Look Back ... to stargazing at JSU, 1999

Jan. 22—Jan. 22, 1949: The date fell on a Saturday during a 12-year period (1940-52) when The Star didn't publish on that day of the week.

Jan. 22, 1999, in The Star: Astronomy students hope stars will be shining brightly for the grand reopening of the planetarium and observatory tonight at Jacksonville State University. The public is welcome to the event at 7 p.m. at Martin Hall. Until recently, the stars have been hidden from view at the planetarium/observatory, which was shuttered and almost forgotten for more than a decade. Two relatively new professors, Laura Weinkauf and Doug Rokke, have done the lion's share of the work getting the equipment cleaned up and functional again. Also this date: An Oxford resident named "Joseph" who didn't want his last name used in a news article says he estimates his family has spent around $30,000 to get ready for the crisis anticipated by the "Y2K" bug. Joseph and his wife are storing food and water for themselves and their two children. They have invested in solar panels, purchased generators for their home and bought "lots" of guns. Joseph has never hunted, but he intends to learn. "Security's gonna be the big measure," he said, having noticed that no one else in their Oxford neighborhood were making similar Y2K preparations. "I don't know what's wrong with them," Joseph said. Pretty soon, he added, the family will move to Jacksonville, where he's bought a 20-acre farm. The reason for their alarm is that some segments of U.S. society are pretty sure the coming of the new millennium will bring long-term power outages, utility failures and the collapse of banks, all because of a computer network that might not be able to adapt to a new protocol for affixing dates to data.