Obituary of Howard Le Vaux

Howard LeVaux died on August 28, 2017 at the age of 84, at home in the arms of his wife, Jean. He was a star gazer, traveler, scientist and consummate outdoorsman. As a young man, Howard spent 15 months in Antarctica, studying the Aurora Australis. LeVaux Peak in Antarctica’s Executive Committee Range is named after him. He returned by sea via Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and Europe. He skied the Alps, the Canadian Rockies, and the Sierra Nevada range, and did technical ascents in the Northern Cascades and elsewhere. Later, he adventured in the rugged mountains of New England with the Sub Sig Outing Club, and skied every line of Tuckerman's Ravine. He met Jean skiing in the Laurentian Mountains near Montreal in 1965; they were married in Cambridge 3 months later. Howard went on to earn a PhD in Astrophysics at Brandeis. They spent a couple of years in Logan, Utah, where he studied the impact of supersonic jet transport on the ozone layer as a faculty researcher at Utah State. In 1978, as Howard was finishing his dissertation on deuterium abundance in planetary nebulae, Jean’s real estate business was taking off. He jumped in with both feet, doing everything from selling houses to building one of the earliest office computer networks. His vision helped set a new standard in the real estate community. An amateur astronomer from an early age, Howard built his first telescope when he was 12. He pursued solar eclipses around the world, viewing totality in Mongolia, Baja, Australia, China, Aruba, Hungary and the U.S. He experienced his final eclipse on August 21, 2017, in Ashburnham, MA, near the wild area of land he had purchased years earlier and spent much of his life tending; he recently put most of it into a conservation easement. Howard continued climbing rocks and mountains, kayaking and running marathons. He bungee jumped from Victoria Bridge in Africa, circumambulated Mt. Kailash in Tibet, dove the Great Barrier Reef, hunted deer in Massachusetts, and elk in Montana. He will be missed by his many outdoor and astronomy buddies, by members of civic and scientific associations like Harvard’s Committee on Microbiological Safety, the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, the conservation community of Ashburnham, and by virtually anyone else who ever knew him or heard his infectious laugh. He is survived by Jean, his loving wife of 52 years, and their sons Ari LeVaux, Stanley, Charles and Howard Letovsky; daughters-in-law Katie, Patricia, and Sharon, and grandchildren Louie and Remy, Emily, Miles and Penelope, and Sasha. Donations in Howard’s honor are welcome to the Cambridge Housing Assistance Fund, www.chafund.org. For information about a future memorial, or to share Howard stories, visit https://www.facebook.com/groups/HowardLeVaux/.