taught physics and astronomy at Oakland.
He is the founder and president of the astronomy club at the Highlands in Dove Mountain. The International Astronomical Union has designated Minor Planet 518523 Bryanshumaker in his honor.
Shumaker’s Jan. 23 lunch and learn will be held at the Oro Valley Community Center, 10555 N. La Canada Drive, from 12-1:30 p.m. The cost is $20; registration is available here.
