The First Astronomical Society of Malaysia
How We Founded a National Astronomy Movement (1979–1986)
By Lim Ju Boo
Some journeys begin in universities. Mine began beside a village water well.
Long before I became a medical researcher at the Institute for Medical Research (IMR), and long before I calculated eclipses or wrote an official report for the Ministry of Science, I was simply a schoolboy in Batu Pahat captivated by the night sky.
Almost every morning at about five o'clock, before cycling to school with my Punjabi classmate, I helped his cowherd family milk their cows. We slept among the cattle and bathed under the open sky beside a village well before sunrise.
Those were wonderfully dark skies.
Hundreds of stars glittered overhead, while the Milky Way stretched across the heavens like a luminous river.
As a boy I often asked myself:
Are there other worlds out there? Could life exist beyond Earth?
Those questions never left me.
Many years later they would lead me to help establish what became Malaysia's first national astronomy society.
For readers interested in those early memories, I later wrote about them in my blog article, Beyond Numbers: When the Universe Silences the Mind – Are We Alone?
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A Newspaper Advertisement Changed Everything
In 1979, a young lady named Lisa Shee placed a small advertisement in the Malay Mail, inviting anyone interested in astronomy to contact her.
Curious, I telephoned her and asked how many people had replied.
Her answer astonished me.
"Countless hundreds."
It was immediately obvious that we needed a large venue where everyone could meet.
Lisa told me that one of the respondents was Ms Shameen, a nursing tutor at the University Hospital, University of Malaya. I suggested that she arrange the University Hospital auditorium for our first gathering.
She did.
None of us realised that day would become part of Malaysian astronomy history.
Among those present was Mohamad Shah from the Malay Mail. Whether he attended as an astronomy enthusiast or as a journalist, I never knew. But his presence would later help bring astronomy into national public attention.
Becoming the First President
When the meeting began, someone had to chair it.
After some discussion, Lisa proposed that I should do so because I had earlier shared my lifelong fascination with astronomy.
I accepted, somewhat reluctantly.
After explaining what astronomy was about and discussing what the society could become, the audience decided to establish a national astronomy society.
They elected me as the Pro-tem Chairman and first President of the Astronomical Society of Malaysia (ASM).
Our founding committee consisted of:
Position | Name |
President | Dr Lim Ju Boo |
Vice-President | Dudley J. Batzer (Mining Engineer) |
Secretary | Tan Cheng Sin |
Assistant Secretary | Ir Tan Seng Khoon (Civil Engineer) |
Treasurer | Ms Shameen |
Council Members | Five Pro-tem Council Members |
We then proceeded to register the society with the Registrar of Societies.
That was how the Astronomical Society of Malaysia was born.
Bringing Astronomy to Ordinary Malaysians
What followed became one of the busiest periods of my life.
After completing my work each day as a medical researcher at IMR, I spent many evenings leading astronomy sessions at Gasing Hill in Petaling Jaya.
At first I simply introduced people to the constellations.
Then I taught them the names of the brighter stars.
Soon they wanted to know the legends behind Orion, Scorpius and Cassiopeia, the science behind stellar evolution, and eventually the physics behind the origin of the universe itself.
As interest grew, I began giving regular lectures at the University Hospital auditorium on:
Astrophysics
Stellar evolution
Cosmology
Theories of the origin of the universe
Practical observational astronomy
What had started as a hobby was becoming a national educational movement.
The Greatest Challenge: Predicting Eclipses
The real test came during the mid-1980s.
Malaysia was about to experience several important solar and lunar eclipses.
As President of ASM, reporters kept asking me one simple question.
"When exactly will the eclipse begin?"
Today anyone can obtain eclipse timings instantly from Google.
Back then there were no home computers, no internet, and no astronomical software.
Only books.
And mathematics. I was fortunate to have a love for mathematics and physics. I have studied physics and mathematics at Aligarh Muslim University. But celestial mathematics was new to me. It was a challenge for me.
Before then, eclipse calculations in Malaya had been associated with distinguished scholars such as Professor Tan Sri Sir Alexander Oppenheim, the renowned British mathematician who became the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malaya.
Now the responsibility rested upon a Malaysian.
I immediately bought two invaluable books:
1. Practical Astronomy with Your Calculator by Peter Duffett-Smith
2. Mathematical Astronomy with a Pocket Calculator by Aubrey Jones
Then I took two weeks' leave from IMR.
I retreated to my parents-in-law's home in Raub, Pahang.
There, while my wife and young son slept peacefully, I worked through endless pages of celestial mathematics until dawn broke each morning.
For nearly ten days I calculated, recalculated and checked every figure repeatedly.
Failure was not an option.
If my predictions proved wrong, it would embarrass not only me but also the young society we had built.
The Ten Longest Minutes of My Life
When the evening of the 28 October 1985 Total Lunar Eclipse finally arrived, hundreds of people gathered. Members of ASM stood beside me, while journalists waited with their notebooks ready. Everything now depended on whether my calculations were correct.
The appointed time came.
Nothing happened.
One minute passed.
Then another.
Those few minutes felt like the longest of my life. I feared that I had let down not only myself but also the Astronomical Society of Malaysia, because this was the first time a Malaysian had publicly calculated and announced the timing of a major eclipse.
Then, about ten minutes later, the edge of the Earth's shadow finally touched the Moon.
The crowd burst into applause and cheers. Relief flooded through me. The eclipse had begun almost exactly as predicted—but with an unexpected delay of about ten minutes.
When I returned home near dawn, I was determined to discover why.
I checked every page of my calculations again.
Eventually I found the answer.
In my race against the approaching eclipse, I had omitted several of the finer astronomical corrections—the tiny refinements that account for subtle differences in the Moon's motion and the Earth's geometry. Individually they seemed insignificant, but together they amounted to about ten minutes.
I had simply run out of time.
The newspapers were pressing for an answer, the eclipse was approaching rapidly, and the public was waiting.
That experience became my greatest lesson in practical astronomy.
For every subsequent eclipse, I incorporated all those mathematical refinements into my calculations. From then onwards, every eclipse prediction matched the observed timing with remarkable accuracy—right down to the last second.
Standing beneath the night sky that morning, I realised something profound.
The universe keeps time with extraordinary precision.
If we are patient enough to do the mathematics carefully, it quietly reveals its own timetable.
When Kuala Lumpur Looked Up
The partial solar eclipses attracted even larger crowds.
We gathered on the Padang in front of the Royal Selangor Club, near the High Court and the famous Kuala Lumpur Clock Tower.
Hundreds of members of the public arrived—not because anyone had organised a demonstration—but simply because they wanted to witness the heavens.
For a moment I even wondered whether the police might misunderstand the gathering.
Fortunately everyone had come for exactly the same reason.
To watch the Sun.
Halley's Comet Changed My Life
Nothing prepared me for Halley's Comet.
When it returned during 1985–1986, my office telephone became almost unusable.
Every few minutes another call arrived.
They came from newspapers, radio stations, television, schools, members of the public, and even overseas callers from Indonesia and Iran.
At night I conducted observing sessions throughout Kuala Lumpur and Gasing Hill.
The crowds became enormous.
Eventually I sought permission from the Director of IMR to use the Institute's grounds for public observing sessions because public demand had become overwhelming.
Looking back, Halley's Comet marked the busiest and most memorable period of my life as an amateur astronomer.
Writing an Official Government Report
The extraordinary public response attracted the attention of Tan Sri Datuk Amar Stephen Yong Kuet Tze, then Minister of Science, Technology and Environment.
I was temporarily seconded from the Ministry of Health and IMR to the Ministry of Science for three months.
My task was to prepare an official government publication documenting the comet.
The result became:
"Halley's Comet, 1985–1986."
Published around 1987, it entered the Ministry's library collection as an official record of one of the greatest astronomical events witnessed in Malaysia.
Passing the Torch
After the Halley's Comet years, I stepped down as President of ASM.
The presidency passed to Dr Chong Siew Meng, a histopathologist from the Faculty of Medicine, National University of Malaysia (UKM). He later migrated to Singapore, where he became a Senior Consultant Histopathologist at the National University Hospital and remained actively involved in astronomy, eventually becoming a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in London before his passing.
As for me, life eventually led me back to further academic pursuits, including my doctoral studies in medicine (PhD) in London.
Looking Back
Today, the original Astronomical Society of Malaysia that we founded has long ceased operating in its original form. Like many voluntary organisations, it eventually reached a point where there were too few people willing to carry its responsibilities forward.
But I do not regard that as the end of the story.
What mattered was that, for a brief and remarkable period, thousands of Malaysians looked up together.
Children learned the constellations.
Families watched eclipses.
Journalists reported the wonders of the heavens.
Halley's Comet inspired an entire generation.
Whenever I look at a clear night sky, I still remember that village water well in Batu Pahat, Johore where I was born and where I used to bathe beneath an open sky and witness the wonders of the Milky Way like a river of lights overhead from horizon to horizon, and the young boy who wondered whether life existed beyond Earth.
In many ways, Malaysia's first astronomy movement began with that question.
And perhaps every astronomer begins in exactly the same way—with wonder.
That is my story.
With warm love from me to all
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