Looking Up and Looking Back
by Michael Watson, President[email protected]

In his professional life he was a high school
mathematics teacher in Toronto. In his
astronomical life he has been a teacher
to all of us in Canada who share a love of the celestial world
above us. His greatest service to the Canadian astronomical
community, however, is undoubtedly his numerous articles and
books on the history of astronomy in Canada. This year marks
the 30th anniversary of the publication of the definitive and
seminal history of our Society: “Looking Up – A History of The
Royal Astronomical Society of Canada,” a magnificent 300-page
work written by long-time Toronto Centre member and a
fixture of the national Society for decades, Peter Broughton.
Peter was born in 1940, a dozen years before I was. He
graduated with a B.Sc. from the Astronomy Division of the
Mathematics and Physics department of the University of
Toronto in 1963 and went on to earn his M.Sc. in mathematics
in 1971. Peter’s professional career, spanning 34 years from
1964 to 1997, was as a high school teacher in Toronto, but his
great passion—developed during his youth and later during his
undergraduate years—was and still is astronomy. In a recent
exchange that we had in preparation for this column, Peter
recalled how he came to astronomy:
“I don’t remember looking through a telescope as a kid.
My earliest recollection of anything to do with astronomy
was a comment made by a friend of my parents who, one
summer evening, pointed my attention to a very bright
star overhead and said “That’s Vega.” I’d heard of Venus
but not Vega so I thought maybe he was wrong or that he
was trying to show off.…
As a teen-ager, the public library was a favourite haunt
and I was attracted to the astronomy shelf, in particular
a set of maroon-coloured “Harvard books on astronomy.”
These were written by experts at Harvard, people like
Bart Bok, Donald Menzel, Cecilia Payne, Harlow
Shapley, Fred Whipple—each one dealing with their own
speciality: the Milky Way, Our Sun, Stars and Clusters,
Variable Stars, Galaxies, the Earth, Moon and Planets.
They were amazing books written for adults but well
within reach of high school students. Through them I
learned how knowledge is acquired and developed. For
me, that is the great adventure—one with no beginning or
end and full of unexpected twists and turns.
At the University of Toronto, I studied maths and physics
with very limited success but found astronomy much more
congenial. [This was accompanied by] summer employment
observing meteors at the Meanook Observatory in Northern
Alberta and working with data from the
Alouette satellite in Ottawa the following year.
It was during that summer in Alberta, in 1962, that the
RASC held its annual GA, and it was then that I joined the
Society. A few years later, Ruth Northcott (who had taught
astronomy lab courses during my student years) asked if I
would consider serving the RASC as librarian—the first of
a long line of positions I filled in the ensuing years.”
As for this last point, starting in 1962, Peter held an impressive
array of positions at the national level: Librarian, Secretary,
Treasurer, First and Second Vice-President, and President
from 1994 to 1996. He has been awarded the Society’s Service
Award and Chant Medal, and in 2013 was named a Fellow of
the RASC. For his contributions to the RASC, the International
Astronomical Union named asteroid 16217 after him—
“Peterbroughton”—in 2005.
In addition to Looking Up, to which I will return shortly,
Peter undertook a decade of meticulous research on the life
of Canada’s preeminent astronomer of the early 1900s, John
Stanley Plaskett, and published his definitive biography of
Plaskett—Northern Star: J.S. Plaskett—in 2018. For this work
Peter was awarded the 2023 Osterbrock Book Prize by the
American Astronomical Society. RASC archivist Randall
Rosenfeld had this to say about Northern Star: “The publication
of Peter Broughton’s Northern Star: J.S. Plaskett, is a
watershed event for the history of Canadian astronomy.
Plaskett, founder of the still-vital Dominion Astrophysical
Observatory, was the first Canadian astrophysicist whose
quality and quantity of research and professional connections
ensured his ability to walk on the world stage of the discipline.
Broughton’s scholarship is thorough, and he presents it in an
attractively readable form.”
But back to Looking Up. As Peter explained in the preface,
the motivation for his book was the centenary, in 1990, of
the incorporation of what was then called “The Astronomical
and Physical Society of Toronto” (it is worth noting that
the Society’s roots dated back to the founding in 1868 of
the Toronto Astronomical Club). The RASC established a
Centennial committee, of which Peter was a member. The
most significant result of that committee was the creation of
the Beginner’s Observing Guide, which was a great success and
continued to be printed for more than two decades.
Peter has also explained to me—or reminded me, because I
was on the National Council as Second Vice-President at
the time but had since forgotten the details—how Society
approval for his book took place. In his own words from an
exchange that he and I had recently:
“An image came to mind of the annual meeting where
I sought permission to proceed with the project. As
President, I was in an awkward position since I knew
some members would take the view that I was taking
advantage of my position to get the Society to finance
my “pet project.” After laying out my proposal, including
the plan that the copyright, and thus any royalties, would
belong to the RASC, I excused myself from the meeting
so that a free debate could proceed without any influence
by me. I can picture myself sitting on the lobby and being
summoned back by you after a few minutes.”
I must emphasize some of his quoted words: “the plan that the
copyright, and thus any royalties, would belong to the RASC.”
Peter’s devotion to and love of the Society is shown so clearly
by the fact that he never intended to make any monetary profit
from Looking Up.
Looking Up took Peter two years to research and write, and
it was published in 1994, 30 years ago. Although it has been
out of print for many years, Looking Up is still on the RASC’s
website and available for all members and the public at
www.rasc.ca/sites/default/files/ardocuments/LookingUp.
pdf. In it, readers can learn of the origins of the RASC, the
expansion of the Society beyond Toronto to all provinces
of Canada, and the activities of numerous Centres in observation,
astrophotography, and the bringing of our passion to
the Canadian public. One of Peter’s goals was to highlight
the contributions of many members of the Society over
the decades, both professional and amateur, to the RASC’s
success, and the book is peppered with notes of dozens of
such members and is liberally illustrated with historical
photographs of the people and activities that have made
our Society what it is today.
Looking Up is a wonderful record of the history of the RASC,
and well worth spending several hours with during cloudy
nights. I will close by thanking Peter Broughton for all that he
has done for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. I am
so very fortunate to have known him over many years.
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