Some of you will remember Jordan Bramble. He joined BBAA as a teenager.? In 2009 he earned second place in the Astronomical League’s Young Astronomer Award for an asteroid search project he did with the RRRT up at Fan Mountain. He won first place in the Horkheimer award the same year – for his volunteer efforts at Fan and to the club.

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Now, 34 and the CEO of his own startup called “Antares” that builds portable nuclear reactors for military and space applications, he is married with a young son and living in the LA area.

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This past weekend he came to visit me. ?We met up in Sierra Vista for an early dinner and then stopped by the Patterson Observatory which is on the campus of the University of Arizona, Sierra Vista. We fired up the 20-inch RC and had a look at comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) which, amazingly, is still a nice telescopic comet, even from inside town.? After a tour of the observatory’s “mini science center” display, we moved on to my home/observatory which is about 11 miles outside of town.

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Unfortunately, the predicted clear skies never quite materialized, but we had enough sucker holes to make for a good session with the 30-inch StarSplitter telescope. I think Jordan was impressed even though the sky was really poor that night. ?It was great to see him, catch up with all that’s going on in his life now, and to reminisce about days gone by. ?

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Jordan was just the third BBAA’er to come to visit my “Desert Coyote Observatory” after Matt McLaughlin and Nick Anderson. I’d welcome others if you ever get to the Southwest. I’m about 90 minutes southeast of Tucson and located nearly equidistant from Sierra Vista, Tombstone, and Bisbee, in a rural area just east of the Riparian National Wildlife Preserve and the San Pedro River. ?It’s Coinjock dark – it would be a magnitude darker if I could run off three or four neighbors with their insecurity lights. The dark sky map turns to black just a stone’s throw to my east.

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Ted

BBAA Southwest

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