Stars in Their Eyes

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

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Also revolutionizing the amateur art is new photographic equipment. Taking a picture of a celestial object used to mean mating a 35-mm camera with the end of a telescope, focusing on the target for as long as an hour, then fooling with the fuzzy image for hours more in the darkroom. Now digital cameras can be equipped with a charge-coupled device (CCD), a digital light amplifier that makes brilliant images out of the dimmest celestial shimmer.

"It's so easy," says Francisco Elguera, a Los Angeles CCD enthusiast who joins West Coast star parties at a two-acre viewing area owned by the Los Angeles Astronomical Society (LAAS). Its site is equipped with 50 small concrete slabs on which members set up their growing mounds of electronic equipment. "The new technology makes a super-imaging platform out of a small telescope," Elguera boasts.

Super-imaging is valuable for more than recreational work. There's not an amateur out there who hasn't looked in the mirror and seen Clyde Tombaugh, the self-taught stargazer who discovered Pluto in 1930, or David Levy, the celebrated amateur who has discovered or co-discovered 21 comets, including the famous Shoemaker-Levy, which crashed into Jupiter in 1994. While there are only so many planets or visible comets out there, amateurs are making contributions tracking star movements and lunar cycles and even hunting for supernovas. Larry Mitchell, the Houstonian with the 36-in. telescope, spotted his own supernova in 1994, a find that in turn enabled professional astronomers to measure the distance to that exploding star's home galaxy. "The professionals need that data and don't have the time to do it," says LAAS president Jim Strogen. "They rely on amateurs."

Most recently and most tragically amateurs pitched in to help NASA reconstruct the debris trail of the shuttle Columbia. More than 3,000 eyewitnesses half of them amateur astronomers, many of whom had GPS markers that pinpointed their location phoned in reports. "These people are our heroes," says Paul Hill, a NASA flight director whose job it was to sift through all the witness reports. "There are 15 to 20 of them who were key to our being able to do our analysis."

That kind of observing power means marketing power. The Bushnell company, one of the country's leading telescope makers, reported a 20% increase in sales from 2001 to 2002. Celestron, another giant, reports a threefold boost in five years, though the privately held company does not get more specific about its revenues. As with all electronic gadgetry, the better and more user friendly the toys become, the more people want them. "Ten years ago, the number of amateurs taking pictures with CCD imaging would have been 5%," says Alan Hale, Celestron chairman. "Now it's 50% or more, because we've made it easier."

And cheaper. A high-end CCD camera may still go for more than $5,000, but a stripped-down model can cost as little as $1,000. The handiest hobbyists can build their own so-called cookbook cameras, buying CCD chips and other imaging hardware for a few hundred dollars and doing the assembly work themselves.

This year the stargazers will have more than ever to shoot. Lunar eclipses will occur on May 16 and Nov. 9. And in August, Mars will make its closest approach to Earth in at least 50,000 years. Amateur astronomers, already drunk on the sky, are likely to get giddier still. "There's a mind-stretching aspect to it," says Berman. "You look through a telescope and don't have to say a thing." The sky, as always, is perfectly capable of speaking for itself.