astronomy

As I said in my profile, I am an astronomer and a big fan of Galileo. That's why I made up the name, Philileo; it's like Galileo, only much stranger, like me. Luckily, my wife is an astronomer as well so she never objected to spending money on the hobby. Actually, I like to think of it as more of a sport, like hunting. Like Orion, the hunter and my favorite constellation, it takes the efforts of a good hunter to find the best night sky and elusive objects.

One year we took a trip to find the best night sky. We had a week to kill before attending an astronomy conference in Iowa so we studied a map and decided on the area around Chadron, Nebraska and headed out on U.S. 20.

Once you're past Rockford, Illinois, 20 becomes empty, except for a few stops along the way. Nebraska along 20 was delightful as we drove through massive sand hills. There was really no traffic the whole way, except for some rattle snakes sleeping on the road. I counted about 20 cars on the whole trip. Chadron is a small town and quite beautiful. The only bad part of town was a Walmart (I'm not a fan of Walmart) but I guess they needed one there.

Outside of Chadron, we found a dirt road which was part of a naional forest. There was absolutely nobody out there. We set up the telescope from the trunk of our car on a driveway to a cattle and horse ranch.

When we stepped out of the car, we thought it would be totally quiet but there were a lot of animals watching us. Wild turkeys, coyotes, racoons and dozens of other animals and birds were popping there heads up as we set up. They were probably woundering what type of crazy humans were these two and what could they possibly be doing here? However, once the darkness set in, they went there own way. A few of them passed by as the night went on but they couldn't care less that we were there anymore.

It was not a wasted trip. On that first night, we were treated to an extremely dark night, even though the moon was nearly full. It reminded me of a guy I knew in Vietnam. He grew up in a big city and said he was disappointed because the night sky was always so cloudy. I explained to him that he was just seeing the Milky Way for his first time. He couldn't believe there were so many stars that it was like looking at a rug made of light.

There was so much to see that the mind acts like a computer that just had too much information fed into it and it froze up. What do we look at first? It was just a casual night of observing and we really didn't care though. It was just having that open dark sky that mattered and we reached our goal on the first night of oberving.

We found many great sites on the trip and by the time we reached the conference in Iowa, it became a secondary event on our trip home. The conference was hosted by an incredible astronomy club with a great observatory. They had one of the largest refractor telescopes I've seen. But we were headed back home to bright night skies. Goodbye, Milky Way!

We are both hobbled with knee and back problems now and a trip like that may or may not happen again but we have great memories. Chadron will still be there and the animals can enjoy the dark skies for us until we come back again. If you ever wonder why anyone can stand being out in the night air, huddled around a telescope all night, just look up the next time you're out away from city lights. It doesn't take a large or expensive scope to find the answer.