Ron Dantowitz is director of the Clay Center Observatory at
Dexter and Southfield Schools in Brookline, Massachusetts.

His primary interests are astronomy education and developing
techniques for ultra-high resolution telescopic imaging. He has long collaborated with Meade Telescopes, where the company provided his team with optics for his special projects that included the high-resolution video that was watched by over 1 billion people around the world of Space Ship One's historic flights into space to claim the
X PRIZE. He was interviewed about this landmark accomplishment by Melissa Block on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

Dantowitz has been fascinated with the stars since he was eleven years old, when he pointed his brother's toy telescope skyward and “discovered” the Orion Nebula. Immediately, Ron developed a child-size version of aperture fever, and wanted (he would say “needed”) a larger telescope with which to explore the heavens. When Ron's parents gave him an optically perfect Cave 8” f/6 Newtonian for his 13th birthday, it began his obsession to see and record the sharpest lunar and planetary features possible. His quest for sharp images continues to this day,
twenty-five years after having taken his first astrophoto.

In 1988, after receiving his Aeronautical Engineering degree and completing a year of work at NASA, Ron took a position at the Charles Hayden Planetarium, at the Boston Museum of Science. It was at the Museum's Gilliland Observatory where Ron began developing techniques for high resolution astronomical imaging using video. The techniques he uses and the images he has achieved have been published in
scientific journals, magazines, astronomy textbooks, encyclopedias, newspapers, and television programs. His special interest is in imaging orbiting satellites at high resolution through the telescope, although the video techniques he uses also work well on “conventional” solar system targets. Ron's efforts have produced some of the
sharpest ground-based optical images of the moon and planets to date, with resolutions approaching 0.1 second of arc.

Ron's goal is to encourage both amateurs and professionals to use video as a serious imaging tool. To this end, he has tested video cameras on telescopes ranging from 4” to 100” aperture, and the results have been very promising. In the May 2000 Astronomical
Journal, Ron published a peer-reviewed paper with the world's first high-resolution images of Mercury, showing impacts and maria on the planet's “unseen” hemisphere. As you may have guessed, an inexpensive off-the-shelf video camera was used in this research.