This is the website of Robert Martin Ayers. It includes both the "Robert Martin Ayers Sciences Fund" and the personal webpage of the proprietor, Robert Ayers.
I, the proprietor and manager of the Sciences Fund, graduated from Harvard in 1962 with a degree in astronomy. I went into aerospace and the then-new field of computer science -- first with General Electric's "Missiles and Space" division, later with Xerox Corp (ex-SDS computer division, then office systems at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto), Digital Equipment's "Systems Research Center", and Adobe Systems.
Retiring from Adobe in 2006, I decided to aid an area that I had been interested in for several years: the role of astronomy in education. There were three main factors:
I had been interested in astronomy since I was a teen.
The "National Observatory" of the United States based at Kitt Peak Arizona, originally was chartered to support the astronomy activities of the smaller colleges and universities in the United States. But, starting around 1990, they decided to join the "giant telescope" bandwagon and they poured their (taxpayer) funding into new large telescopes and shed their support for the one-meter class telescopes that had been supporting the smaller college's research and PhD programs. I found the lack of support for "smaller" telescopes to be unfortunate.
Several educational organizations had discovered that astronomy could play a role in science education in the secondary schools. Teens are interested in astronomy, and space-based classroom acivities can introduce them to physics, statistics, and other related areas. These organizations include "Hands on Universe" and "Telescopes in Education". Also NASA outreach programs and, in Great Britian, the Faulkes Foundation.
I have a longer bio elsewhere on this site.
The sciences fund was initially created with Adobe stock ("Thanks, John and Chuck!") and exists to encourage astronomy and science research, especially as it relates to education. The fund is not a large one: its grants have ranged from four-figures to six-figures.
To learn more about the sorts of activity that the fund hopes to support, read the page about the fund's criteria.
The fund's current activities include these:
Working with Lowell Observatory to rebuild a forty-inch Boller and Chivens telescope acquired from Northwestern. This telescope will be operatable over the internet and fifteen percent of its time will be available to outside organizations and individuals for astronomical observations.
Working with the PROMPT telescope consortium, based at UNC Chapel Hill, to make the consortium's four robotic telescopes in Chile available to researchers and educators. To learn more about this, visit the PROMPT website and examine the proposal form.
Working with the AAVSO to create "APASS", a homogeneous whole-sky photometric survey in five bandpasses down to magnitude 17. This multi-year project has just been funded (February 2009) and is in the process of acquiring equipment.
You can find a complete list at the grants page.
Separate from the above is my long interest in amateur astronomy: star-watching. I became interested in the ninth grade when my parents bought me a Criterion four-inch reflector and I have been interested ever since.
I currently live in the light-polluted San Francisco Bay area, alas. My "dark sky" site is about 90 miles southeast of San Jose, at the 3000 feet elevation near the tops of the Diablo Range, where I own forty acres of off-grid grassland. Persons in the bay area who might like to observe from this site are welcome to read the site's webpage and contact me. Also, while looking for a good site, I examined a number of locations in San Benito and Monterey counties and further south; persons looking for a dark-sky site might read my page about observing sites and microwave relay sites.
At my site I have an eight-inch "bent" short refractor with a flip-mirror switch to a four-inch. This is similar to the "bent" six-inch that was the subject of Gary Seronik's column in Sky and Telescope of December 2006 (PDF). I use this scope a lot at low powers with nebula filters. I also have a Questar Seven, ex-spook, that I use for higher magnifications, mostly on solar system objects.
Now retired, I have been looking for a more astronomy-friendly location than the Bay Area. I have explored north Arizona and central-west New Mexico. I may purchase a really dark-sky site in the desert if I can decide whether I want a part-time observing site, a remote-operated imaging site, or a residence-with-observatory.
When trying to convert from galactic l,b coordinates to various "equinox of date" coordinates, I became frustrated that available Internet tools required multiple steps.
So I wrote a Javascript program for coordinate conversions. You can find it at my 'tools' page along with other small tools I may create.
Individuals or groups with interests in this area are encouraged to contact me.
I can be reached via email as "bob" at this dot-org domain. Or at astroayers@gmail.com