Byline: Terri Tabor Daily Herald Staff Writer
Tom Droege's idea of retirement isn't traveling around the country in a motor home or sailing around the world in a new yacht.
The part-time Fermilab scientist would rather spend his days and nights watching the stars.
Although he hasn't retired fully from Fermilab, where he has spent the last 24 years designing instruments for high-energy physics, he already is full-swing into his retirement project.
Droege doesn't want much - just to measure the entire universe.
Unfortunately, there's not a yardstick big enough, which is why he made his own telescopes and shipped them to strangers all over the nation.
Droege has no background in astronomy, yet when the comet Shoemaker/Levy collided with Jupiter about four years ago, he came up with an idea to build a comet-searching device.
He marketed his idea on the Internet, hoping to attract people with similar interests. Astronomers from California to Maryland responded but persuaded him to measure variable stars instead.
"Just finding comets has no particular scientific interests," he said. "There's more interest from the professionals (in researching stars)."
The group's members, only a few of whom Droege has met, is hoping to make a name for itself by cataloging the stars in the sky. It already attracted national attention with its research. The Amateur Star Survey has been featured in several major newspapers and magazines including "Sky and Telescope" and has attracted input from renowned astronomer Bhodan Pacynski of Princeton University.
On a clear night, Droege and his colleagues use his handmade telescopes to take pictures of the sky from their different locations. They hope to put together a map of a strip of the sky over the Equator.
While the project is high-tech, the telescopes are fairly modest. They consist of a couple of manual camera lenses that point toward the sky and take pictures of thousands of stars that can't be seen by the human eye.
"You can look out here and not see a star in the sky and this thing will see thousands of stars," Droege said as he demonstrated his backyard telescope, which looks like an oversized birdhouse.
The telescopes recorded the star pictures on a device like the ones found in television cameras.
The beauty of the project is Droege and his colleagues don't have to stay up all night to watch the stars.
"You just turn it on and go to bed," he said. "That's the advantage of this. Other astronomers stay up all night watching their telescopes."
Droege's Batavia house obviously is the home base for The Amateur Star Survey. His invention and research spans three floors of his four-story house.
Wires, computers and hardware cover his basement. A narrow spiral staircase leads to the third floor where there are more computers and kitchen cabinets full of computer gadgets. The winding staircase tops out on a tree-top deck perfect for star gazing.
Pretty soon the deck will be the home of "the next generation" camera - a telescope that will enable Droege to see 100 times as many stars as he sees now.
Despite two hip replacements, Droege makes his daily rounds on all floors, turning the telescope on and off and analyzing a night's work with his fellow collaborators via e-mail.
Through computer programs his colleagues have written, TASS members are able to record stars' precise measurements, positions and brightness.
Their goal is to put a catalog over the Internet where people can look up a star and find out how big it is, how bright it is, where it sits in the galaxy and its history.
Droege doesn't know if and when they'll finish the project.
"You'll never be done because you are measuring things that are changing," he said. "It's like you're counting potholes in the streets of Chicago."
Droege has sunk more than $70,000 into this retirement project, which has raised a few eyebrows.
"If I go out and buy a sailboat, people would accept it," he said. "Buying telescopes and giving them out - people say you are nuts."
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