Stars in Their Eyes

STEVE LISS FOR TIME
NIGHT SHIFT: The Cheneys study the Nebraska sky in their backyard observatory

Had the warden at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York agreed to turn off the lights in the exercise yard, it might have been possible to see a galaxy. But turning off the lights is not something you do at a maximum-security prison. So the 18 students in the inmate astronomy class who were getting their first chance to peek through a telescope at the impossibly open sky above them had to content themselves with the moon and Saturn.

But even that was enough to stagger the hardened bunch: some of the inmates actually wept. "It propelled them so far outside of where they are, they didn't have words to describe it," says Marymount College astronomy professor Bob Berman, who teaches the prison course. By the end of the class, even some of the guards were peering through the telescope.

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The Bedford crowd is not alone in its enchantment with the cosmos. In recent years an odd sort of celestial rapture has spread across the country. Whether it's driven by a longing for a larger world, for post-9/11 meaning or simply for the pleasure of a silent field beneath a riotous sky, more and more Americans are falling in love with the heavens. There's Erica Block, 15, of Lincoln, Neb., who sold her horse and emptied her bank account to buy a $1,000 telescope that, she boasts, is taller than she is. There's Evan Chan, a Los Angeles tour operator who a year ago spent his free time watching TV and now--$10,000 worth of equipment later is no longer chained to his remote. There are Clark and Deb Cheney, who sold their home in a busy part of Nebraska and moved to the more remote town of Plattsmouth simply because the night sky is darker there.

The evidence of the trend is more than anecdotal. Membership in the nation's largest amateur group, the Astronomical League, has more than doubled since 1990. State and local astronomy clubs can be found almost anywhere with little more than a Google search. New York City, one of the most light-polluted places on Earth, boasts a 350-member stargazing group.

The market for telescopes and peripherals has exploded too, and with affordable star-tracking software, digital cameras and access to global-positioning systems (GPS), self-taught stargazers can discover comets and supernovas on their own, thus democratizing this once elite science. Amateurs helped track the trajectory of the doomed shuttle Columbia. Indeed, the very distinction between amateur and professional astronomy may be vanishing. "There are professionals who can't even tell you the exact location of a galaxy they have been studying," says Berman. "And then there are so-called amateurs for whom the sky is a second home."

More than 600 of these grassroots scientists gathered last week at the Prude Guest Ranch in the Davis Mountains of West Texas for the 25th annual Texas Star Party, some driving from as far away as Boston. They arrived at the ranch early to stake out their viewing areas with large squares of AstroTurf staked to the ground, and then proceeded to set up their scopes. Telescopes are measured by the size of their reflecting mirrors, from venerable 6-in. models to souped-up 18-inchers to 362-in. monsters at professional observatories. At Prude Ranch the latter variety was not in evidence, but as the forest of 600 instruments started to sprout from the Texas scrub, it became clear that practically every other type was.

Larry Mitchell, 66, of Houston had to climb a 12-ft. stepladder to the eyepiece of his huge, cannon-like telescope with its mammoth, 36-in. mirror the largest at the gathering. George Stradley, 87, who still works as a chemical-process consultant, built his telescope, a 12.5-in. model, complete with a polished Baltic-birch mount. "I liked the challenge of it," he said as he squinted through his eyepiece, lining up the Sombrero galaxy. "Besides, I've lost my touch chasing women."

What distinguished this Texas Star Party from ones held only a decade ago was not all the species of scopes, but all the electronics that drove them. After dark, the grounds of the Prude Ranch flickered with dimmed laptop screens tiny electronic campfires that helped observers sort out the storm of stars overhead. The ground below the telescope mounts was a nest of cables and cords, and when the viewing began, the respectful silence was broken by the whir of telescope motors, the tap-tap on computer keyboards, the click of digital cameras.

The biggest innovation in the computer era is that the tedious business of locating objects in the sky has been automated. In the past, finding a heavenly body involved a sort of cosmic hunt-and-peck, with stargazers eyeballing the approximate celestial spot, then nudging the telescope this way and that until the target object hove into view. Today that job is handled by new systems that combine computer databases of celestial objects and uplinks to GPS satellites. As long as your computer knows where you're located and what time of day it is, all you need do is type in the code for the object you want, and a motor-driven telescope mount seeks it out.