Retired engineer Tom Crowley proves that you can play around with a hobby you love and see it grow into something extraordinary.
The 80-year-old has turned his love of astronomy into consulting work with the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Aloha Telescope outreach program. He operates the robotic telescope on Maui through high-speed internet connections from his home in Park Springs, a senior life plan community in Stone Mountain.
Tom Crowley operates a telescope located in Hawaii from his home in Park Springs Life Plan Community in Stone Mountain. He works with James Sowell of Georgia Tech to help run the the Aloha Telescope program as well as to maintain the telescope.
Crowley works in partnership with James Sowell, a Georgia Tech principal academic professional and astronomer in the School of Physics, and director of the university’s observatory.
Together, they’re bringing live video images of the moon into Georgia K-12 classrooms.
The oohs and ahhs they get in return are priceless.
“I tell kids this is almost as close as operating the Hubble Space Telescope or the rover on Mars,” Crowley said. “This telescope is almost a quarter of a way around the world.”
When he’s at home, Crowley runs the telescope through his computer and keeps the image online throughout the day. He also helps with maintenance, sometimes with a trip to its location at the U.S. Air Force Research Lab on Maui.
“It’s the same as if I were sitting at the telescope and using it,” Crowley said. “The fact that it’s 6,000 miles away is not a big deal. I typically get on somewhere between 1 or 2 in the morning (Hawaiian time) and run it to about 6 o’clock.”
Crowley had a long career as an electrical engineer and retired early from IBM. At age 55, he became interested in radio astronomy, studying celestial objects at radio frequencies.
Now, “it’s an obsession,” said Crowley, the past president of the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers. “This allows me to get back to the purity of engineering.”
Sowell and Crowley met 15 years ago at the Atlanta Astronomy Club. Sowell was the guest speaker and sat across from Crowley during the dinner. Crowley offered to fix the professor’s problems with his telescopes, and they’ve been working together ever since.
“I couldn’t do this without him,” Sowell said.