by Jack Hitt
“Do you know what this is?” he howled above the Carborundum’s abrasive roar. I suggested dandelion, and instantly I could see his disbelief that I would guess something that ridiculous. He put it in his mouth. Apparently, it was edible. He shouted something, another witheringly amicable put-down. He turned his back to me and picked some more green from the yard and continued on the prowl for a half hour. I had signed on for almost a week of this—never suspecting that my nonagenarian telescope guru was someone whose idea of lunch involved grazing.
II. The Big Surrender
One afternoon, when I was a sophomore in college, I bumped into a friend at the library. He told me that there was going to be a big lecture by a prominent professor flown in from California. It was a talk intended to coax undeclared students into science and had a wry title like “The Outer Limits of the Universe: A Tour.”
“Let’s get stoned,” my friend cackled, “and go.” If you’ve seen the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, then you know that for a certain generation, the universe was marketed to the bourgeoisie mostly as a cool light show, a slightly more mind-blowing version of the strobe-light spectacular that had become routine at Deep Purple concerts. Instead of music, there were mind-bending facts or dimensions of scale that were, to our feeble brains, entertainingly incomprehensible. When an astronomer says that a solar system is sixty trillion miles away or that it would take the Apollo spacecraft traveling to a certain galaxy a billion billion billion lifetimes to get there, what precisely is getting conveyed that’s any more precise than a six-year-old’s “gajillion”? Maybe it is best to be stoned for such lectures.
That night, we took our seats and the professor did not disappoint. He had lots of amazing slides of spiral galaxies, psychedelic nebulae, and re-creations of exploding stars. At one point, with the lights dim and some wild image on the enormous screen, he started talking about quasars, those extremely distant and extremely powerful sources of light.
“Here,” he said, flashing up a single tiny dot of light in a field of woolly stars, “is the quasar that is the farthest out object we have ever seen with a telescope. It is, literally, the edge of the known universe.” He let that sink in.
“And how far away is it? Consider that light travels at 186,000 miles per second. That means that in a single second, light can circle the earth seven times. We call that distance a light-second.” He let that sink in.
He changed the slide to something a little trippier, but still, there was that far-off quasar: “A light-second is a measure of distance for astronomers, not time. A light-minute is the distance light travels in one minute. The sun is a bit more than eight light-minutes away from the earth.”
Another image appeared. The room was caught in a lovely haze (or maybe a lot of people prepared for the talk the same way I had). “We also have a light-day. We can talk about a light-week. And we have the light-year, the most well-known interstellar measurement of distance. Try to imagine that distance. Light traveling 186,000 miles per second for an entire year. Proxima Centauri is the closest star outside our solar system, and it is just over four light-years away. Imagine that distance. Light zinging through space for more than four years.”
He paused again, letting his incremental description build and set. Then he pointed to the quasar dot in the image. “This quasar is 130 million light-centuries away from earth.”
Poof! If the other people in the room weren’t stoned, they were now. And it was true then—and is still true—that conjuring this effect is the essence of good space writing. Can you jar loose that childlike sense of wonder? That has always been the lure of a good telescope. It’s not hard to do when you bring your eye down to that lens—when you see Saturn as if it were a distant mountain range. In the same way that the big surrender of a giant movie theater practically locates us in that most intimate space of the beautiful actors on the screen, a good telescope creates a kind of proximity, reeling in these remote locations such that it seems as if we have traveled out to their vicinity. Every time I squint into an eyepiece, I still feel that—let’s call it a collegiate sense of awe—and the fresh sensation of being out of body, off the earth, up in space.
Astronomers have a term of art called “seeing.” It’s meant to describe the conditions in which one can break free of visual obstacles—earth’s atmospheric turbulence, varying temperatures, and even wind speeds—and get a real good eyeful of what we came for: mind-boggling frontier, outer-limit space. “The seeing is good tonight,” an astronomer will say. What they are trying to see is really not all that different from what people have attempted to see since the dawn of astronomy—as far into the distance as possible, with the hope of understanding, of finding something new.
It’s the lure of astronomy but it’s also why this field has drawn a steady pilgrimage of self-taught sky-buffs for the last half millennium. Here is the original proof of wonder and the primal motive of the amateur: the seeing, the seeing for oneself.
The amateurs have come and continue to come. If one thinks of organized sports as the most mature pro-am relationship, then astronomy probably occupies second place. It’s crowded with different kinds of amateurs: the phalanx of volunteers willing to perform the donkey work of astronomy—to confirm and reconfirm the location of variable stars, or hunt for supernovae, or scour the barely discernible blinks and wobbles of faraway stars suggestive of an exoplanet. And there are other kinds, the ambitious amateurs struggling to crack the ranks of pro with the DIY observations that they manage to have published, as well as a few truly innovative thinkers, devising new theories or creating new equipment.
The amateurs come for another, simple reason. Ever since Galileo, the gear one needs can be put together at home with a few accessible items and a little elbow grease (actually, now that I know, massive amounts of elbow grease). As a result, it didn’t take me long to find another set of innovators, literally in their garages, trying to cast new telescope mirrors. They noticed that the average Dobsonian is, say, twelve to fourteen inches in diameter. And the professional telescopes at the other end of the spectrum are simply monstrous: The Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona today has a mirror wide enough that Shamu the whale could easily stretch out on it. So the latest crowd of self-made opportunists are populating a new niche—the world of astronomy that aspires to mirrors a bit larger than, say, a hula hoop. And with that size come entire geographies of sky-gazing that are largely ignored.
Their innovations are ingenious—involving recycled glass, TV wall mounts, and parts from Radio Shack. Among these, I found one amateur astronomer in particular who has been studying the most recent discoveries of certain far-off planets and has ginned up one of the most provocative ideas to speed our success in making contact with extraterrestrials.
III. The Last Hippie
The second night I spent with Dobson in Oregon, every muscle in my upper arms and across my back ached fiercely, so we decided to call it a day in the late afternoon. The sun had angled down far enough that we could feel no guilt about goofing off a bit. We hosed down our bench, covered my lens with a towel, and stepped inside.
Our host, Garth, had made oxtail stew. Dobson was off getting ready for dinner in his room. Garth and I talked recipes until we got around to Dobson.
“He comes through once or so a year,” he told me. “He’ll arrange a lens-grinding class somewhere and then sleep at a friend’s house.” It’s a simple system and one that Dobson has been using for forty years. He has friends, essentially, everywhere. He’s never patented anything, and he takes a decent cut of the class fees for his organization. “Sidewalk Astronomers”—named to distinguish the very public aspect of Dobson’s mission and to pose a contrast to the elite and solitary nature of what preceded him, “backyard astronomy”—now has chapters all over the world. Dobson is not only one of the very original hippies, he may be the only one who never got sidetracked by fame, drugs, or wealth.
He may have quit the monastery, but the ascetic life to which he comm
itted himself as a young man, he continues to live. He sleeps on people’s floors and lives mainly off what he makes teaching a class. Dobson is one of a great type in this country—known over the years as colonial frontiersman, cowboy, hobo, hippie, RV roamer. Among these drifters, though, one finds a subset who are uniquely American. When one thinks about the ponytailed John Dobson flitting about the wide-open skies of America, teaching the secret of building a telescope, it’s hard not to recall his spiritual kinsmen—Johnny Appleseed, John Harvey Kellogg, Charles Atlas. There exists a type of self-invented American obsessive who becomes seized by the genius of a single idea—apples, grains, fitness—and devotes the rest of his life to an itinerant evangelism.
John Chapman elevated his pseudonym, Johnny Appleseed, into a name both legendary and majestic. Likewise the stargazing hippie has become a monumental noun: “I am building a Dobsonian.” The word is used to describe an entire phylum of telescopes now. It’s a word that resonates with “Newtonian” and carries, perhaps unfairly, that level of gravitas.
When Dobson abandoned monastic prayer for telescope proselytizing, he attracted a few disciples. Eventually they obtained a school bus and traveled around the way Johnny Appleseed did, moving from town to town, leaving homemade telescopes in their wake. It’s important to remember that, at the time, anyone with a passion to gaze at the stars beyond a late night meditation was limited to those store-bought two-inchers. Then, here comes to town the crazy hippie with his pile of cheap porthole glass, a cardboard tube, and some sand. He would set up one of his cardboard telescopes on a street corner and invite views with a patter that was half carnival barker and half Upanishad. “Would you like to walk on the moon?” he might say. (Dobson told me: “Always approach the girls; they’ll listen and then drag their reluctant boyfriends along.”) Afterward he would make the case for attending one of his telescope classes. Suddenly, you could spend a few days laboring away with like-minded people and, when it was over, own a twelve-inch telescope. Imagine you had grown up walking around your town, dreaming one day of owning a really nice bicycle, and then along came a guy who offered to help you hand-build a working Formula 1 dragster.
Dobson would pull into parks, attract his followers, and set up all-night star parties. Once, upon his entering a national park, a guard tried to turn him away, saying that the sky was not part of the park. Yes, the cavorting guru replied, but “the park is part of the sky.” These gatherings date back several centuries, actually, but their current popularity owes a great deal to Dobson. The annual Stellafane star party in Vermont attracts more than three thousand people every summer. The homemade telescope enthusiasts who congregate at star parties dwell in what is colloquially known as the Valley of the Dobs.
After dinner in Oregon, the old man escorted me outside. Garth’s Dobsonian was set up next to the street. The really nice thing about a Dobsonian is that the entire cardboard gizmo is set on a gimbal made of plywood. It both rocks up and down and swivels left and right easily (spinning typically on a slick vinyl LP bought, as mine was, at a garage sale for a dime). The two simple motions mean that you can just point the telescope anywhere you want with great ease and start focusing. After fiddling with the eyepiece, Dobson stepped back.
There was the moon’s surface up close. The craters were scattered atop a smooth, dusty plateau, creating a landscape that, at this level of intimacy, seemed familiar—reminiscent of a time-lapse photo of the aftermath of a drop splashing in a bowl of milk. I could imagine myself walking on that moon dust, the notoriously powdery regolith that makes the surface feel like a treeless prairie after a dust storm.
I could hear Dobson and Garth almost laughing at my cries of joy, the pleasure of good “seeing.” I was reminded that at the Sistine Chapel, there are guards whose job entails quieting the crowds’ groans because often in the inevitable crescendo, this ambient sound becomes increasingly obscene. But the sounds in Rome are people observing man-made beauty and art, experiencing awe.
We don’t really have a good vocabulary for what was happening when I peered closely at those craters, which is the precise opposite of the Sistine sensation, the inverse of wonder. What’s happening inside the tiny space of that eyepiece is understanding, a kind of knowing, a bite of the apple. The mysterious object in the night sky becomes instantly intimate. You can familiarize yourself with the place. Walk around it a bit. Get to know it. Imagine yourself running the dusty plains or leaping into a milk-drop crater. These are not so much groans of wonder as yips of orientation.
Ah, I see where I am now.
When I pulled back, Dobson spun the telescope toward Saturn. We talked a bit about the Cassini Division, the black line that’s sometimes visible there. Dobson focused the telescope, as he has tens of thousands of times.
“Here,” he said, in one of his rare koan-free moments, “I want you to see this.” It didn’t take much time at all, and it was the precise effect Dobson has been arranging on street corners for decades. In a few seconds, I was leaping across the Cassini line, a line as wide as the continental United States. It was an incredible sensation: Saturn was no longer a planet, but a place.
IV. The Cosmos, Updated
If you had one million pictures of one million galaxies and you wanted to organize them in folders by type, how would you go about it? If you spent fifteen minutes on each image—trying to decide what kind of galaxy it was, spiral or elliptical, and whether it contained any notable irregularities and novelties—then, given an eight-hour workday with no vacation time, it would take an average lifetime and then some—eighty-six years. So you think, maybe, I’ll hire a staff. But even with a crew of ten, nine years seems a long time for such grueling, mind-numbing work.
What would really work a lot better? A staff of 230,000.
In the late ’00s, when scientists set up a website called Galaxy Zoo and invited amateur astronomers from all over the world to sign in and classify images, that is what happened.
Communities formed around some of these efforts. One of them created a fellowship around a couple of peculiar galaxies that were pretty small and oddly colored, like little emeralds in the distant sky. They became known playfully as the Green Peas. The amateurs who spotted them in the images called themselves the Peas Corps and their online thread where they discussed their observations was slugged, “Give peas a chance.”
In time, they realized that they had found something new. In the grade-school textbooks, for the longest time, galaxies came in two classical types, spiral and elliptical. But the old sober idiom is giving way to new terms as discoveries increasingly familiarize us with a universe that now has newer and more names: irregular, ring, ventricular, starburst, and now, the Peas Corps has contributed its own goofball name, as so often happens in a profession distinguished by amateurism. “Green Pea galaxy” is now the term of art used to describe an intense kelly green star factory that has one-one-thousandth the mass of our Milky Way but is pumping out ten stars for our every one.
The dark sky has always been every culture’s final frontier and its first palimpsest. Professional astronomers may consider themselves the primary authors of it, but every culture writes and rewrites all over it, thinking, theorizing, seeing, dreaming. The metaphors have changed radically. The universe is such a different place now from the languid Kubrickian void of the previous generation. That serene expanse of totally cool collegiate space that might be a speck under the fingernail of a giant is, today, a much more knowable, mapable, named, and landmarked cosmic jungle. We now live in a wild and violent place where normal stars are occasionally consumed by stellar zombies; where a cosmic drive-by can cause “resident stripping,” furiously yanking the guts from a dwarf galaxy, resulting in a billion-mile slough of stellar litter; where a patch of darkness might suddenly reveal the wreckage of a “vampire star”; where entire galaxies of four hundred billion stars can collide with another of comparable size in a “galactic smashup” or where dozens of them can pile up because a monstrous “cannibal
galaxy” appears driven to consume its neighbors; where our own Milky Way is now known to be on a 300,000-miles-per-hour collision course with our neighbor galaxy Andromeda, which will result in a new galaxy already nicknamed—Milkomeda—that will unavoidably come into existence in about four billion years.
All of this violence happens in a universe of incomparable extremes—one that is, when resting, just under 3°K and, at its most violent, churns temperatures of 100,000,000°K. The current general theory of the universe literally holds that 96 percent of all material stuff—dark matter and dark energy—cannot refract light, so it’s invisible. Dark matter is there but we cannot see it. Of all the matter in the universe, the remaining 4 percent is called baryonic matter because the baryon is the heavy bit in an atomic nucleus and is considered (this week) basic to the construction of all visible matter. These intermittent flecks of visible stuff bunch up—a process known ponderously as “baryonic acoustic oscillation.” Whatever forms those clumpings eventually take—stars, planets, rocky asteroids and comets, gassy nebulae, our bodies—the sum total of it all is still, essentially, only 4 percent of the matter in the universe, the only visible stuff out there, and all of it is composed of space lint.
The universe, then, as we see it, is but a few shards of exploding flotsam and collapsing jetsam bobbing along in a vast and expanding ocean of ghostly motes. Occasionally amid the violent jets of plasma and colliding galaxies and rogue black holes, a spurt of stellar dust will gather in the tug of a medium star and for hundreds of millions of years begin to clump together into little dust bunnies until these smack together into “planetary embryos” and then condense into planets, which cool as tiny greenhouses nursing elements other than the universe’s tedious streams of hydrogen.
We think of the earth or our gas giants such as Jupiter as the only models for what a planet might look like, for obvious reasons, but recent discoveries suggest that exoplanets might be dominated by different elements, so that on distant planets we might find plateaus marked by lakes of methane, or oceans of ammonia, or rainstorms that extrude droplets of molten rock.