The famous Canadian astronomers  Dr. David Levy has donated a digital facsimile of his complete personal observational archive to the RASC, to be made available to all those interested in astronomy and Dr. Levy's stellar career and achievements.

Dr. Roy Bishop, a long-time personal friend and mentor of Dr. Levy's has provided an introduction to this rich resource (David Levy and his Observing Logs), and the RASC Archivist, R.A. Rosenfeld, discusses Dr. Levy's logbooks in their historical context (David Levy’s Logbooks in Context). Dr. Levy's intention is to make this resource freely available to amateur astronomers, historians of astronomy and science, and others everywhere for fair, non-commercial use (see below).

Dr. Levy reflects on the genesis of the project as follows:

"Not long ago, my wife Wendee and I asked our daughter Nanette if she would like to undertake the challenge or digitizing all of my observing archive, which begins in the mid-1950s with the sighting of the Big Dipper, and later of a single meteor, at Twin Lake Camp in Vermont. Session No. 1 records the October 2, 1959 partial solar eclipse visible from near my childhood home in Montreal. Nanette has done a superb job, completing the task over the course of a year.That morning session in 1959 was the first of more than sixteen thousand observing sessions held over more than half a century. It is my hope that members of the RASC and visitors to the RASC website will be able to read, study, and enjoy this archive, and that it will help inspire them to keep records of their own observing sessions. In my view, observations not recorded are not observations. Observations that are recorded can stay alive indefinitely. May you all enjoy this archive".

This is a novel project for the institutions involved, although astronomical archives of one sort or another have been available in electronic form for some time (http://dc.zah.uni-heidelberg.de/lswscans/res/positions/fullplates/form). The David Levy Logbooks are an evolving project, a "living archive" as it were, for the accumulation of records from Jarnac is ongoing, the older logbooks are still regularly consulted and used by David in his work, and this website itself will be periodically added to, upgraded, and renewed.

As well it marks our participation in the healthy trend towards the open availability of the sources for doing science, which has marked some of the best initiatives of the AAVSO (http://www.aavso.org/aavso-research-portal), Zooniverse (http://www.zooniverse.org/), and some ESA and NASA missions. It is also intended to model one solution to ensuring the longevity and availability of amateur observational archives, an important resource which is under threat (see Preserving the Past: Averting the crisis in Amateur Astronomical History and Heritage on this page). In concert with Dr. Levy we welcome you to the David Levy Logbooks, and invite you to explore this resource.

Source: Royal Astronomical Society of Canada