On clear nights through Sept. 20, the waxing moon and bright Jupiter will be visible to the naked eye. For closer observation, head to Mount Washington.On those evenings, Dan Peden, a hobbyist astronomer and 30-year member of the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh, will set up a telescope along Grandview Avenue directly across from the Carnegie Library. Weather permitting, passersby are invited to pause and peer into the cosmos. Tomorrow – Sept. 17 – will be a partial lunar eclipse and a full Corn Moon, named such by the Algonquin tribes because September’s full moon coincided with the gathering time of pumpkins, beans and corn. The moon will put on a show for the next three nights.Peden and his telescope have been a fixture along Grandview for years (when he invites a young woman to look at the moon, she says with a laugh, “I have, you’re always here!”). His role on Mount Washington isn’t a childhood dream fully realized, though. Peden earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from St. Vincent College in 1977. In fact, he came to astronomy as an adult, more than 30 years ago, on a clear night in the city.“Look at it! That’s so cool! Dad, can you see it?” says Ava Lijewski as she views the moon along Grandview Avenue. Lijewski, a student at PA Cyber, her father Matt Lijewski and Ava’s friend Miley Sibert, a Carrick student, right, stopped to chat moon and stars with Dan Peden, center, last week. Photo by Katherine Mansfield.“I was a city paramedic,” he says. “We were driving through the South Side one night, this is probably 1990, and there was a guy with a telescope set up in front of Primanti Brothers on Carson Street and another guy on the other corner across from him. We stopped and said, ‘What are you doing?’”The men were with the AAAP. One was looking at the moon, the other, Jupiter.“They told me about this club,” Peden says. A couple days later, he attended the group’s monthly star party (then held at South Park) and joined that night. “Soon after that, I bought a telescope,” he says.At the time, Peden worked an inconsistent schedule, and had difficulty attending the AAAP’s monthly star parties (which are still held one weekend each month at the organization’s Wagman and Mingo observatories, in Deer Park and Mingo Creek County Park, respectively. They are free and open to the public).“In frustration, I ended up coming up here,” Peden, who lives in Brookline, says. “Back in 2010, one day, it was a weekday, there were no star parties going on, but the sky was clear, the moon was up. ”I thought, hey, I’m just gonna go up to Grandview and see what happens. I came up here and that started this.”“When I was a kid, I had no interest in science,” Dan Peden says, eyes scanning the sky for a break in the clouds. “I love showing kids. I always think about, like, when I was 8, 9, 10 years old, if I’d been walking down the street one day and some guy had had a telescope set up, showing stuff, whether that would have had some kind of effect on me or not.” Photo by Katherine Mansfield.He’s been stargazing and planet chasing atop Mount Washington ever since.His work is a continuation of a long tradition of sidewalk astronomy. The earliest accounts of this public service date to the 1870s, when William F. Grosser took to the streets of Los Angeles and invited the public to see what most had never seen before through his telescope. In the 1930s, Frank Manning set up a telescope along New Orleans’s bustling streets. But it was a San Franciscan who, in 1967, put sidewalk astronomy on the map.“The guy who invented the mount for this telescope,” Peden says, pointing to his own device, “his name was John Dobson. A lot of stuff, he got out of dumpsters, and the only thing he had to buy was an eyepiece. Cost him about $10 back then. He would take his telescope out on the streets of San Francisco and say, ‘Hey, anybody want to look at the moon?’”The moon, minutes later, through an iPhone lens looking through Dan Peden’s telescope along Grandview Avenue. Photo by Dan Peden.Today, the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers, which Dobson co-founded, is the largest sidewalk astronomy organization in the world. Globally, for-profit and nonprofit groups set up equipment in parks, parking lots, fields and sidewalks to share the cosmos with the public.More than 50 people pause to gaze up through Peden’s telescope on a Monday night as he recounts some of his most memorable interactions. Peden has borne witness to centenarians viewing the moon up close for the first time, craters and all. He’s watched kids’ eyes widen when they see Saturn’s rings (passing out astronomy literature to the most interested kids). Some people are moved to comment; others, rendered speechless. Some ask questions, which Peden, who traded in his once-beloved fiction novels for books on astronomy, relativity and physics, is more than happy to answer. One instance that sticks in Peden’s memory is one of a couple and their teenage daughter’s experience.“She came and looked in the telescope and she looked up and she said, ‘I see the moon.’ Her mother very quickly walked all the way down to that bench down here and sat down and started crying,” Peden says, motioning to the bench a few yards away. “I had no idea what was going on. The daughter, she was autistic, nonverbal. Apparently, that’s the first time that either [parent] had ever heard her speak in about a year.”As Peden interacts with a group of young adults, his eyes shining bright while he explains the positioning of Saturn’s rings, it’s clear that this – sharing his passion for celestial bodies – is more than just a hobby. It’s his biggest joy.“To me, that’s the best thing in life, is when you’re able to, you have something you can share it with other people and you haven’t lost anything,” he says, repositioning his telescope for a better view of tonight’s crescent moon. “I just love doing it. I think everybody should give their little bit back to society.”Pittsburghers can visit Dan Peden, sidewalk astronomer, along Grandview Avenue on every clear evening through Sept. 20. He’ll be there again Oct. 9-18 and Nov. 8-15. To learn more about the AAAP, visit their website, or follow them on Facebook or Instagram.The post Sidewalk astronomer shares stellar cosmic views from atop Mt. Washington appeared first on NEXTpittsburgh.