Wastin’ away in deep space — Jimmy Buffett’s telescopes gifted to local stargazing club 

Astronomical Society of the Palm Beaches accepts four telescopes from late musician, now seeks permanent home in Palm Beach County.

Some local stargazers are attempting to launch a moonshot: finding a home and observatory for their amateur astronomers club.  

Leading their mission: the late Jimmy Buffett.

Wastin’ away again in Margaritaville? Wastin’ away in deep space was the laid-back tropical rocker’s bigger dream before he died in 2023. Besides making music and building an entertainment empire, Buffett piloted airplanes, befriended astronauts, attended shuttle launches, beamed a concert to the International Space Station and wrote a song about Neil Armstrong.

Still searching for that lost shaker of salt, the Palm Beach resident searched the skies, too, a music star who gazed at actual ones and distant galaxies through his collection of sophisticated telescopes.

“He spent countless hours setting the telescopes up and getting them to work properly,” said Darin Hinson, a West Palm Beach teacher who worked as Buffett’s personal assistant for the last 25 years of the musician’s life. “He was a kid in the candy store, he was having so much fun.”

More than two years after his death, four of Buffett’s telescopes have landed with the Astronomical Society of the Palm Beaches, a gift from the singer’s estate that has reinvigorated the club’s longtime wish upon a star for a permanent home. 

The local amateur astronomers are hoping the donation will spark community interest and help raise money to build a modest observatory in Palm Beach County where the Buffett telescopes and others can be shared with the public.

They don’t have a site yet, but they have a potential name: The Jimmy Buffett Memorial Observatory.

“The quality of these scopes is remarkable. They should be great for the club members who want to learn basic astrophotography,” said ASPB President Bob Barr.

The club is starting to spread word about the donation and the club’s push for a permanent home. On Jan. 31, at Winding Waters Natural Area in West Palm Beach, Barr brought one of the Buffett telescopes to the Palm Beach County Natural Areas Festival. The club collected 105 names on a petition of support for an observatory. 

“My hope,” Barr said, “is that Jimmy’s story and his telescopes will help generate more enthusiasm in the community for our night skies and help us obtain an observatory site and building.”

Scopes valued at more than $20,000

Barr and other club members have long been fans of Buffett’s music. But until Hinson reached out to them for the first time last year with the donation, they had no idea that the man who wrote “Margaritaville” and  “Cheeseburger in Paradise” was a fellow amateur stargazer.

Used by Buffett for deep-space astrophotography in the final years of his life, the telescopes “are not set up for easy public viewing, but they can be used for demonstration purposes,” said Barr, who may soon use them to host an astrophotography class.   

Valued at more than $20,000, the scopes are stored at the homes of a few club members. A dedicated home for the club would “allow us to keep his telescope collection together, along with other donated telescopes,” Barr said. 

Active informally since the 1960s, the club, which incorporated with the state as the ASPB in 1986, has about 180 dues-paying members today. But it has led a somewhat nomadic existence because it has never had a general base of operations. 

In 2009, members started holding monthly meetings at what is now the Cox Science Center and Aquarium in West Palm Beach, where they brought their personal telescopes to support the center’s public night sky observing events. 

Barr said the astronomy club in 2022 helped design and assemble the center’s 10-inch refractor telescope. 

But the science center since 2024 has been undergoing a $140 million expansion that when complete (estimated in 2027) may no longer accommodate the ASPB, he said.

Aim: observatory with a rolling roof

Despite those limitations, the club has managed to offer a robust public outreach program. Using their personal telescopes, members host public stargazing events wherever they can get permission — from the parking lots of libraries and bars to natural areas such as Pine Glades west of Jupiter. They also offer educational programs with schools and community groups. 

That outreach, listed on the club’s events calendar, caught Hinson’s attention one day about 18 months after Buffett died when he went online looking for a good home for the singer’s telescopes. 

“I knew Jimmy would want people to use them. I liked what I read about you and thought you could do great things with them,” Hinson told club members at the society’s monthly meeting in November.

Buffett owned seven telescopes when he died. His three children each took one. The other four, geared for astrophotography, are more complicated to operate.

“We could have tried to sell them and made some money,” Hinson said, “but I went to Jimmy’s wife and explained the situation: ‘Why don’t you let me find a place to donate them so they can be put to use?’ She agreed 100 percent.”

The goal is for the Buffett equipment to one day be the centerpiece of a modest observatory with a rolling roof, a home base of operation where members can store their telescopes, offer public night viewings and hold monthly meetings. 

One model they may try to replicate is the Fox Observatory at Markham Park in Sunrise, owned by Broward County and home to the South Florida Amateur Astronomers Association. 

‘A sense of real responsibility’

Until the club can find a home, members will continue to transport their personal telescopes to observing sites, a routine that Barr said can be challenging: The quality of the observations and imaging requires precise alignments, which can be jostled during a car ride to an observation site. 

The astronomy society has received other offers of donated telescopes over the years but often had to decline — because they had nowhere to store the stuff other than the homes of individual members. 

“But this was Jimmy Buffett!” Barr said, recalling his reaction when Hinson offered the donation in February 2025. 

At first, some club officers thought the gift sounded too good to be true. 

That changed a week later when Barr and ASPB treasurer Quin Travers met Hinson in Wellington, where the telescopes were being stored at the home of the late Rodney Gnoinsky, who worked as Buffett’s technician. (Gnoinsky died in 2024.) 

“Meeting Darin and seeing the telescopes made it all real,” Travers said. “It was humbling to think that Jimmy Buffett, I almost felt like he was looking down on me because I’ve got his telescopes. I felt a sense of real responsibility in making sure we take care of these delicate instruments and put them to good use by educating eager enthusiasts.”

Richard Branson bet him a trip into space

As they got to know Hinson, club members learned more about his connection to Buffett and about the musician’s love for the stars.

Hinson, 48, had been working as a special ed teacher at his alma mater, John I. Leonard High School (class of 1995), when he took a year off in 2001 to work as a nanny for Buffett’s children. 

It was the start of what Hinson calls a 25-year “adventure,” traveling on the family’s private plane, often piloted by Buffett, and meeting billionaire Richard Branson, who in 2013 played a charity tennis match against Buffett with a tantalizing prize for the winner: If Buffett won, Branson would send him into space. If Branson won, Buffett would perform a free concert.

“Jimmy was very gracious in defeat, and soon swapped his racquet for his guitar. The music was good that night!” Branson wrote in a blog.

Buffett, himself a billionaire, was credentialed by NASA to cover John Glenn’s return flight in 1998 for Rolling Stone magazine. A year later, he released the album “Beach House on the Moon,” the title song’s lyrics about “… relics from Apollo trips, when the Earthmen came to play, and a hammock from a distant star, out in the Milky Way.”

In 2015, he serenaded astronauts in the space station with a concert beamed from Houston to outer space.

‘The Rocket That Grandpa Rode’

One of Buffett’s closest friends was astronaut Ken Reightler, who piloted the space shuttle Discovery on missions in 1991 and 1994 and logged more than 320 hours in space. 

In 2011, Reightler invited Buffett and Hinson to the Kennedy Space Center to watch the final space shuttle launch. On their way to the viewing area on a bus of VIPs, as they passed the Vehicle Assembly Building, Buffett and Hinson overheard someone say: “Hey, kids, look over there. That’s where the rocket that Grandpa rode was put together.”

Buffett turned around and introduced himself to Rick Armstrong, whose father, the late Neil Armstrong, was the first man to step on the moon. The episode inspired Buffett to write a song called “The Rocket That Grandpa Rode.”

“Nobody was more tickled than Jimmy to be sitting near the Armstrongs,” Hinson told the club members in November. “I got to witness Jimmy’s creative process, like he did on this bus headed to the last launch on the space shuttle.”

The telescopes became almost a nightly ritual for Buffett, his gateway to the galaxy. 

“In Jimmy’s mind, if you came out of Mississippi, you can go anywhere on this planet. And Jimmy wasn’t satisfied enough to think just about adventuring on the planet. He wanted to think about adventuring all over the universe,” Hinson said.  

At his ASPB lecture, Hinson said he and Buffett spent countless hours with the telescopes.

“He would be tickled about you guys looking up into the stars and he’d be even more tickled that you were doing it on one of his telescopes,” he said. 

He said he looked forward to the club realizing its dream of a new home.

“I am here to support it in any way, shape or form from the Buffett side of things. We’ll see where it goes,” he said. 

For Barr, the donation has taken on a deeply personal meaning, invoking fond memories of listening to the singer’s music while boating with his late wife, Sherry.   

Sherry had cancer and passed away in June 2023, three months before Buffett died. 

“His music held such strong memories for me of my wife that I couldn’t bring myself to listen to all the tributes being broadcast for Jimmy,” he said. 

“It was at least six months before I could listen to his music again, my happy music. Ironically, a couple of years later, I have three of Jimmy Buffett’s personal telescopes stored in my house.”

The Jimmy Buffett telescopes

From small to large:

• Williams Optics RedCat 51mm Refractor, F=250mm, f/4.9 with a ZWO AM3 mount and TC40 tripod.
• Apertura 75Q Astrograph Refractor, F=405mm, f/5.4 with a ZWO AM3 mount and TC40 tripod.
• Celestron 8” (203mm) NexStar 8SE SCT, F=2,032mm, f/10 with a ZWO AM5 mount and TC40 tripod.
• Celestron EdgeHD 14” SCT, F=3,910mm, f/11 with a Celestron CGX-L mount and heavy-duty tripod.

The imaging accessories were all composed of ZWO system components, including advanced astronomical cameras, EAF and ASIair Plus Wi-Fi camera controllers. The two larger telescopes also have Starizona HyperStar attachments.