Jimi Lowrey and Steve Odewahn at The Texas Star Party, which presented its prestigious Lone Star Gazer Award to Lowrey last month.
Jimi Lowrey & Steve Odewahn discuss the discovery of an uncharted astronomical object.
Lowrey moved to Fort Davis in 2006 and decided to build a telescope that would permit him to push observation to the limit. When looking for faint objects to pursue with his monster scope, Lowrey discovered an object – decidedly not a star – that looked like a green pea. Thinking it might be an undiscovered planetary nebula, Lowrey approached several scientists at McDonald Observatory to provide confirmation.
Odewahn obtained time on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) to get a low-resolution spectrogram of “sweet pea.” Listen to the interview for more about the fascinating professional-amateur collaboration on this discovery.
