Obscene Astronomy and Street-Smart Stargazing

Image Gallery image by NASA / courtesy of nasaimages.org

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Last autumn I set up my telescope across the street from Trotta’s Castle Lounge in Geneva, New York. I aimed the telescope at the gibbous (three-quarters) moon hanging over city hall. Two guys were smoking outside the bar, and one of them called out to me.

“Dude, can you see my balls in there?”

“No, a telescope is for big things that are far away, not tiny things close up. That’s a microscope you’re thinking of.”

I didn’t really reply that way, even if it was the best of several retorts I worked out about two hours later. What I did say, I said out of a total lack of talent for witty repartee but also a transparent honesty.

“No, I’m looking at mountains on the moon. Wanna see?”

The guy blinked several times, and then his friend said “sure,” shrugged, and crossed the street, leaving ball-dude looking more than a little foolish.

Ball-dude’s friend looked through the telescope. “You gotta be fucking kiddin’ me . . . Man, get your ass over here and see this shit! You won’t fucking believe this.”

I’m sorry about all the cursing in this otherwise family publication. But I have to tell it like it is. Faced with some of the true wonders of the universe, people curse. Beautifully.

One evening I was showing some college students the planet Saturn through the telescope. Suprita, a sophisticated and polite student from India, took one look, breathed in audibly, and came down the stepladder. “Can I curse?” she asked. I shrugged. Suprita stepped back up to the eyepiece and let out a string of obscenities in a discordantly lovely accent.

Sidewalk astronomy, a term for nerds letting the public look through their telescopes, was coined in the 1960s when a feisty Vedanta monk named John Dobson started building large telescopes out of garbage he found lying about and setting them up to educate passersby in San Francisco. The monastery, tired of his secretly grinding mirrors in the bathroom after curfew, threw him out, and, like a latter-day Johnny Appleseed, John Dobson has been a mendicant ever since, traveling around and showing the universe to anyone who will look.

I met John Dobson at a star party in the mountains of Pennsylvania. (A star party is a gathering of amateur astronomers who camp out in a big open field and, weather cooperating, look at the sky together. It’s a lovely nerd fest.) I asked John what he wanted people to get out of their encounters with the night sky. “You were not born in some little town in western New York,” he said. “You were born into a universe.”

Astronomy should be a part of every grade school curriculum, right next to the Erie Canal and how tadpoles become frogs. Alas, we’re a long way off. The small cadre of sidewalk astronomers can’t make up for our country’s failed education system, but it can make a difference.

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