Bunch of Amateurs (31 page)

These bubbly koans and rehearsed rages constitute an evolved efficiency born of five decades of telescope making. He knows where all the common mistakes are made, and he’s fine-tuned the tactics of teaching others to avoid them into an obscure art form. He talked to me constantly throughout my work, filling my head with deep-space factoids while simultaneously flogging me like a galley master. It was really hard work, and I would have to do it. The result in the end would have been a near miracle in every other century: to look through my own keyhole at the outer reaches of the known universe.

The decibel volume of the grit started to die down, and the stuff began to cream into a kind of gray slurry. I rinsed off the mirror and the tool. I grabbed my small cup of black Carborundum and applied a fresh sprinkling across the glass with a dab of water. Again the volume cranked up as Dobson gamboled off, puckishly prancing in a distant part of a backyard that was more like a field. Way out at the edge, he held up some green that he’d plucked from the ground.

“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.

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.

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 committed 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.