For Global Astronomy Month 2020 (22) - In Memoriam Vasile Micu (1963-2020)

By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe and Valentin Grigore

Published: Saturday, April 11 2020 20:07

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“TO A FIREBALL 

By Vasile Micu 

Ephemeral glow-worm of the sky,
You cross its paths.

Filled with your light is the sky,
Your glory is total.

Beautiful light,
Fantastic “star”,
You penetrate my heart!”

Vasile Micu shone in the 1990s as a human fireball in Romanian amateur astronomy.

He was the first vice-president of the Romanian Society for Meteors and Astronomy-SARM (founded in 1993, after the communist cataclysm), a passionate astrophotographer (before the digital era), an appreciate teacher of astronomy during the golden age of SARM’s Perseid event, an elite contributor to the European Halo Project, an occasional astropoet and especially an excellent meteor observer (in 1995 he was the 5th in the world ranking of the International Meteor Organization; it is to note that during those years he opted for a job of nocturnal guardian at a coal mine to have the possibility to observe the sky all night long).

He represented Romania at the International Meteor Conference in 1996 (Apeldoorn, the Netherlands).

He also received an award for his astro-photo-poetry at SARM’s Cosmopoetry Festival in 1997.

To honor his memory, we chose to put together a few of his pictures (sunspots, lunar details and Comet Hale-Bopp) over a 1996 issue of SARM’s magazine “Noi si Cerul / Us and the Sky” (transformed into a TV Show later) that also includes a picture by Vasile Micu (Comet Hyakutake) on its first cover, to photograph them and to add a haiku (classical methods just because Vasile Micu served astronomy before the explosion of the computer era). 

As a pigment for his astronomical life, in 1998 he photographed a strange object near M31 and the star Mirach in the constellation Andromeda, and for a while we talked about “Comet Vasile”, but later the discovery was not confirmed by others (for instance, a specialist from the Harvard University said it was just a “ghost image of Beta Andromadae”).

Finally, before our memorial work, thanking Vasile Micu for what he did for astronomy, we present an excerpt of a text he dedicated to Comet Halle-Bopp, included in his astro-photo-poem that was awarded at SARM’s Cosmopoetry Festival 1997: 

“We will await you, Comet!
You will return after thousands of years.
Go quiet.
We will schedule
Our reincarnation!”
-Vasile Micu-