On a recent night near Norwood Young America in Carver County, more than a dozen people arrived at Baylor Regional Park and headed toward the high, arched roof and warm, red glow of Onan Observatory. As the sun set, Tim Hagen threw his six-foot-seven-inch frame against a manual lever inside. Hagen is a volunteer with the Minnesota Astronomical Society. He rolled back a corrugated-steel canopy, giving the observatory’s half-ton telescope an unobstructed view of the night sky. The white aluminum cylinder with a 16-inch-diameter mirror inside looked like the jettisoned stage of a small rocket. It stood eight feet high, mounted on a mechanical tripod.
A line formed to the side, where there was a small educational display. It was lighted with small red bulbs, giving it a kind of sci-fi flair. Dana Bloom, who is earning her Earth Science teaching license, was looking for ideas she could use with her students. Her son, almost two years old, reached out and tossed Uranus and Neptune to the floor. They were softballs in an exhibit designed to show the relative size of the planets. Nearby Jupiter was a basketball. Mars was merely a marble, and the Earth appeared to be a jumbo-sized gumball.
At the telescope, some older kids studied the moon with their parents. Magnified 130 times by the observatory telescope, the lunar landscape revealed itself in astonishing detail. Surface craters looked close enough to touch. The view resembled famous footage shot from the Apollo spacecraft. Still, Justin Fasula, an enthusiast who is “six and three-quarters” years old, wanted to see more. He kept Hagen busy with requests for views of the Andromeda Galaxy and the Ring Nebula.
Outside, Hal Yngve from Plymouth unloaded a telescope from his car. Bundled in a pointy-hooded parka against the gusty, 40-degree night, he set up his gear and discussed his interests in a deliberate, serious manner, though not an unfriendly one. Yngve welcomed newcomers. He politely asked their names, and encouraged them to peer through his equipment, even offering a specially designed padded chair to optimize viewing angles. Many astronomy buffs focus their passion on a specific category of celestial bodies. Yngve likes “open galactic clusters.” On this night he named and easily located several of the star groupings, including the Perseus Double Cluster and M45. A purchasing agent by day, Yngve was awestruck by the sight of Halley’s Comet in 1986. During last year’s Leonid meteor shower, he counted 300 shooting stars in six minutes. Tonight, he wasn’t expecting anything so dramatic.
Earlier in the day, amateur astronomers converged at Radio City, a Mounds View store that sells telescopes alongside short-wave radio equipment and robotics magazines. During “StarQuest,” a one-day sales event, longtime hobbyists mixed with relative neophytes. John Porter recently received a gift catalog from his employer, Lockheed-Martin. He skipped the clocks and tie tacks in favor of a telescope. He’s happy with his choice. “Even with my dinky little scope, I can see the rings of Saturn,” he said. “Now I’m starting to dream about fancier scopes.” Porter’s coworker Chuck Zdeb has been staring into space for years and remains fascinated. “Jupiter looks different every night you look at it,” he said. When the planet got slammed in 1994 by the Shoemaker-Levy comet, he recalled, “You could see the marks where it was hitting!” Zdeb has often encouraged others to join him during his nighttime outings. “It’s a great way to pick up girls,” he said.
In the Radio City parking lot, Astronomical Society president Ben Huset answered questions and passed out flyers about Quaoar, an orb recently discovered about a billion miles past Pluto. During occasional cloud breaks, passers-by could peer at the sun through a powerful red filter. There were sunspots. To the untrained eye, they resembled specks of mildew or seeds from an elm tree.
Radio City owner Daniel Fish, stocky with a white mop of Andy Warhol hair, has watched the skies for more than 50 years. He and his wife, Maline, live in Ham Lake, lured north by the darkness. They recently fought City Hall to stop a neighboring development from using decorative lantern-style lights that would have generated what astronomers call “light pollution,” an increasing problem in sprawling metropolitan areas. Fish observed its effects when he taught a class at a Twin Cities elementary school. “None of those kids had ever seen the Milky Way,” he said. “They didn’t know what I was talking about. Is that a real loss? I guess I think it is. I’ve always wondered why we don’t have access to guaranteed dark space. We can have parks and nature conservatories and ice arenas, but us poor little people who just like to have one place where it’s dark are considered freaks.”
Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, from St. Paul, knows a great way to get around light pollution. “From the space shuttle, you don’t have any light from the ground, and you get less obscuration from the atmosphere because you’re above it,” she said. Plus, the vehicle orbits the Earth in 90 minutes, affording frequent views of both the northern and southern hemispheres. “It gives you an opportunity to see a sky that you don’t normally see,” she said. She’ll get that opportunity. In May, the 39-year-old NASA mission specialist takes her first journey into outer space, aboard Endeavour.
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