The Okanagan is home to many amateur astronomers, each one proving that child-like curiosity is the first, and most important, ingredient in the pursuit of truth and beauty

By Ross Freake

I adjust my earphones, cradle the tape recorder to my chest and lie down in the 2 a.m. darkness. An owl hoots; rows of grape vines frame the sky; small rocks pierce my Taiga vest and grass licks my neck as I close my eyes, finger on the play button. I wiggle around on my lumpy bed, take a few deep breaths and press play. The throbs of a giant heartbeat, the birth cries of the universe pulse through the earphones. I open my eyes and the world explodes out of the void.

A luminous band of stars flows out of chaos, from the centre of the galaxy 26,000 light years away. On each side of that starry river, thousands of other suns glitter, illuminating the Milky Way with their cold fire.

The Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago, but it also happens every moment between our ears in the way we comprehend what we see, what we believe, what we hear. The gurgling of the infant universe, the birthing sounds of the exploding primeval atom crackling though my earphones were extracted from the cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of creation’s birthday that permeates every micron of space.

?Philosophers, theologians and cosmologists each have their own creation story, but amateur astronomers looking through their telescopes seek to be in the mystery, not in the know. They might not see the whole picture, but a bigger one comes into focus as they scan the cosmic ocean that laps at our shore.

You can see the fuzzy outlines of that picture on YouTube while listening to astronomer Carl Sagan. As he talks, images of Earth—a pale, blue dot—float across the computer screen. One photo was taken from the moon in 1968, the first time we got to contemplate our home. Another was shot by Voyager 1 from 6.4 billion kilometres away.

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic darkness,” intones the deep, resonant voice that captivated 200 million people in the 13 weeks Cosmos shot across our TV screen. “…?a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

The Practice of Wonderment

Like Sagan, amateur astronomers embody a playfulness that sages, fools and children possess. That sense of fun is on display during opening night at the 10-hectare site four kilometres up Big White Road where members, appropriately called RASC-OCs (for Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Okanagan Centre), plan to build an observatory with a 25-inch, research-calibre telescope. The Okanagan is the only place in Canada with a population this large without a public observatory.

Eight personal telescopes are set up in a gravel bowl—on one side is a treed hill, where the 25-inch telescope will sit in a roll-back roof building, and below is Big White Road where headlights slice the darkness like shooting stars. But the telescopes are unattended this April night as the RASC-OCs wait in the darkness, tense fingers on the triggers, eyes probing the area around Castor and Pollux. As the International Space Station emerges from the shadows, a laser hits it.
“Cookie, please,” Guy Mackie says with a laugh as he turns to Colleen O’Hare with his hand out, laser pointer dangling from his wrist. As she thrusts the Tupperware container of chocolate chip cookies toward him, her binary-star system tiara sways in the cool, mountain air. She swears it keeps the mosquitoes away.

?Mackie, chair of the observatory committee, nibbles on his cookie, laser tracking the space station 380 kilometres up, racing along at 17,000 kilometres per hour. “It’s kind of cool,” he says. “There are people riding up there; it’s just a little point of light. That’s a UFO if you’re into daytime TV.”

While many of us watch fake stars on TV, Mackie, the Kelowna Curling Club icemaker, is out in the darkness 50 nights a year transfixed by the real thing. He has seen billions of stars. And star clusters, nebulae, galaxies and supernovae. And he never tires of what he sees, nor of talking about it, spreading his passion like a supernova spewing the elements of life into the cosmic dark.
After the space station fades into the shadows over Big White—and O’Hare gives everyone a cookie—Mackie slides his glasses from forehead to nose and swivels his telescope, like a contestant on Dancing with the Stars, toward the constellation Leo. After some adjustments, he steps back.

“Here, take a look at this.” He waves me over to his 12.5-inch, night-black telescope, one of three he owns. Like the telescope, he’s dressed in black, from ball cap to shoes; only his white beard reflects photons, the bringers of light.

I press against the eyepiece and jump 50 million years back in time. Fifty million years! When the photons hitting my retina left those galaxies, the super continent Pangea was breaking apart, the Atlantic Ocean was little, the Pacific huge, India was about to smash into Asia and create mountains that man, not yet a gleam in Nature’s eye, would litter with garbage on his way to plant a flag on the top.

“There are two galaxies—M66 and M65—vertically arranged,” Mackie tells me. “It looks like two stars, but they’re actually spiral galaxies face on.”

In a cookie-cutter world that does its best night and day to produce carbon-copy clones of everything, Mackie, like most amateur astronomers, delights in the seemingly little things the world-weary scoff at. “I always get excited about stuff. I can’t help myself,” Mackie says with a laugh, one hand on hip, the other on his telescope.

“Most people have a sense of wonder, but I think it’s enhanced by practicing this. Not just astronomy, it’s nature in general. You can find moments like that in the feathers of a duck, or whatever. The night sky has been an important connection for humankind since mankind began,” Mackie says, stretching his arms to encompass the over-arching heavens where Cygnus the Swan flies forever above the river of the Milky Way, which the Greeks thought looked like milk from the breasts of Hera, mother of the gods.

?“The night was part of the day; we learned when to plant crops, when to have ceremonies, those types of things. But with light pollution, we’ve become separated from the night skies; we drive from one well-lit house to another well-lit house on a well-lit road. When people get back under the night sky, they recognize that deep instinct, that this is part of the human condition, part of the human experience that they might have been missing. Some people really notice they miss it.”

Chasing Discoveries Large and Small

This International Year of Astronomy is a good time to reconnect with the night sky, and with that pale, blue dot we live on yet take for granted. This is the 400th anniversary of the origin of modern science, when Galileo pointed his itty-bitty telescope with a two-inch mirror he had ground himself toward the sky. When he saw the craters on the moon, the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter, he knew Earth was not the centre of the universe. And that changed everything.

“The first time I saw Saturn’s rings tilted nicely, seeing the bands of Jupiter and the four moons, I thought, hey, this is what Galileo saw,” Richard Christie, a professional radio astronomer and Okanagan College physics professor, says softly in the near-midnight darkness. “I go out often with these guys because they’re way better than I am at looking through telescopes and finding something interesting. I’ll leave my telescope and wander over to Guy. He’ll say, ‘take a look at this.’”

Which he does this evening. “I got something cool. It’s NGC4565, a spiral galaxy edge on; you can see the full length of the disk stretching out on either side,” Mackie says.

“That’s nice,” Christie replies, after gluing himself to the eyepiece on Mackie’s telescope.
“It’s in the Virgo Supercluster. I can see the dust lanes, exactly what I have seen in a professional telescope.” He steps back and I sidle up to the eyepiece, and see gossamer, glitter sliding along black velvet. Even though it’s 53 million light years away, seeing NGC4565 through a telescope, in the raw, is more intimate than admiring colour pictures in a glossy magazine.

When he teaches—at the telescope or in a classroom—Mackie maintains that astronomy is the highest form of education. “It is the most alive of the sciences in that it is constantly adapting to new environments of discovery, such as the foundation-shattering realization of the accelerating expansion of the universe.” Imagine that: a speck so small that it makes a proton, a very small part of an atom, look enormous, has been expanding faster than the speed of light for 13.7 billion years, creating time and space. The former speck grew more than the distance from the Earth to the moon in the time it takes to read this sentence.

If ennui should replace his passion, which is always in full flood, all he has to do is look at the night sky and find the globular cluster dubbed Mackie1 by the U.S. Naval Observatory. “It’s a small star cluster with about 29 stars,” Mackie says. “I was at the Mount Kobau Star Party (near Osoyoos) and Alan Whitman was observing dim objects with his 16-inch telescope. I decided to try to find everything he was finding with my 12-and-a-half. But because my scope is undriven, I was constantly correcting for drift, and every time I was about to make the correction, a fuzzy blob would come into the upper right hand corner of my eyepiece. ‘What’s that fuzzy thing?’ I yelled across to Alan.”

Mackie also hunts comets, much like Charles Messier—the 18th century French astronomer who compiled a list now called the Messier Catalogue, the first big challenge for amateur astronomers—and Jim Tisdale, who lives in the shadow of Knox Mountain with an awesome view of Okanagan Lake and the skies over the Westside.

“I have a special thing for comets,” says Tisdale, a doctor for 43 years. “I think it was Carl Sagan who said that comets are like cats, they all have tails and they do exactly as they please. You don’t know when a comet comes in from the far reaches of our solar system and starts to go around the sun, if it will brighten and be great to look at, if it will have a big tail or whether it will be a dim object.”

He was driving to Kelowna General Hospital to deliver a baby in the 1960s when he saw Comet Bennett streaking through the sky. “I had had no previous knowledge that this thing was coming. But even through the streetlights, it was really clear. For the next three or four nights, I set up my 4.5-inch reflector on the KGH roof and made sure almost every person working at night could have a look at this comet.”

Time has not satiated his lust for astronomy, which started in 1955 at Michigan State University. Every night before he goes to bed, he looks at the sky. If it’s clear, he goes out with his binoculars. If he sees something interesting, he’ll grab his small telescope.

“Before you know it, it’ll be 1:30. My wife is really good about it. I’ll come into our bedroom and say, ‘are you asleep?’ The answer usually is, ‘not now.’ I’ll tell her what I’m looking at and say, ‘you should come and see this.’ She’ll say, ‘have I seen it before?’ I’ll say, ‘Yeah, but it’s really clear; you should look at this.’ And she’ll get up.

“Comets are one of the few things that are given the name of the person who discovers them,” Tisdale says. “I have never discovered a comet.”

Neither has Jack Newton. But an asteroid—30840 Jackalice—was named after him and his wife for his work in astrophotography. His pictures of cosmic objects have appeared in books, newspapers, magazines and shine on Internet websites like the stars in the Milky Way.

“I was always fascinated by the moon and northern lights as a young child. I used to use binoculars. When I was about 10 or 11, my parents bought me a small telescope for Christmas, a two-inch refractor, and with that I discovered Saturn. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I could see the rings as clear as if they had been drawn by a draftsman. I discovered it purely by accident, but I knew exactly how Galileo felt.”

Fifty-eight years later, he shares that Galileo awe with his guests at his bed and breakfast atop Anarchist Mountain, 450 metres above Osoyoos. If it’s cloudy, his guests ramble into his home theatre with its three-metre high-definition screen and he fires up the telescopes at his observatory in Arizona Sky Village, a 450-acre astronomical community he helped develop in the Grand Canyon state.

He uses one of his Arizona telescopes for supernova hunting and has discovered or co-discovered 39—eight so far this year. Supernovae explosions are factories of life; without them there would be no Earth and no us; no one to look and wonder. While hydrogen and helium, the most common elements in the universe, were created during the Big Bang, the heavier elements such as carbon, lead, silicon and oxygen are created in stars and scattered into the cosmos when they explode.

Newton’s first-discovered supernova blew up 400 million years ago. (Light travels almost six trillion miles in a year.) “I get to watch it blow up when the light arrives,” he says. “You’re actually witnessing the death of a star; you really are being part of it.”

Bringing the Stars to the Street

Compared to Newton, Colleen O’Hare is a relative newcomer to astronomy, but she spends almost as much time infecting others with her passion at schools, libraries, seniors’ centres, parks and the Wal-Mart parking lot. “The first observing I ever did was with binoculars looking at the moon,” says the retired lab technician. “I was struck by the details, the beauty and the reality of it. When I got my telescope, the first thing I looked at was Saturn and I actually screamed. Thank goodness I was alone.”

As soon as she joined the RASC-OCs in 2003, she began helping with Sidewalk Astronomy, a program Mackie started to bring astronomy down to the man on the street, or parking lot. “I thought I knew what I was talking about, but I quickly found out I knew nothing,” O’Hare says.
At first she was the Vanna White of astronomy, not saying a word as she held posters and pointed to the telescope. Now, she’s front and centre at the 80 to 100 presentations the society does every year, showing the wonders of the universe to thousands.

“We’ll bring the telescopes and we show whatever is out that night, usually a planet or two, some stars, globular clusters and all sorts of sky observations,” she says. “That’s the biggest thrill, showing people—especially people who have never looked through a big telescope—what’s up there and seeing the looks on their faces when they discover that.

“We were at Wal-Mart doing one of our Sidewalk Astronomy sessions when a mother and teenage son came over to have a look. The son seemed a bit excited, but as he looked at the moon he stood quietly gazing through the eyepiece. Mom had a strange look on her face, a mixture of pride and amazement. Her ADHD son was standing perfectly still and totally in the moment. She said she hadn’t seen him that still and calm for a long time. He had never shown any interest in anything before.”

That was a wow moment—a Galileo moment—and O’Hare hopes to create at least 7,500 of them before the sun sets on 2009. “There are very few people not enthusiastic about astronomy,” says the self-professed “astronomoholic.” “Everyone seems to know a little bit about it and has wondered the same thing—how, where, what, who, when. I don’t allow any why questions. Why implies a purpose or direction. Neither exists in the universe. Age makes no difference, either. And to be able to share someone’s first look through a big scope, whether that person is five or 95, is quite an honour.”

That Awesome Feeling

Remembering the “wow” brought Frank Stariha back to astronomy after retiring. As a kid, he spent a lot of time stumbling around the foothills of Osoyoos with a star map, binoculars and a flashlight. “Anything you read on retirement, longevity and quality of life will include people’s grey matter working,” he says. “Four hundred years ago, Galileo opened up a whole new world looking through his rather primitive telescope. In a sense that’s what has happened to technology in the last 30 to 40 years. It’s a whole new universe. And at the end of the day, it’s fun.”

Only three people come to the Big White gathering to celebrate International Astronomy Day (or night), but that didn’t stop the RASC-OCs from looking, joking and talking. I couldn’t see 73-year-old Zoli Boda, but I could hear his excitement as he waxed eloquent about the joys of the telescope. “Things looked different from what I imagined them to be,” he says “Even at my age, it’s a wonderment.”

Boda has found 97 of the objects on the Messier list. “We were out at Brenda Mines and when I would discover one, I would just scream. It’s almost childish, but it’s amazingly exciting. When I find number 110, (Mackie) said he will buy me a beer.”

Mackie chuckles, looking forward to the night when he gets Boda’s call—or hears his scream. “I have been with seven people when they finished their list,” he says.

While I was amazed to look 50 million years back in time, Mackie has seen more than seven billion years into the past, long before our sun flared on after a cloud of hydrogen and helium compressed and atoms fused, causing a thermonuclear reaction.

He spent 20 to 30 hours over many nights looking at one part of the sky for a double quasar, but couldn’t find it with his scope. “I have a friend—Wendell Shuster of Penticton—who has a 16-inch scope,” Mackie says. “We went up to an area near Goudy Road. At the end of an observing period in winter, about 2:30 in the morning, I said, ‘can we try and look for this?’

“He said, ‘If you want to, but I’m cold, it’s 30 below.’ I moved the scope and I saw it, a little blue streak at least half the visible universe away. I was just hooting and hollering. I like those kinds of challenges. Other ones I’ve been successful at finding are dim objects at the edge of visibility with this telescope. I just pick up a photon or two; seeing almost nothing really excites me.”

But the universe he stares into came from a speck smaller than nothing, something I marvel at beneath the vines with music from a 13-billion-year-old hit playing on my tape recorder and a river of light flowing overhead. We are, after all, the eyes through which the universe contemplates itself, trillions of lifeless atoms holding hands to achieve consciousness.

And that, as the eight-year-olds who first see Saturn through a RASC-OC telescope proclaim, is awesome—way cool.

Mount Kobau

For a time, Canada had the largest telescope in the world. But six months after the 72-inch reflector telescope at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory on Vancouver Island was trained on the night sky, it was relegated to second place by the 100-inch Hooker Reflector at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. Within two generations, Canada was out of the top 10—no longer the sun, but the Pluto of the astronomical world.

In its bid to get back into the inner circle of darkness, the director of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory commissioned a survey of potential sites for a world-class telescope.

Mount Kobau, the 1,890-metre peak just outside Osoyoos, was chosen. “The centrepiece of the planned Kobau complex was a 12-storey dome housing a telescope with a 157-inch diameter mirror,” writes Jim Failes, second president of the Okanagan Astronomical Society, forerunner of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Okanagan Centre (RASC-OC).

“The instrument— dubbed the Queen Elizabeth II Telescope—would be the second largest on the planet, surpassed only by California’s famous Hale Reflector.”

Some astronomers argued, however, that Canada should build in a more exotic locale where the viewing was better. While the astronomers bickered, politicians killed the project as part of budget cuts in 1968.

But each August, amateur astronomers set up their telescopes and their tents at the Mount Kobau Star Party. “It’s like a convention; everyone is like-minded, like retailers,” says Colleen O’Hare, outreach director for RASC-OC. “You’re immersed in astronomy.”

“You could have 10 astronomers sitting at a table and they’ll all do the hobby differently,” says Guy Mackie, telescope director for the society. “They get together at organized events and learn about other aspects.”

And the secret to being able to log all those hours for eight days? “Astronomers are good nappers,” says Mackie. “The nap is a practice sadly overlooked in our culture.

Newbie Frank Stariha, who plans to attend his first Mount Kobau Star Party in August, also has down-to-Earth advice: “Bring warm socks.”

Mount Kobau Star Party
Runs from dusk August 15 to dawn August 23, 2009
www.mksp.ca

Getting Started

Becoming an amateur astronomer is easy:

• Find a dark site. On any given night, 2,000 stars can be seen with the naked eye.
  
• Start with binoculars. Larger glasses like 7x42, 8x40, 7x50 or 10x50 are recommended.
  
• Use maps and guidebooks.
  
• Find other amateurs.

That’s what Dennis Krause did after moving to Kelowna. He took RASC-OC’s 10-week New Observer to Visual Astronomy Program.

“That course, along with monthly club meetings, attending various organized speaker presentations, access to the club’s library of books and videos, and taking advantage of numerous evening opportunities to view the night sky with the very knowledgeable club astronomers, has all enhanced the learning process,” Krause says.

“Equally wonderful has been the ability to view Jupiter, along with some of its moons in the pre-dawn, spring sky using nothing more than a pair of binoculars (8x56 Celestron SkyMaster) and from my light-polluted driveway. Using those binoculars, along with a planisphere (road map for the night sky), I hunt for stars, constellations, galaxies, nebulae and other objects.”

Local amateur astronomers are more than willing to share their knowledge and their passion.

“Questions we’re often asked is, ‘how big a telescope should I get, how much does it cost and where can you buy it?’” says Jim Tisdale, former RASC-OC president. “Don’t buy a telescope (immediately) because it will probably gather dust. Get some star charts and learn constellations.

Buy binoculars. You can spend hours, days, nights with them. If you still have an interest, then buy a telescope. You have to work up to it, but you need a certain background knowledge first.”

“A good opportunity is our rental fleet,” says Guy Mackie, another former RASC-OC president. “Once you have the telescope and the eye pieces, there is no other expense.”

Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Okanagan Centre (RASC-OC)
www.ocrasc.ca

Guy Mackie
www.members.shaw.ca/guy.m

HubbleSite
http://hubblesite.org/ explore_astronomy