For Global Astronomy Month 2020 (124): Echo (18) - GAM Time Tunnel (17)

By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe (text) and Florin Alexandru Stancu (design)

Published: Friday, June 12 2020 19:22

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Giordano Bruno and Adrian Bruno Sonka,
Two passionate astronomers in different times.
But if Giordano was burned at the stake,
Adrian should always remain awake.
-Andrei Dorian Gheorghe-

Adrian Bruno Sonka, nicknamed “the amateur astronomer who becomes professional in his free time”, is a special personality in Romanian astronomy:

-former secretary general of the Romanian Society for Meteors and Astronomy-SARM;

-current coordinator of the Admiral Vasile Urseanu Bucharest Municipal Observatory, where he is the continuer of the famous popularizer Dr. Harald Alexandrescu (1945-2005);

-collaborator of the Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy - former Bucharest Astronomical and Meteorological Observatory, pre-founded by Stefan Hepites in the 1880s and officially founded by Nicolae Coculescu and Spiru Haret in 1908, the main institution of astronomical research in Romania, which gave a long list of remarkable specialists, such as Constantin Parvulescu and Gheorghe Demetrescu;

-awarded for over 10,000 observations by the American Association of Variable Star Observers;

-author of an ambitious “Messier Integral” (astrophotography and technical sketch);

-fervent collaborator of the Minor Planet Center;

-former editor-in-chief of “Vega” (the on-line magazine of the Bucharest Astroclub);

-presenter of digital planetarium shows at the Urseanu Observatory and the Bucharest Museum of History.

My GAM time tunnel found that he used a remote telescope of the Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy and caught three comets on April 23 and 24, 2020 (C/2017 T2 PANSTARRS, C/2017 Y1 ATLAS and C/2017 Y4 ATLAS) in memory of the two Romanians who discovered comets in astronomy history, Wofgang Pauly (a sky lover of German origin, in 1898) and Victor Daimaca (in 1942 and 1943).

Adrian Bruno Sonka is also an untiring popularizer of astronomy at the Bucharest Municipal Observatory (made in 1910 in the form of a yacht by the president of the first Romanian astronomical society, Admiral Vasile Urseanu; this observatory also hosted the Bucharest Astroclub in 1968-2016 and the Bucharest branch of SARM - led by Iulian Olaru in the 2000s, who edited the short-lived magazine “Ocheanul” / The Spyglass).

Thus, Adrian Sonka writes articles and books - quite attractive because of his robust literary talent pigmented by humor -, makes informative monthly calendars, teaches courses and presents lectures for the public at large (he also “shattered” recently a leading group of astrologers in a public “duel of arguments” in a central bookstore in Bucharest).

Sonka obviously published an article about the three comets of April in his blog (in Romanian), from which my time tunnel remarked his tragicomic conclusion (“for connoisseurs”), where he describes the trajectories of these comets for the next weeks, and ends:

“On July 1, 15,000,000,000, there will no longer be a solar system from which to observe comets.”
-Adrian Bruno Sonka-

Then he caught an animation (through the same remote telescope) with Asteroid 1998 OR2 on April 28, 2020, and published another article in his blog.

The combination between his conclusion (which I translated into English from Romanian) and the image (where the asteroid seems the biggest light among the stars - but it is not!) looks also like a real cosmopoem (astro-photo-poem):

“So we have a small giant asteroid
which moves to such a small distance from the Earth
that is 16 times farther than the Moon.”
-Adrian Bruno Sonka