Davy Howard Levy was born in 1948 at Montréal, Quebec. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in 1972 from Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and his master’s degree in 1979 from the University of Queen’s in Kingston, Ontario. Both degrees were in English literature. He is currently writing his doctoral degree at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, still on the subject of English literature.

Levy’s interest in astronomy began during a partial eclipse of the Sun in 1959 at the age of 11. In 1965, he began to search for novae and comets in the sky. By the end of the 1980’s, he was the most prolific observer in the American Association of Variable Star Observers with more than 10,000 observations per year for meteors, variable stars and Messier objects.

Always looking for a better climate and a darker sky, he moved to Arizona in 1980 where he still lives today. In 1984, after 19 years of fruitless searching, he discovered his first comet. Today, he is the discoverer or co-discoverer of 21 comets and more than 225 asteroids, including the famous Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet that crashed into Jupiter in 1994.