GRAAA Reflections: October 2025

Each month this year, we will share with you a significant image from the GRAAA archives as the group commemorates 70 years of existence in 2025. The images are selected to reveal not only significant history, but also some lighter moments.

In early September, GRAAA was saddened to learn of the passing of Gerald Persha, a longtime former member and friend of the Association. Jerry, who founded the well-known Optec Inc. in Lowell, which builds optical accessory equipment used in observatories worldwide, was also a GRAAA Board member and contributor for several years. He served as Treasurer from about 2005 to 2017, when he relocated to the rarefied air and clear skies of a mountaintop in New Mexico to build both a home and an observatory. There he continued to contentedly make scientifically significant observations, while keeping in touch with old friends back in West Michigan and elsewhere.

Jerry was an important contributor to the technological improvements that came to the Veen Observatory in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In this photo from 2000, Jerry (second from right) oversees installation of the mount for an updated version of the Jeffrey Borr Memorial Telescope in the west dome of Veen Observatory. He was also a contributor to the effort to convert the telescope in the Veen's east dome to one with robotic potential.