Howard Sims is an 83 year-old man from Comer, Georgia, who found an affinity for astronomy long before he even knew what astronomy was. As a small child in the 1940s, he would often lie in a field that yielded no more than $500 worth of cotton a year for him and his family. In those quiet moments, Sims said he would look up at the sky and wonder what was up there.
Sims is holding his personal model of the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of the dozens astronomical models he collects.
Sims was 17 when he saw his first telescope after he and his family moved from Comer to Chicago. They visited the Alder Planetarium within his first month in the city.
"I had to build one (a telescope). I asked the people who worked there how, and they placed a book with instructions in my hands. They told me to read chapters one through six twice over, and then I would know how. So I did."
Sims' observatory that he started to build in 2001 and finished in 2002. The dome rotates 360 degrees, is 18 feet tall, and can comfortably hold ten people.
Sims learned how to grind glass together to make the mirrors necessary for telescopic lenses around the same time that he began working as a glass sign manufacturer at the Beeco Technology Company. During that time the dream to build his own observatory began to take root. He decided he would move back to Comer where there was less light pollution and build an observatory when he retired. An observatory is essentially a room equipped with a telescope and other scientific materials for the study of astronomical phenomena.
Sims built his first telescope in 1962. Seven years later, Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. Dissatisfied with the distance that his first telescope could reach, Sims built this 300 pound telescope in 1974.
Though it is daytime, Sims is adjusting the telescope to focus on soda cans he nailed to a tree roughly a mile away.
True to his desire, on the day of his sixty-fifth birthday Sims retired. He has always loved working with his hands, and retirement allotted him more time to partner his skills in glassmaking with his passion for astronomy.
According to Data USA, 96.8 percent of astronomers and physicists in the American work force are white or Asian. There are only 92 working astronomers and physicists over the age of 80 in the United States. Sims was never a paid or commissioned astronomer and is completely self taught. He finished his formal education in the eleventh grade in a one room school where his teachers did not know how to use a typewriter.
Sims invited Dr. Loris Magnani, a professor of astronomy at the University of Georgia, to visit his observatory. Sims made an impression on Magnani that he has remembered in the ten years since that visit.
“For an amateur astronomer, he is about as good as it gets,” Magnani said. “He could get an A in my class without breaking a sweat.”
In comparison to the telescopes at the UGA Physics department, Magnani said that Sims’ are “little gems in relation to our functional behemoths.” Though they are smaller in size, Magnani says that Sims’ telescopes are perfect to suit Sims’ personal interests.
“We are asking different questions overall. Sims is interested in what he sees and how to improve in seeing it, whereas I am more on the theoretical side of things,” Magnani said.
Above: A model of the Solar System that Sims made out of items such as modeling clay, erasers, and scrap metal. Below, Left: A model of the moon's affect on the tides Sims made out of a golf ball. Below, Right: Sims speculates over the most dangerous asteroid that hit the Earth and projects when another will strike.