Presidents Day has evolved from a specific salute to the countrys first commander in chief, George Washington, to a broad celebration of all the chief executives and their accomplishments. Most of them have exhibited a wide range of interests and many demonstrated a curiosity about, if not aptitude for, the sciences. In the area of astronomy alone, presidents have looked to the skies for various reasons, from trying to gain a basic understanding of the workings of our universe, to metaphorically explaining the state of the union and establishing the countrys prominence in science and technology.

This interest in celestial matters began with George Washington himself, who as a surveyor became proficient in collecting accurate astronomical data. Perhaps not surprisingly, Washingtons fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, took an active interest in astronomical matters, from directing Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to use celestial navigation in fixing the coordinates of rivers they explored during their perilous Corps of Discovery Expedition, to making his own observations. Once, while suffering through a bout of rheumatism, he passed the time by observing the Sun and calculating the longitude of his residence. On September 17, 1811, he witnessed an annular solar eclipse with a refracting telescope and recorded the timing of each stage of the event. He also observed and commented on Uranus and double stars and even included an observatory in his design for the University of Virginia.

Jefferson is remembered as one of our most learned presidents, a true Renaissance man. President John Kennedy famously commented on this at an April 29, 1962, gathering of Nobel Prize winners at the White House. During his welcoming speech, Kennedy said, I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

Kennedy himself pointed his eyes to the heavens, galvanizing the country to work together in the name of national and ideological pride to send humans to the Moon. Kennedy was one of our more charismatic leaders and, on a sweltering day at Rice University on September 12, 1962, he gave a speech that left no doubt about his view on the importance of this quest.

The most poignant part of Kennedys speech read:

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people...There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the Moon! ... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win

A century before Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln incorporated his memory of a spectacular meteor shower (probably the Leonid Meteor Shower of 1833, which one observer estimated peaked at 100,000 meteors per hour!) into a comment about the troubled nation. The story was later recounted by poet Walt Whitman in his 1882 book, Specimen Days & Collect:

As is well known, story-telling was often with President Lincoln a weapon which he employed with great skill. Very often he could not give a point-blank reply or comment and these indirections, (sometimes funny, but not always so,) were probably the best responses possible. In the gloomiest period of the war, he had a call from a large delegation of bank presidents. In the talk after business was settled, one of the big Dons asked Mr. Lincoln if his confidence in the permanency of the Union was not beginning to be shaken whereupon the homely President told a little story. When I was a young man in Illinois, said he, I boarded for a time with a Deacon of the Presbyterian church. One night I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door, & I heard the Deacons voice exclaiming Arise, Abraham, the day of judgment has come! I sprang from my bed & rushed to the window, and saw the stars falling in great showers! But looking back of them in the heavens I saw all the grand old constellations with which I was so well acquainted, fixed and true in their places. Gentlemen, the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now.

Lincoln also looked to astronomy for respite from the stresses of the crumbling nation. On several occasions, he sneaked away from the White House to peer through a telescope at the United States Naval Observatory (USNO), then located in Washington, D.Cs Foggy Bottom area, just north of where the memorial to Lincoln would one day be built.

The USNO is one of the oldest agencies of scientific research in the United States. Like Percival Lowells observatory here in Flagstaff, the USNO sprouted from the mind of an amateur astronomer from Massachusetts. His name was John Quincy Adams, yet another president who looked to the skies in the name of curiosity, knowledge, and national pride.

Kevin Schindler is the Lowell Observatory historian

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View from Mars Hill: Astronomy often a hobby and fascination of presidents - Arizona Daily Sun