Sidewalk Astronomy 52 years ago
Mar 3rd, 2010 by CtCameraEye
A friend in Washington D.C. mailed me a stack of photos of the early days of space exploration in the United States. They are very interesting to see how we looked at space in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I will start off this “Space retrospective” series that I will post here intermittently, with two photographs of “Sidewalk Astronomers” looking for the Russian satellite Sputnik launched October 4, 1957.
The top photograph are members of the Whittiter, California Amateur Astronomers Association using wide angle low power telescopes to try to get a glimpse of Sputnik on October 5, 1957.
The bottom photograph is undated, but is captioned that members of the public lined up to look for Sputnik at an unknown location.
It must have been unbelievable looking for the first man made satellite in the sky, the size of a beach ball.
