Oklahoma City Astronomy Club Meeting

Title: “Stonehenge at the Winter Solstice”

Ed Ting is a well-known amateur astronomer whose works have appeared in Sky & Telescope Magazine, Astronomy, Skywatch, Discover, and Popular Mechanics magazine. He is a National Science Foundation Ambassador to Chile, a Mission Patagonia ambassador, and a NASA Solar System Ambassador. His science-themed YouTube channel has over 69,000 subscribers and gets two million views a year. In addition to his science writing, Ed’s creative works have appeared in literary journals. He is a past winner of the New Hampshire Flash Fiction contest, and was selected as Writer-in-Residence at the Writer’s Center for the Fine Arts in Edgartown, Massachusetts in 2016. Ed holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois,

From New England College, and an MA from Dartmouth, where he produced an award-winning thesis on astronomical imaging, and there he produced the graduate school’s new astronomy-themed logo Truly a man for all seasons, Ed is a classical/New Age pianist, a retired bicycle racer, and an enthusiastic fudge confectioner.

Stonehenge has fascinated mankind for thousands of years. After taking an archeology/Stonehenge class at Oxford in the summer of 2023, Ed returned to Stonehenge for the winter solstice of 2023. Discover what we know, and what we don’t know about this well-known “henge”, and what steps you can take to visit this most ancient ruin.

Ed shared that when he was a kid, his science teacher told him that photocopier lenses make good telescope objective lenses. He and his buddy would go around to office buildings and ask if they had any dead copiers. They brought their tools with them. His first telescopes were built around those scavenged lenses.

Due to Ed’s areas of interest, I inquired further. In Ed’s own words…

I am an amateur astronomer, just like the rest of you. I am fascinated by telescopes, mounts, and imaging equipment. Like most people, observing through a telescope caused an innate desire to capture what I saw through the eyepiece, and that’s what led me to dive into the “imperfect”frustrating world of astrophotography.

Where else have your observing/photography travels taken you? (I know you did a great job for CBS Sunday Mornings before the last Solar Eclipse in April of 2024.)

• I’ve been to Chile three times – twice for ACEAP (2017, 2018) and once for Mission Patagonia (2025).

Knowing you own more telescopes than most people, how did you get involved in Telescope

Reviews? Benefits? Downsides?

• In 1997 I started Scopereviews for one simple reason – I didn’t know html code and needed to learn it. I never expected that people would be reading it. In 2020, I started the YouTube channel for a simple reason – I didn’t know anything about film making. I never expected that people would be watching it.