Tuesday, September 23, 2003

It was chilly enough for a sweater at Wagman Observatory on the last Saturday night of summer. In the inky darkness of a field in Deer Lakes Park, my wife swiveled her bazooka-sized telescope on its pier like the coolly efficient amateur astronomer she is.

Surrounded by hundreds of her fellow sky watchers, she was in her element in a way I've never seen before. At home where she's often wrenched from her reverie to deal with the primordial disaster of three boys and a husband, she is never as relaxed as she is when she's peering at primordial light from an exploding nebulae.

Watching the other amateur astronomers with their telescopes pointing to the sky while arrayed in orderly rows behind their cars like cosmic honor guards, I was closer to understanding my wife's passion for cataloging the night's incalculably distant lights.

"Here, take a look at this," she said, focusing the hand-me-down telescope she inherited from another female member of the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh a few years ago. She's not interested in a state-of-the-art replacement for her bulky blue tube made in the 1950s. Since she's hard-core about everything else in life, there's no reason why she'd make an exception for astronomy.

She directed my attention to a double cluster before pivoting her telescope toward the Andromeda Galaxy.

While standing directly under Vega, she names the stars as easily as she calls our kids to dinner. Other than the shooting star I saw while her back was turned, there was nothing within several hundred million light years she wasn't familiar with.

"There's a globular cluster I want you to see," she said as she focused on M13. When I said I was only interested in looking at stars with mature alien civilizations circling them, she ignored me. Meanwhile, a mother and son approached my wife for a peek through her telescope. At the AAAP's "star parties," passers-by are encouraged to approach anyone with a telescope with the assumption that they want to share their piece of the universe.

While my wife entertained strangers with a front-porch view of Mars for the millionth time, I wandered over to the field behind Wagman's 11-inch refractor and its 20-inch telescope for a guided tour of the night by founding director Tom Reiland.

Roughly 70 people surrounded Reiland as he skipped across the stars with a laser pointer that connected the dots of unfamiliar constellations with the finesse of Luke Skywalker's light saber. Moving swiftly from Polaris the North Star to Cassiopeia to Draco the Dragon, Reiland extolled the virtue of navigating the sky the way our ancestors did -- with conscientious and persistent observation over time. He dismisses store-bought computerized telescopes as "toys" that get in the way of truly learning the sky.

Within seconds of someone asking Reiland if artificial satellites could be seen with the naked eye, the International Space Station appeared just above the southern horizon, as if on cue. After a chorus of ooohs and ahhs, the space station was visible for less than a minute before disappearing behind the Earth's shadow. It makes the same pass every 90 minutes.

Given the fortuitous timing of the question 20 seconds before the object appeared, Reiland was, briefly, the contemporary equivalent of Hank Morgan "summoning" the solar eclipse of 528 A.D. in Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court."

When I returned to the Norman Observatory, my wife was deeply engaged in a conversation with another amateur astronomer about some impossibly faint object I couldn't see in her telescope -- but she could.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that my wife, who often complains about having "bad vision," never misses a thing when it comes to scanning the night sky. Somehow, her eyes -- which can never find her car keys -- are more than adequate when it comes to exploring celestial mysteries. Even in the dark, I could see her smile as she focused her telescope with its 6-inch aperture on the center of the universe.

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