I.

I came out here to help teach astronomy as part of the Night Sky program. Chaco Canyon pretty much started the Astronomy in Parks movement some years ago, and now many of the western parks have similar programs, helping interpret the incredible resource of the dark sky for park visitors. It gives campers staying in park grounds something to do in the evening, as well. They’re kind of a captive audience, why not help them to look up and wonder?

Last week, when I arrived, I was met with almost immediate disappointment. The campground was closed, and so the night sky program was seriously undermined; there was essentially no audience. Crestfallen, I stared out at the desolate landscape, imagined my wife and child in Slovakia where it’s green and lush, eating berries and cucumbers and peaches fresh from the garden, and wondered just what the heck I came out here for. I even wondered if I should stay. Sure, there were other ways I could help the park. I did some weeding, helped fix an errant wheel on the observatory dome. But my main goal was to work with the public.

Well, you do your best, I told myself, and you can’t control everything. I’m in a very special place, might as well make the best of it. Maybe the reason I thought I was coming here woudn’t be the reason, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t get something out of it. I just didn’t know what that was, and that was a bit disturbing.

My fears were mostly unjustified. We’ve had a few Night Sky programs and they have been attended…sparsely, but attended nonetheless. Jim, the other astronomy volunteer, spends time at Bryce Canyon doing outreach and he says they get sometimes 500 people a night. Personally I’d rather have 5 curious people and the time to really engage them in conversation than 500 elbowing each other for a glance into the telescope. Each night we’ve had people I’ve met very nice folks, and had a lot of time to tour the sky at a leisurely pace, explaining things as I go, taking detours to different topics.

Before last night’s program, I had GB, Jim and Amber over for dinner. All three of them work in one way or another with the dark sky program. We were talking movies, Star Wars vs. Star Trek, and I asked if any of them were Firefly fans. All of them were. That’s not such a common thing. It’s a trifling thing, affection for a somewhat obscure, prematurely truncated but completely excellent sci-fi TV series from auteur Joss Whedon, but it made me feel at home. Firefly is about people coming to a place together seemingly without reason, but finding that reason in an informal family and community. It’s a trifling thing, but I suddenly felt like I had come to the right place, and for the right reason, whether that was in focus or not.

Doot doot doot lookin' out my front door.

II.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a front-porch view like this, and I doubt I ever will again. I can hardly put it into words. Sometimes I lose track of it, take it for granted, and then look up from my book, computer, or food and go…wow. I live here. For a few weeks, at least.

Front and center is Fajada Butte, a shape that is hard for us Easterners to think of as natural. Mesas to the right and left outline the Butte’s stage, and the sky above is the other character, constantly changing itself and everything else. The hour around sunset is a show and a few nights already I’ve just stood at the railing of the long porch and just…watched.

The nature here is subtle, as I said. It grows on you. At first I felt it was empty, desolate. Then I started to see the changes the landscape takes on during the day. I started seeing more animals, more wildflowers. There are no big bursts of flowers or fields of color on the horizon like I remember from eastern Turkey. Just isolated bushes here and there, or plants low to the ground. You have to walk to see them.

Now, as I type, the clouds and star fields are taking turns. It’s the time of twilight when every moment brings newly-unveiled stars. High hum of crickets. The air is still. I’m overwhelmed by the subtle physical beauty of this place. In some ways, I wish I was camping here in a tent. The duplexes built by the Park Service are nice enough, lovely even and comfortable, but I enter the apartment and feel totally cut off from the nature outside. On the porch it’s better, but I can escape back inside whenever I want, plug in, check my email, watch a vid. Meanwhile there’s all this drama outside. I think people are funny; we’ve come a long way to be here but we huddle in a little compound at night, replicating the thick settlements we come from, united against the big dark empty.

III.
I’ve seen all manner of bird here, and I should learn the names of them and make my daughter, Zora, proud; she’s quite the bird-watcher. I saw a bull snake the other day, slithering up a tree. Later on, I was told, the snake ate two wren chics out of a nest. There are at least two different species of lizards. One fast, skinny, stripped and lives in the lowlands, the other shorter, slower, and mutable in color that lives on the mesa tops. Lots of rabbits, about 25 per acre, and coyotes, though I have yet to see them, I have seen lots of tracks and droppings, some fresh, others dried and filled with rodent bones. There are these odd chipmonk-looking creatures that kind of hop. I have to find out what that is called as well. It’s funny that the official names of things are so important. I guess I could call them what I wanted to. I’d call those chipmonk hoppers “Kangaroo Squirrels.” I wouldn’t be wrong; they wouldn’t take offence. But then I’m not sure anyone else would know what the heck I was talking about. So we need those official names to communicate with each other. They’re placeholders. Like the names of stars. The things dear to us can have public names for communicability, and private names for contemplation and appreciation.

IV.
A lot of people find this place spiritual. The mystery of the ancient Chacoans who built all these Great Houses and then left after a few hundred years holds many in its spell. I am not one of those. The old masonry walls are beautiful, but they don’t really speak to me. For me the “mystery” is an intellectual challenge, and it’s more fascinating to examine what people think happened here than to actually figure out what did. Chaco Canyon, in this respect, is a like a closed gift box…we can only conject what is inside, maybe rattle it around a bit. Mostly we see what we want to see, either our worse fears (at the moment, that seems to be civilizational collapse because of environmental degradation) or our highest hopes (a spiritually enlightened, egalitarian and peaceful meeting place for people of all tribes to come together in seeking to better ourselves and gain wisdom, either individually or as a group.) But it’s fascinating to watch the process of making meaning, the way everyone who comes here, be they workers or visitors, struggles to define the essence of the place, and not just internally by socially…exactly what happened at Chaco Canyon 1000 years ago is a very live topic today, which is not something I can say for the rest of US society, where events even 15 years ago are rejected as irrelevant in our “constantly changing” world.

I don’t often travel without a plan of some sort. In the past, I always felt constricted by my premeditated itinerary, but too wimpy to wrap it up in caution and throw it out the window. But, when I travelled last week to New Mexico, I tried to grow; I had a firm destination—Chaco Canyon National Park—but was unsure of exactly when I would arrive and where I would find myself along the way.

I was going to Chaco Canyon to teach astronomy, part of the park’s volunteer corps, assigned to the Astronomy in Parks program. Being a good nerd, I left my tent at home to free up enough suitcase weight to allow me to bring a telescope, mount, eyepieces, red flashlight and star atlas. I found a camping store in Albuequerque and bought a one-man tent, threw it into the back of the rental car—from the company with the name that would warm any nerd’s heart—and headed up route 550 towards the four corners.

I should back up a little bit. I took a taxi from the airport to the rental car agency downtown. My cabbie was clean cut, middle-aged, a self-professed amateur astrophysicist, and very chatty. He knew my whole plan, including the fuzzy parts, by the time we pulled in front of the agency. He suddenly took out a card—he’s a musician—and said: “You know, you’re going right by Cuba. There’s a gathering of people there starting this weekend, hippies.” He drew me a little map on the back of the card. I hadn’t accepted it quite yet, but I had my layover destination, just off the main road in the Sante Fe National Forest.

The Rainbow Family is an annual gathering of thousands of hippies. Each year they choose another natural spot, descend from all directions in all forms of vehicle from rubber soles and thumbs to VW campers to the oddly incongruous Beamers, hike into the forest, and live for a week in total freedom. I remembered hearing about the after Katrina sacked New Orleans, how the hippies emerged from the forest and set up kitchens to feed people. It was anarchism in praxis, people actively trying to create the kind of community they wished to see. So what if they smelled like patchouli? I had to check it out.

I went as an ambassador, my telescope on my back as I hiked in the last 2 miles. Hippies, I come from a different family—the nerds. I come in peace. Take me to your drum circle.

The first thing anybody said to me wasn’t “Welcome Home,” though I would hear that about hundred times that day. (It’s the Rainbow Family greeting.) No, a particularly scraggly looking guy with a scraggly looking dog snickered at me and my telescope: “Weirdo.”

I raged inside. Weirdo? Are you kidding me? Here I have to profess something that has bothered me about the “counterculture” since it turned me off from going to art school when I was in high school. My problem is that all the folks busy being different start to look the same once you’re among them; personal expression starts to becomes another mindless uniform. Not just appearance, but patterns of speech and patterns of thought. I ran through this old argument silently in my head, and then got over it. I wasn’t being fair. People should be affiliating with them that share their values. They’re called affinity groups. I belong to one called an Astronomy Club, and yes, they probably would call a Hippy with a giant rain stick a “Weirdo,” too. I had come to bring peace, at least, a little bit of it.

I walked on into the unknown. I got some chai and an introduction on how to poop in the forest from a Bahai follower named Wind, and walked to the Meadow. There were the drummers and dancers and little campfires and of course, plumes of pot smoke pretty much everywhere. I pitched a tent somewhere near Camp Love, founded by an ex-soldier named Kane, asked a guy for help bringing my telescope down to the Meadow, and set up not too far from the big wooden map where people attempted to get their bearings. “Dude, have you seen ‘Shut Up and Eat? They have the best soy milk and wheat grass curry…”

The night was mostly clear with a waxing moon, and my scope and I had a lot of attention. People were great. I’ve never done outreach to stoners before. They see more than most people do. “Dude, I see craters on Saturn’s moon!” (That’s not possible, though I didn’t contradict the person.) Everyone, however, who looked through the scope was genuinely moved, effusive in their praise (of my presence there and of the heavens), and almost everyone gave me a hug. I probably showed 50 people something (Saturn, Albireo, M13—the usuals) and about half of them have never looked through a telescope.  I felt like I had already started to fulfill my mission of bringing a view of the universe to those that need seeing it.

The Rainbow Family were warm and cheerful, and very appreciative. The loose but highly functional organization of the place was impressive. They somehow managed to hike in enough soy milk and wheat grass, set up enough free kitchens, to feed everyone. They take care about hygiene, well, at least about where they poop. And they are subjected to suspicion and low-level intimidation from law enforcement from miles around, all secretly grateful that they have such a large and scrawny audience in front of which they can strut their manly lawfulness.

It was nice to see so many folks enjoying each other’s company in relative peace. When’s the last time you went camping with 8,000 other people simply because you simply liked their company? They are on to something, and if the country collapses when oil runs out or the oceans swamp all the coasts, and we all become refuges from modernity (like what happened after Katrina), well, there might just be a smiling Bahai in a tent waiting for you with a warm cup of Soy Chai.

The next morning I woke up to rain on my little tent, quickly packed up and continued on my way, out of the comparatively lush forest of Ponderosa Pine and Aspen, back into the semidesert, and down the long dirt road to Chaco Canyon, which is another story.

Sky and Telescope is one of the major monthly publications for amateur astronomers. Yeah, it’s like so many hobby magazines, where you get the sense they’re a bit beholden to the big corporations that pay their advertisers. But beyond that, they’re a serious bunch of people who do a lot for the amateur hobby, the professional science, and a general public that should know a lot more, generally, about where they are in the universe. It’s also packed with information about what planets are visible, when, and where, and includes a monthly sky map. It’s an excellent resource, and if you’re new to astronomy, this should be your very first purchase. Or, skip the consumerism, read it at your local library, and photocopy the star map for home use.

When my issue comes every month, I sit down and open it to the back. It’s a habit. I always read magazines from the back to the front. I should have been born in Japan. The last feature in Sky and Telescope is called Focal Point. It’s a chance for astronomers to write about a variety of non-technical subjects close to their passions: reflections on the observing life, stories about communicating astronomy to the public, or musings on the meaning of it all. I can usually expect to find the kind of astronomy writing I myself aspire to produce; enlightening, funny or moving, and always gently nudging readers to a wider understanding of our place in the universe.

In June, however, I was dismayed to find that Robert Wolfe’s “Who Will Be Next on the Moon?” (June 2009) did none of those things, and instead presented an awkward, nationalistic argument for re-energizing the US space program that rested on those standby twins of justification: economic development and national security. Wolfe starts his essay ominously: “U.S. citizens will wake up one day to watch Chinese taikonauts setting up a lunar base, resulting in us having to catch up once again.”

“Once again” references several things: the initial fright that the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, caused the US in 1957, the renewed terror that resulted from the USSR sending up Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, just four years later, and a whole slew of other horrifying “firsts” that the supposedly decrepit USSR beat us too, including Alexie Leonov’s first space walk in 1965. The thought of the Chinese opening up these old wounds…well, I can’t speak of it. The shame of the early Space Race is enough!

Wolfe then outlines the economic benefits of returning to the moon: the much diminished escape velocity of rockets leaving the moon for destinations further afield, all that Helium 3 waiting to be mined for the as-yet-nonexistent fusion reactors, and the technological dividend of new technologies the second great race to the moon would bestow upon humanity Americans.

The economic argument laid out, he then slips in the national security argument: A moon base “will allow relatively easy delivery of defense systems to low-Earth orbit.” Let’s reflect on that a bit, and forget that Wolfe is the retired Chairman/CEO of Gencorp, “with companies that are involved in space propulsion and space-based defense systems.” Also forget that the Department of Defense was rightly called the Department of War until Truman, and the earlier title was more accurate if less friendly-sounding. When the US acquired a de-facto imperial hegemony after World War II, agressive war became an impossibility (the Mexicans and Phillipinos must have breathed a sigh of relief!) and every military action the US undertook became “defense”. Okay, so defense=war=people dying.

What we’re talking about here is anti-satellite and anti-ballistic missile technologies. Satellites don’t kill people directly, but they help guide the bombs and missiles, direct the soldiers, collect intelligence. Ground war is directed from space. Wolfe is talking about bringing the fighting into space. It’s a natural thing for a war-minded person to do.

Perhaps because the space industry has been so linked to the war industry, as Wolfe’s essay and position indicate, many of the people involved as astronauts and scientists and administrators have worked really hard at creating a different, peaceful vision of space exploration. Yeah, the Cold War kinda propelled the US forward into space (at least, it propelled the funding forward), but the tone of those involved has been more or less consistently peaceful. Talking to people in my astronomy club who remember watching tiny Sputnik fly overhead, they remember the wonder, the way it changed their worldview. And many of them became engineers and scientists as a result of that little chrome radio that simply fell but missed the earth for a short while. Few of them talk about wanting to pick up the technological sword to fight the Russians. Sputnik, to them, wasn’t Russian or communist, it was a human endeavor. The Apollo-Soyuz handshake that happened in earth orbit nary two decades later was more than a publicity stunt, it was a statement of this principle.

Hard science fiction dealing with space exploration picked up the tensions and themes. Arthur Clarke’s novel 2010: Odyssey Two and the 1984 film by Peter Gubers both dealt directly with the Cold War politics of space and a way around it. Ben Bova’s 1987 The Kinsman Saga imagined the earthbound Cold War ending when the two opposing nation’s lunar bases create their own separate peace. Yukinobu Hoshino’s 1984 manga 2001 Nights begins with the Soviet Premier and US president holding a peace summit in orbit so they keep the earth’s appearance from space, as a borderless, fragile thing, in the forefront of their minds. So, though the exploration of space and the technologies of war have since the beginning been linked, many of those involved in humanity’s push to the stars have urged us to embrace the same view of the earth from space that forged so many fictional peaces, and try like heck to create a real one.

These voices have urged us not to militarize and carve up space with short-sighted national goals. In the end, it is humanity that needs space, not the US or the Chinese or any national group. Let the Chinese space exploration program inspire and motivate us, but let us proceed in the spirit of cooperation. After all, those fancy technological devices Wolfe credits the US space program with providing are now made in China. It’s not us or them, it’s us and them. Finding Chinese taikonauts on the moon ahead of us is only “sad,” to use Wolfe’s word, to those who wish to make money off of putting weapons into space and moving human conflict into the skies.

Conflict in space is a dangerous and increasingly likely reality. The Bush Administration made a very quiet, but very serious, policy commitment to militarizing space. In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which is a cornerstone of the legal framework of space as a protected, demilitarized common. There’s speculation, none of it particularly well-founded, that the recent collision of an Iridium communications satellite with a Russian satellite was actually part of an anti-satellite weapons system. With two nations famed for their secrecy, it’s always hard to figure out the truth, but the ramifications of the incident are very real. The impact caused two huge clouds of debris to form that will spread out over an entire orbital path. Space debris could eventually become so common that space travel would become impossible…it’s called the Kessler Syndrome, and it’s a very dangerous reality.

We have to resist the militarization of space. It’s only a distant issue until weapons start raining down on us from orbital platforms. If satellites can see pretty much everything from orbit, including the fact that the hot dog I grilled yesterday was burned or what condiments I put on it, then they can also kill anyone they want. Space, as a frontier, could be the place where humans finally figure out that fighting one another is a rather silly at best and completely suicidal thing at worst. And maybe those humans will come back down to earth and finally convince the rest of us.

Antarctica is the place to look as a way forward. A whole continent run by an international treaty dedicated to peace and science. Let’s extend that model to space, and let’s try to use space exploration as a way for us to develop as a species. Quite simply, let’s try to suck a little less, and let’s try not to ruin things off our world as have done so well on it.

Last night was the first night I went to bed before 2am in almost a week. It was 1:30.

I’ve tried recently to not let a clear night go by without doing some observing. That’s the price of being an amateur astronomer, heeding the call to a different kind of ocean from a different kind of siren. Observing is exhilarating, in a quiet and cranial sort of way, and even if I trudge out to my driveway tired, I seem to find a special reserve of energy and the time passes.

On Thursday night, I had my trusty 6″ newtonian…I should give it a name?…out and was trying to make my way through a fairly unsteady sky. My neighbors Charles and Linda walked by on a nighttime walk with their daughter Katie, back from college for a brief visit. Charles and Katie peeled off and headed my way, and asked if they could look through the scope. I turned to Saturn. It’s easy to find, still nursing under Leo, and it is always stunning.

Katie and Charles both had a look, and both were exclamatory. Saturn never fails. That’s why I call it the Wao of Saturn. It’s almost a mystical thing. Check out the photos being taken of Saturn by the Cassini space probe. Saturn is a trip of a place, filled with unlikely and mind-boggling geometries, whimsical alignments, beguiling colors and textures. Saturn, even through a small telescope, is a complex mini-solar system. People run out of words looking at Saturn. They often ask me for confirmation: “Is that real?” I’ve heard of dubious observers looking into the telescope to see if the astronomer has simply pasted an image of Saturn in there. That may be apocryphal but the disbelief is common enough.

And frankly, sometimes I’m stunned. Saturn is on average 762700000 miles from earth. Let’s put in the commas: 762,700,000…that’s 762 million miles. Driving in a (spaceworthy) car at 65 miles an hour, it would take you 1,339 years to reach Saturn.

So, the fact that you can see Saturn at all, let alone its rings, moons and sometimes even cloud details on the surface…it is jawdropping. Most casual observers don’t think about these things, and yet the sight of it still drops jaws.

On Sunday night, I brought my telescope to the country home of our local baker, Dustin Cutler. Again Saturn was the first target. About 10 people looked at it, including four kids ranging in age from three to five years. For several of the people gathered it was their first view through a telescope and their first view of Saturn. I did my job.

After that, I showed people several other “showpiece” objects…the globular cluster M13 in Hercules, the Ring, a planetary nebula in Lyra, that Van cat of the night sky, the double star Albireo in Cygnus, and finally M81 and M82 in Ursa Major, the constellation that the big dipper is actually a part of. Those are all beautiful objects, but I’ve noticed that the Wao of Saturn cranks up the expectation so high that the fainter, fuzzier things are a bit…underwhelming. Some context and description helps flesh them out in people’s minds–much of the power of observing rests on both aesthetics and context, and that takes a little more mental work.

Viewing Saturn in a telescope is the astronomical version of bungee jumping…and I suspect the Wao of Saturn is based on the release of dopamine in the brain.

I usually show Saturn first to “hook” people–but I think I’ll start saving it and build up to it. It’s a show-stopper!

It wasn’t a very good weekend in this are for 100  Hours of Astronomy. But Sunday night it cleared up, and I packed the old white telescope into the old white Honda and headed downtown. Or should I say ‘ghost town’? For a while my first visitor was a cat. She was wary of me, paused, and then moved on.

I moved the scope down the street and parked it in front of Main Moon Chinese Restaurant. Given that the moon was out, I thought that was fitting. Here’s my scope and the restaurant:

I showed the moon and Saturn, and it’s four easily visible moons to about 7 people. Two young ladies who were delivering food for Main Moon, one customer who was waiting, a nice man who just passed by, and Kevin, the owner of Main Moon and one of his staff. Everyone enjoyed it. I could barely pick out the brightest stars because of all the glare. My house is just a mile away and the sky is actually pretty dark, but all the round globe streetlights downtown throw orange light up and out–not down on the ground which is where I guess people should really want it. Anyway, young astronomers downtown would be excused for thinking that the night sky is made up of the moon and a handful of bright “stars,” most of which are actually planets. Hmmm, maybe Geneva needs a dark sky ordinance?

Anyway, I took a few images of the moon through the eyepiece. This is just holding my Canon DSLR up to the eyepiece. I should get an adapter to mount the camera there, I might have better results, although these are not so bad:

The terminator line on the moon (line between day and night) is the best place to see real definition in the surface features.

A little lower on the terminator

Astronomers who love to observe the moon sometimes jokingly refer to themselves as “lunatics”. However, their etymology is pretty accurate:

lunatic |ˈloōnəˌtik|

noun
a mentally ill person (not in technical use).

ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French lunatique, from late Latin lunaticus, from Latin luna ‘moon’ (from the belief that changes of the moon caused intermittent insanity).

Unfortunately, I remember from my time in Washington DC that most of the homeless around Dupont Circle had outpatient hospital wrist-bracelets on, and most of them seemed schizophrenic. It’s a shame that our mentally ill are too often left to sleep under the moonlight that was once thought to be the cause of their maladies. Just a little thought.

This weekend is the official, round the world star part organized as part of the IYA, or International Year of Astronomy. I’m sure you all knew about it, so central are stargazers to the popular culture heartbeat. Anyway, it’s a big effort, called 100 Hours of Astronomy. The goal: show people stuff. You know, up there. Galaxies. Newborn stars. Dead stars. Giant clouds of gas. Planets. Our little neighbor-world, the moon. So for the last few days, astronomers the world over have dragged their telescopes to street corners, open their backyard (or mountaintop) observatory doors, and have worked really hard to get other eyeballs on the universe. I love it.

Of course, in this area, any planned astronomy event seems to be a signal for rain. Friday and Saturday, no go. But tonight. The Clear Sky Clock for Geneva is clear, clear, clear. So, I’ll be downtown with my telescope. I’ll be on Castle or Exchange or Seneca…the dude on the sidewalk with a telescope. I’ll probably set up around 8:30pm. Come check it out, Geneva!

Just put this up under “about” but thought somebody might want to read it this way: