At an age when many men are having grandchildren named after them, Warren Offutt '50 has Minor Planet (7639) Offutt, an asteroid 350 million miles away.
The honor came on his seventieth birthday, when the International Astronomical Union named the asteroid after Offutt to honor his scientific contributions.
Yet astronomy is only a hobby for Offutt, who in 1990 retired from his position as a vice president at a large manufacturing firm in Ohio and moved with his wife, Beverly, to the mountains of southern New Mexico, where they built an observatory.
“I don't play golf, I get tired of fishing in a big hurry, and Beverly and I enjoy astronomy so much that we decided to make it a kernel around which to build a retirement,” he explains. Since they built their observatory, the Offutts have been widely honored for their significant contributions to astronomy — from their careful documentation of the Hale-Bopp comet and their photograph of it that ran in magazines and newspapers nationwide to their recent help in the discovery of a new moon orbiting Uranus.
A lifelong love of engineering and technology
Warren Offutt's interest in astronomy began when he was a boy, but his fascination with technology and engineering — his true passion and the component of astronomy that he finds most intriguing — began when he was a toddler. He remembers playing with an old radio, twisting its big dials and knobs while his mother did the week's wash with a scrub-board. “That kindled my imagination, and to this day, technology of all kinds continues to fascinate to me,” he says.
His interests brought him to Union, where he volunteered to work as an engineer for a local World War II veteran who wanted to manufacture antennas but who had no knowledge of engineering. “That unpaid, free, fun work was actually the ticket to a good job,” he says. After graduation, Offutt landed a job with Airborne Instruments Laboratory (AIL) in Mineola, N.Y., where he designed microwave and radar antennas. His specialty was polarized radar feed and antennas that enabled ground controllers to maintain contact with airplanes even in bad weather. His design enabled the Air Force, and then commercial airlines, to maintain surveillance of aircraft positions for navigation and safety throughout the duration of a flight. “Whenever I land in a small plane, I always crane my neck to look at the antenna to see if it is one of mine. It often is,” he says.
Although Offutt did graduate work at several colleges, he stayed with AIL and moved into management roles as the company was acquired by Cutler-Hammer and later by the Eaton Corp. Before he retired from Eaton, he managed the company's research and advanced engineering development — a staff of about 450 people and an annual budget of $40 million. He also had oversight responsibility for all engineering in the corporation, which included 5,000 people and a $125 million budget.
The downside of all this responsibility, Offutt says, was that he traveled at least five days a week while Beverly “managed the home front” — their ten children. “When I retired, I promised myself that I would never see the inside of another airplane,” he says. “I've almost kept that promise.”
Focusing on astronomy
The Offutts spend most of their time at the home they built in the Sacramento Mountains in south-central New Mexico, a location that they chose for its dark skies and relatively low humidity. Their house and observatory, called W & B Observatory for Warren and Beverly, is on top of a mountain 8,300 feet above sea level — a great spot for optimal stargazing.
The Offutts bought their first telescope when their children were young to simply look at the stars and the planets and to introduce their children to astronomy, which had captivated Warren since he helped assemble a cousin's telescope at the age of twelve. Warren and Beverly enjoyed the telescope all the years their children were growing up, and in 1985, they purchased a five-inch telescope. “Beverly and I wanted to see a comet (never having seen one) and set about studying Comet Halley,” Offutt explains. “We viewed the comet in Illinois and Wisconsin, in Florida Everglades National Park, and in New Zealand, where we spent most of April 1985. All told, we took about 175 photos piggy-backing a 35-mm camera on the telescope.” This included one shot that appeared on the cover of an astronomy journal.
It was after their studies of Comet Halley that the Offutts decided to build their retirements around astronomy. (Beverly graduated from Ellis Hospital School of Nursing but stopped working when their children were small. After an eighteen-year hiatus while the children were maturing, she returned to active nursing, retiring finally in 1986 to help care for Warren's elderly mother. Following the death of Warren's mother, they retired together in 1990 to New Maxico). The Offutts' observatory has a twenty-four-inch telescope controlled by several homemade computers and installed with the help of software that Warren wrote himself for precise polar alignment. “It worked so well that it has since been used for similar alignment projects at five professional observatories,” he says.
[What makes the Offutts' telescope so remarkable, says Jonathan Marr, assistant professor of physics, is that it is large, sits on top of a mountain, is in an area with dark skies, and is accompanied by sophisticated equipment. “It is the equivalent of a telescope at a college, and they have the opportunity to use it anytime they want,” Marr says.]
Making a name for themselves
When Comet Hale-Bopp was discovered in 1995, the Offutts did the confirming observations and got the first post-discovery photos of the comet. (When a new comet is discovered, it must be confirmed by several astronomers, and a series of observations must be made to determine its orbit.) In fact, their photo of the comet was printed in many newspapers and magazines throughout the country.
“What was more important was that I was able to get a very precise location of it in the sky,” Offutt explains. “What was most interesting for me was that I could measure precisely where the comet was and precisely where it was moving in the sky.”
Offutt has come to focus on precision astrometry, the science of precision measurement of the position of astronomical bodies, which provides the basis on which the orbits of comets, planets, and asteroids can be computed. “The precision we achieve here on a good night is equivalent to measuring the angular difference between the top and bottom of a ten-mile distant golf ball,” he explains.
The Offutts' measurements of Comet Hale-Bopp were so precise that they caught the attention of professional astronomers, who often have difficulty getting time on large telescopes. “In general, professionals are driven by the desire, and even the need, to publish new results, but they are often limited by not having enough assigned time on professional telescopes,” Offutt says. “I have all the time I want on my own equipment. As a result, collaborations have developed in which the professionals define the types of research data needed and I endeavor to obtain those measurements for them.”
Offutt is also hailed for his ability to track very faint objects in the sky — so faint that they are typically one ten-millionth as bright as the dimmest star that one can make out with the naked eye on a very clear night in a place with no light pollution. Offutt is thought to be the only amateur astronomer in the world who has successfully observed and measured these objects, and it is high-quality observations of such objects that led to his receiving the Amateur Achievement Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in July.
“I enjoy astronomy because it combines the worthwhile goal of adding to man's knowledge of God's universe with a challenging opportunity to exercise my interest in science and engineering,” Offutt says. In fact, it is clear that it is the technology of astronomy that attracts him. “I came to Union as a hopeful engineer and left as an engineer. Deep down, I think I still am an engineer,” he says.
Sir William Thompson, also known as Lord Kelvin of Largs, once wrote, “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge of it is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.”
“Lord Kelvin's statement inspires me,” says Offutt. “Astronomy offers limitless opportunity to pursue science in this sense and to share it with others.”
Contending with light pollution
One of the characteristics of modern society that bedevils astronomers is light pollution — the contamination of the night sky by stray light from cities and towns.
Warren Offutt says light pollution costs the country money, causes needless glare that hinders the safety of citizens (especially those with certain vision impairments), and destroys both the aesthetic beauty of the night sky and the research opportunities to study it.
“All that is needed to correct this is the use of what are called full cut-off fixtures,” he says. “These are designed to keep the light in the area where it is effective, generally within a ground radius of about three times the height at which the lamp is mounted.”
He says such fixtures are so efficient that their use could reduce electric operating costs by as much as half — and, of course, protect the beauty of the starry sky.