Alan died on June 6. The great comet he discovered in 1995 gave him fame he deserved much earlier.
He was a lifelong ardent observer of the night sky; was often quoted in Sky & Telescope as an expert on comets. He was a patient comet-hunter, had put in hundreds of hours of methodical search. (This was in the personal-discovery age; now comets are routinely found first in images made by automated sky surveys.) It seemed unfair that Alan did not yet have a comet to his name. He lived at Cloudcroft in the cloud-free uplands of New Mexico.
At last, in 1995 just after midnight between July 22 and 23, happening to look with his telescope at globular cluster Messier 70 in the southerly constellation Sagittarius, he came upon his comet. Calculations from its movement showed that it was amazingly far out to be as bright as magnitude 10, must be large, a “new” comet from the remote outer solar system, and was likely when coming nearest to Sun and Earth in March 1997 to be far above naked-eye brightness. Indeed, many sky-lovers later felt that it compensated for the disappointing return of Halley’s Comet a decade earlier.
Despite being now just past the enormous distance of 50 AU (astronomical units, Sun-Earth distances) it is still in the list of observable comets.
Slightly after Alan’s discovery, and about 400 miles west, near Stanfield in Arizona, some friends were using a telescope; on taking his turn to look, Thomas Bopp noticed the comet. So this, too, was reported to the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the comet had to become Hale-Bopp.
Alan wrote the “Comets” section of my Astronomical Calendar for 1987 to 1992 and 2003 to 2015. More recently I continued to rely on him for comet advice.
Once I telephoned him, and heard an amusing message in a grumpy voice: “Alan is away somewhere, I’m his phone, I’m left here watching the grass grow till he comes back.”
Alan was much more than an astronomical observer. He founded, and raised funds for, a project called Earthrise, an international network that would foster cooperation among researchers and students. He made several “science diplomacy” visits to Iran, including one to coincide with the transit of Venus in June 2004.
His web pages about all this seem to have survived him:
http://www.swisr.org/earthrise.html
http://www.swisr.org/iraneclipse.html
http://www.swisr.org/esfahan.html
The Iranian city where he spent the most time, as I did, and at which there was an international comet conference apparently organized by him, was Esfahan, famously beautiful with its blue mosques.
I refrain from quoting the very strong words with which Alan expressed his anger at the recent bombardment and killing of his friends in Iran.
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