Astronomy column ‘Star Trak’ attracts readers 32 years later

Hal Kibbey knows the answer to, “What is that bright thing up there in the sky?”

“No, it’s not a UFO,” he said. “It’s the planet Jupiter.”

Kibbey is the writer behind the monthly astronomy column Star Trak, which has been published for the last 32 years.

Written for the “average person taking trash out to the curb,” Kibbey said, the column is published by IU News Room, the Herald-Times and as a stand-alone newsletter.

It started in 1979 when Kibbey, who completed his graduate studies in physics at IU, was hired by the University as a science writer.

The column he inherited was different from Star Trak of today.

It was a weekly report faculty members of the astronomy department would take turns writing, and it wasn’t written for publication, but for the department’s records.

“So, the first thing I did without knowing what else to do was simply put that in the form of a news release to the extent that it was news and send it out,” Kibbey said.

A professor who would be out of town the week he was to write the reports approached Kibbey.

“He said, ‘I have to be out of town next week, even though I’m supposed to do this, and it seems to me that you could probably handle it yourself,’” he recalled.

“And the faculty liked the result well enough that they said, ‘Why don’t you just keep on doing it?’”

From then on, Star Trak was Kibbey’s project.

The faculty members used to draw basic information for Star Trak from a magazine called Sky and Telescope.

Kibbey said he was surprised to discover that was their source of information, but he believes the magazine does a “fine job,” and he still uses it.

Soon after Kibbey took responsibility for Star Trak, he made it a monthly publication, and the column gained popularity among readers.

“There is a scientist in Chile who is an amateur astronomer and a physicist by profession,” he said.

“I got an email from him years ago asking if it would be okay with me if he could translate my column into Spanish and then redistribute it to a list of Spanish-speaking readers ... so it’s been a nice way of reaching an awful lot of people, certainly far beyond what I thought of when I first started doing it.”

The column has become “an important part of the astronomy department’s outreach effort,” said Catherine Pilachowski, the Daniel Kirkwood chair in astronomy.

“People like to know what’s going on in the sky, what they’re seeing in the morning or in the evening,” she said. “Hal’s column does that in a beautiful way.”

Kibbey said he continues to write Star Trak because there is still an audience.

“What’s interesting to me is that it’s still of interest to some people,” he said.

“After all these years, with all this specialized stuff, anyone who wants to can go on the Internet and get as much high-tech information as they want from all over the world, and yet they still like to read my column, which is kind of nice.”