Stars in Her Eyes

The place is nestled between Marshfield and Fairgrove, a prize for skywatchers tucked at the end of the maze of gravel roads.  It’s a sort of haphazard collection of buildings and structures.  There’s the grassy wannabe parking lot, separated from the telescopes by a short barbed wire fence and tiny box hedges that will never fill out.  An unmarked white dome hides half the main building from view, the home of the still-unfinished robotic telescope.  Behind it, a concrete pad is permanently dotted at regular intervals with skeletal bases for absent eight-inch scopes.  Perched on the far edge of the pad, just before the thick trees begin again, is the heart of the Observatory—an asymmetrical, twin-domed white shack.  There’s barely room inside for the two monster computers (straight out of the nineties) and the cabinets that house the eight-inch telescopes.  On either side, the mismatched domes hold the bigger fourteen- and sixteen-inch scopes. There’s a bathroom somewhere, but I admit I’ve been too wary of Slenderman to hunt for it in the trees.  It’s not nearly so glamorous as you might think when someone says “observatory.”

Twice a year, we open Baker Observatory to the public.  I spend the final half-hour before sunset erecting a randomly selected eight-inch out on the pad.  I mount it backwards at first; it’s been a full six months since I last visited.  I laugh and remind myself that in order to keep up with the Earth’s rotation, I’ve got to position the scope with the miniature finder-scope perched on top, so the whole mess can pivot on its stand.  I correct my mistake, drag one of the sparing plastic chairs next to my post, and flop into it to listen to the clock drive’s innocuous hum.  I intend to sit while the visitors fumble to find the eyepiece, but I know full well I’ll spend the majority of the night on my feet, surrendering the use of my chair to the kids too small to reach.  Choosing a target while the sky is still light is folly, so I settle into the chair with a Clif bar and a bottle of Gatorade.

The parents with the smallest children are somehow always first to arrive, as if they expect the sky to darken more quickly to suit the kids’ bedtimes.  They never listen to the parking attendant and they never point their headlights away from the Observatory.  They’re lucky there’s anything to see this early, but we catch a glimpse of Saturn as it sets, just distinguishable against the denim blue sky.

They always expect color, but they won’t find it through our low-power scopes.  I try to explain to them that the human eye just doesn’t have that kind of light-gathering power, that the pictures they see in the books are created with sensitive cameras, incredibly long exposures, and colored filters, but some grumble all the same.  Honestly, you can’t expect your eight-millimeter pupil to gather all the photons an eight-inch lens does, hold on to them like the hundreds of microscopic wells in a CCD camera will, and process them like a nice, modern computer can. 

But barely anyone listens to the whole answer, let alone accepts it.  Last year at this function, I had a delightful gentleman exit the sixteen-inch’s dome and make a beeline toward me.

“You!  You know somethin’ about planets and such?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What was that nonsense in there?”

“Last I knew, they were looking at the Ring Nebula.”

“It’s just a smoke ring!  I couldn’t see a damn thing.”

“I’m sorry, sir, it’s just that the human eye—“

“Bah!  What’s the use in driving out here for a lousy smoke ring?  What a waste.  I didn’t see anything.”

Sometimes it’s less about ignorance and more about straight-up stupidity, like the drunken redneck that came later.  He wobbled up to my eight-inch, clearly unsteady on his feet, and slurred, “Where’s Vulcan?”

“You mean the constellation Vulpecula?  It’s just above the—“

“NO!” he roared.  “The planet!”

“Planet, sir?”

“The one Spock’s from!”

“Erm.  It’s, ah…not visible this time of year, sir.”

I sincerely hope he hadn’t driven himself.

It frustrates me that I can’t always make our visitors understand the magnitude of what they’re seeing.  I am armed with a wealth of knowledge about star formation, about the potential of protoplanetary discs, about the mythology surrounding our ancient celestial neighbors—but no one ever asks.  The millions of light-years of distance go over their heads.  They don’t seem to grasp it when I tell them they’re seeing Andromeda as it was two million years ago.  They gape and crane their necks and pout about the length of the line to peer through the sixteen-inch.  They blind each other with the flash on their iPhones and allow their children to play tag on the grassy knoll beside the pad and when it’s over, they pile back into their cars and wash the observatory with the light of their headlights and trundle down the gravel road noisily, taking nothing with them but the dirt on their shoes.

If convincing people to take my word for astronomy is difficult on home turf, imagine the difficulty of being summoned to do it in a classroom setting.  As part of an internship, I accompanied my advisor to a meeting with an art teacher at an elementary school.  She had grand plans for having her students create a to-scale replica of the solar system and was heartbroken when we told her she’d need two projects to scale size and distance separately.  What resulted was paper “plaques” taped down a hallway at calculated intervals, inaccurately colored foam balls hanging from the library ceiling, and a disgruntled old lady.

“Well, could you at least come to our open house?  We’re having an assembly that day, could you speak at that?”

I cobbled together everything I knew about the planets and made a movie, complete with photos and my own voice narrating.  The video played to a packed gymnasium, but the tiny voices never stopped.  Too excited about having time out of class?  Maybe.  I got a pat on the back for my movie from my advisor, but it was clear I had missed the mark.  I spent the remainder of the evening supervising children in the creation of graham cracker replicas of the Mars Rover.  I bit my tongue, held back the waiting flow of information about the recent discover of water beneath Mars’ surface, and mopped up the icing with Clorox wipes when it was all over.

I can’t imagine I was much different at that age.  No “astronaut” ever came to my school assemblies, but the most I ever learned about above the atmosphere was the phases of the moon.  I like to think I would have known better than to ask a visiting NASA employee how many planets she’d been to or whether I could stand on Jupiter, but then again, would anyone have told me before that day that humans are (for the next few decades) bound solely to Earth?  That not all planets are rocky and solid?  Surely, I thought as I wilted in light of their perfectly innocent ignorance, surely these are not the future grumpy old men and drunken Vulcan hunters.

 My hope was renewed after being requested to make a presentation for a homeschool group.  I was thrilled and honored to be asked to come.  These were not public school children we’d be presenting too; if their parents cared enough about astronomy to seek out university students well-versed on the subject, then surely they already knew a thing or two.   In my excitement packed up a school-owned eight-inch and a sun filter, to give the kids a chance at some safe solar viewing. That year was the peak of the sun’s eleven-year solar cycle, and I was eager to share the abundant sunspots with anyone who cared to look.

I perched on one of the church’s basement library tables while my partner lectured and showed pictures out of the many books she’d brought.  The crowd was more diverse than I would have liked; a crew of kids ranging from three to fifteen makes it tough to alight on a definition for “age-appropriate.”  We did the best we could, but the littlest ones fidgeted after ten minutes and even the older ones seemed positively nonplussed by the idea of black holes.  She gave up after an hour or so, and the kids happily trouped outside where the eight-inch was waiting.  I took one look at the now clouded-over sky and called it a bust.  Oblivious, the two dozen tykes took full advantage of the church playground.

I hope they get to see sunspots one day without going blind.  I hope someone will tell them that different parts of the molten sun spin at different rates, and that they take their magnetic field lines with them.  I hope whoever explains all this compares the field lines to rubbing a fine chain in between your palms, letting the links become hopelessly tangled.  The tangled chain of field lines rise up out of the surface and sink back down into the plasma.  Where the fields penetrate the surface, the fusion slows down; the particles are held hostage in a magnetic prison and cannot interact properly.  The surface cools and grows dark in the places where the line rises and falls.  I hope they personify the sun like I would have, and tell them that after eleven years of this snarled mess, the sunspots growing worse and worse, the sun gives up, throws all its magnetic field lines away, and starts fresh.

I never could have explained that before my first astronomy course.  I myself was barely interested beyond the fact that it would satisfy the university’s need for me to take a natural sciences course.  I opted for the section without a lab, mostly because I was lazy.  The generic lecture hall in the library housed up to a hundred students, but only sixty or so attended class on any given day.  The pictures in the textbook admittedly intrigued me.  I actually read the first reading assignment.  And the next.  And every one after.  Our professor, a gruff but soft-spoken man, presented the strange physics of space like it was no big deal, except that it was.  I sat in the front row.  It wasn’t enough to know that quasars were a thing.  I had to know why.

I didn’t trust myself to major in physics, but I changed my minor to astronomy.  I had to know more, and the online articles and off-brand two-inch telescopes weren’t enough.  A flyer went up in the physics building, advertising open positions as astronomy research aids.  On the day applications were due, almost on a whim, I slipped my resume and cover letter under the head honcho’s door, certain that other, more qualified applicants had already been selected.  The joke was on me; there were almost no other applicants.  So I snuck onto Kemper’s staff and added NASA to my resume.

So, admittedly, my romance with science didn’t properly begin until university.  So I can’t be too angry--they’re only children, after all.  It’s the parents’ prerogative to prioritize what they will in raising their little ones.  How can I blame them for the fact that my own parents planted a seed when they woke me in the middle of the night to see a lunar eclipse?  How can I fault them for wanting to be anything other than an astronaut when they grow up?  After all, NASA has slashed their space exploration initiatives.  The US curriculum for math and science is skimpy at best.  No, it’s not little ones I blame, though I mourn for the relationship with astronomy they’ll likely never have.

Thing is, I’m not sure if the adults are really at fault either.  There are so few men and women of science to look up to here and now—so few models to demonstrate a proper appreciation of astronomy.  I’ve been with the “professionals” too, and they hide their nastiness and elitism behind the mask of their nationalities.  Sometimes they let politics dictate who gets published and who doesn’t.  They abandon their science at conferences, when an American finishes speaking and the French attendees stand up and shout their dissenting opinions.  Thank God I never witnessed that, but at the conference I attended in Tucson, it was difficult to remember that I was at a professional meeting and not just another gen-ed college lecture, so great was the number of faces hidden behind laptop screens showing no reaction to the words being spoken at the front of the room.  Even the emails they write to their colleagues are peppered with snark and sarcasm—not the business-letter formality I expected.  I’m not entirely convinced that they consistently care more about astronomy than the average Springfieldian.

What, then, can be done?  Surely no one individual can be responsible for the resurrection of interest in astronomy.

Sometimes there’s a glimmer of hope.  Sometimes I tell Callisto’s story at Open House night to an avidly interested guest, and smile as I spin the epic tale, the constellations as my characters.  Other times I’ll ask a child how many dots they see in this cluster, and point to Pleiades with my green laser.  If they answer “seven,” I tell them they’d make a fine Roman archer.  For the briefest instant, I make contact.  I break whatever boundary it is that makes people so unwilling to learn from a stranger and for the split second of the breach, I deposit some small nugget, a factoid, a new knowledge.

When I point my eight-inch at the twin stars in the middle of the Big Bear’s tail, a boy of no more than ten removes his glasses and mounts my chair to get to the eye piece.  I don’t see his mouth open, but I hear the tiny exhalation of wonder.

“Do you see them both?”

“Yeah.  Do they go around each other?”

“You mean like binaries?”

“Uh huh.”

            “Not these.  They look close, but they’re a good ten lightyears away from each other.”

            He removes his eye from the eyepiece and looks up to focus on the constellation again without the scope’s aid.  “Ya know, I think I see them both, now I know they’re there.”

            “Definitely possible.  The second one’s just on the edge of visible magnitude.”

            He hops down from the chair and I spot his wide grin even in the faint red glow that leaks from the Observatory.  “Thanks, miss.  I think that’s the coolest one so far.”

* * *

On our most recent visit to our hometown, my husband and I informed my mother-in-law that we’re expecting.  After the initial squealing and hand flapping, the questions came thick and fast.

            “Do you know the gender?”

            “It’s only week 14, Mom.”

            “Have you thought of names?”

            “Not really.”

            “What theme will the nursery be?”

            My husband looked to me, deferring to my judgment.

            “Uh… Space.  Yeah.  Outer space.”

And that was that.  It took exactly one day for my Pinterest feed to overflow with pins to the “space” board my mother-in-law has dedicated to the baby.  I guess I made a choice, without realizing then that I had decided.  I have seen the grumpy men and the drunkards, the children who know no better and the adults who will not teach them, even the scientists that cannot be bothered to be their field’s own advocates.  Maybe no one person can bring astronomy back to the kind of popularity it enjoyed in the 1960’s.  I cannot change school curriculum, nor can I round up the funds to bring NASA back from the brink.  But I can do this one thing.  One day, when he’s older, of course, I can wake this little one and bring him to the backyard to gaze up at the blood-red moon.  Maybe he’ll ask what makes it red, and I can get excited and make huge gestures and explain it’s all to do with the Earth’s shadow.  I don’t care what his major or minor wind up being, or if he goes to college at all—I just really hope he thinks lunar eclipses are cool.  And maybe that will be enough.