Slacker Astronomy » Keep Looking Up

Keep Looking Up

By Aaron on November 29, 2006 at 3:20 pm | In Blog Posts |

All astronomers - professional, amateur, armchair or otherwise, have a point in their life where they “got it”. It’s kinda like the eureka moment of the inventor, minus the dollar signs over the eyeballs and the cash register KA-CHING! in the background. (In fact, that “got it”, usually portends a bad case of aperture fever a few months hence.)

For me, that moment came when I first saw Saturn through a telescope on my porch in subburban Dallas. But leading up to that moment were years of watching Jack Horkheimer, The Star Hustler.

Back in the mid 1980’s, when I was in elementary school, television channels actually went off the air late at night. I know, perish the thought! We were such savages back then. When the local PBS station went off the air, it would play the five minute show “Jack Horkheimer, Star Hustler” show. I discovered it by accident, but started watching it religiously.

Jack is a portly, incredibly charming and friendly fella who laughs at cheesy jokes while talking about naked eyeball astronomy with equally cheezy new age music and graphics. It was the kind of stuff almost anyone could enjoy, even from urban skies. He may not have taken the geek out of the astronomy stereotype, but he definitely took out the nerd!

I probably owe my career to him more than anyone else outside of my family. Without that show, I wouldn’t be doing what I do today. And Slacker Astronomy certainly wouldn’t be around. (In fact, now that I look at SA I recognize quite a bit of our show owes a bit to his influence.)

Eventually it became more difficult to find his show on the air as TV stations began running 24/7. One of the first things I did on the new “Internets” was hunt down his show and find footage. This was around 1994 or so. I was shocked to discover that he was being forced to change his name from “Star Hustler” to something else. It seems that “star hustler” sounded too sexually provocative and some people protested! So they held an online vote as to what the new name would be. I don’t remember the other options, but Star Gazer won and it sounds appropriate, if a bit less dynamic, to me.

November, 2006 was the 30-year anniversary of the show. The basic format of the show hasn’t changed, but they have kept up with technology. The graphics are high tech and you can now watch his show as a video podcast (subscribe here).

Jack Horkheimer has plenty of accolades, but he is still probably one of the most underrated astronomy popularizers out there. He has probably introduced astronomy to more people (in the USA at least) than anyone not named Carl Sagan. And he keeps on going, we’ll “keep looking up!”

P/S: He has a children’s book out about astronomy. Being Christmas and all, it may make for a nice present for a young child.