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Astronomer Taught Students To Reach For The Stars

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By KURT LOFT, The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 8, 2008

TAMPA - He made the stars twinkle for thousands of area students and put the cosmos in perspective for their parents. He brought the most complex theories down to earth and soared in spirit with every rocket launched into orbit.

Joseph Carr, a Tampa astronomer and director of the old University of South Florida Planetarium, died Friday after a long illness. He was 87.

"He loved teaching, and he was always enthusiastic about it," his wife, Anita, said Monday.

Carr was a local fixture in the world of astronomy, and kept busy with space science issues long after his retirement in 1990, the year before the planetarium closed. Seldom was he idle in the big domed building, which he called his "personal workshop."

Every day, he unveiled the night sky to schoolchildren, university students and inquisitive visitors. Using an old but dependable Spitz sky projector, he re-created the heavens in vivid detail, from the neighboring moon to the most distant quasar. Each year, he gave 450 planetarium programs for 25,000 visitors, and no two lectures were the same.

"I love my job, I really get a kick out of it," he once told the Tribune. "Nothing makes me feel better than if people ask questions and want to learn a little."

While he had a short fuse with unruly students, he could hold a curious audience in awe with his imaginative presentations, said Carol Williams, who last month retired after 40 years as a USF professor of mathematics.

"He was a folksy, down-home chatty guy who seemed like your best friend the minute you met him," she said from her home in Palm Harbor. "He had sayings and witticism that I wish he had written in a book."

Carr's love of astronomy began at age 7, when he peered through a telescope at a county fair in South Dakota. "It was aimed at Saturn," he said, "and I was amazed at what I saw."

During World War II, he specialized in radios with the Army Signal Corps, and at one point was stationed at Tampa's Drew Field - now MacDill Air Force Base. After the war, he earned an master's in physics at the University of Minnesota, where he taught astronomy.

Carr celebrated his 40th birthday with a new job as astronomy professor at the University of South Florida: the day it opened on Sept. 26, 1960. Four years later, be became the one-and-only director of the planetarium, a position he would hold for 26 years.

He not only ran all planetarium shows, he built much of the equipment by hand. A licensed electrician, watchmaker and insatiable tinkerer, he created an unusual lantern slide projector out of spare parts from government surplus stores and flea markets. He also invented a zoom projector that created the effect of traveling from one planet to another.

"The thing I admired about him is he did all his own astronomy programs," Williams said. "Most are canned software programs that you buy. He refused to do that."

Over the years, Carr's collection of knickknacks, clocks, motors and optical devices spilled over from his office to his home.

"And now I don't know what I'm going to do with everything," his wife said.

Reporter Kurt Loft can be reached at (813) 259-7570 or kloft@tampatrib.com.

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