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Fan Mountain Observatory
The night sky glows beyond Fan Mountain Observatory, Albemarle County, Va. For links to more observatories, go to BlueRidgeCountry.com.
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Lagoon Nebula
This deep sky image of the Lagoon Nebula was shot in Poages Mill, Va.
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Bob Hampton
North Carolina astronomer Bob Hampton stands with his Dobsonian (blue) and Newtonian (white) telescopes.
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Fan Mountain Observatory
The night sky glows beyond Fan Mountain Observatory, Albemarle County, Va. For links to more observatories, go to BlueRidgeCountry.com.
On a hilltop in Botetourt, I’m looking at Saturn. I wouldn’t have guessed it, necessarily, had I seen it without explanation. It’s not beautiful, like the photos in astronomy textbooks, with broad striped rings circling a not-quite-spherical heavenly body, colors a little more subtle than Jupiter. Saturn, through a Dobsonian telescope on a hilltop in Botetourt County, Va., looks something like a toy, a faint, somewhat fuzzy little ball, ringed with a thick oval, all of it in shades of gray, rather than gold or yellow.
Somehow, Saturn’s gray faintness starts to suggest just how far away it is, and just how old it is, and just how tiny we are, here on this hill, looking through a telescope at a planet we’ve never been to and won’t until who knows when.
“Emma – moon!” Chelsea Fridley, of Eagle Rock, is talking to her two-year-old niece, Emma Fridley, who replies, “Moon!” – and we can see that, too, through these telescopes, a big glowing rock, a little past first quarter.
The hilltop in Botetourt County is at Blue Ridge Vineyard, owned by husband and wife Jim Holaday and Barbara Kolb; the event is an informal star party, one part of an evening that also includes live music, barbecue and wine tastings. The Roanoke Valley Astronomical Society holds star parties up here every so often because the skies are clear and dark.
John Goss is one of the amateur astronomers here tonight – he’s a former president of the RVAS and is vice president of the Astronomical League, a national organization of astronomy societies. He also writes a monthly column on astronomy for The Roanoke Times.
“Older people have trouble remembering how dark the skies were 30 or 40 years ago,” he says. “The young people never knew.”
Light pollution is a major challenge facing astronomers, amateur and otherwise, especially in this half of the U.S. “If you’ve seen a photo of the United States taken at night, you’ll see that the eastern side of the country is pretty much lit up, except right around our area and into West Virginia.”
And so people aren’t maybe as curious about the night sky as they used to be: “If stars are out of sight, they’re out of mind.”
The RVAS, like other amateur astronomy organizations, has a mission to educate, in a time when skies are brightening and kids are staying indoors. The society’s projects include donating a telescope to the Botetourt County Library that can be checked out like a book, and building an observatory at Roanoke’s Apple Ridge Farm, with the help of a $10,000 grant from General Electric.
Richard Drumm, president of the Charlottesville (Va.) Astronomical Society, echoes Goss: “If you go to, say, Central Park in New York City, and look up, and you’re lucky, you might see one star. You might see Jupiter. Or the moon. That’s it.”
Drumm first became fascinated with astronomy when he was a child living in Lexington, Va., where his father taught history at the Virginia Military Institute. Captain Roland Jones, who ran the VMI planetarium, lived upstairs and would set up a telescope outside to look at the stars.
“I saw probably the moon, Jupiter and Saturn, and that was probably all,” remembers Drumm, “but that’s all it takes.”
Why look at the stars?
“Well, one really good reason to do astronomy,” he says, “is that every once in a while, every few million years, a giant rock hits the earth, and if we don’t look, we won’t see it comin’.”
But mostly, it’s curiosity, awe, the continuation of a study that’s been going on for countless ages: “I see this smudge over here in the constellation of Andromeda,” for instance. “Light is made of photons, and I happen to know that because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.” And, “I happen to know that those photons are two and a half million years old.”
That’s all it is – just a smudge, like my blurry toy Saturn, but, as Drumm puts it, “a really awesome little smudge.”
I was on a mountaintop when Hale-Bopp entered our skies – it won’t again for another 2,380 years or so. I remember walking across the James Madison University campus one night, looking up, and suddenly seeing a smudge in the sky – not a little one, but a definite streak, a glow. Another night, a fellow musician and I headed out to Dayton, Va., from Harrisonburg, to Reddish Knob, where you can look over the mountain ridges into West Virginia, watch some beautiful, beautiful moonrises, and where the sky is dark enough that satellites are visible, little silver specks crossing the sky. We watched the comet, and the sky was so dark we could see its second tail.
In a matter of weeks it was gone, but for a little while it was a brilliant, constant reminder in the night sky of what is out there, beyond our sight most of the time, in a vast expanse of space.
In his back yard In Burnsville, N.C., Bob Hampton is up until 5 a.m. most nights, he says. He worked as an electronics technician for years, and between second and third shifts and his interest in astronomy, much of his day has always been after dark.
“In 1982 I bought my first telescope,” Hampton says – a 13-inch reflector telescope he still uses. He’s built his own observatory which he calls Thunderstruck Observatory (after the mountain he lives on). “It’s just a simple little wooden shed, about 10 by 10 feet… with a tin roof on wheels,” he says. “I only spent a few hundred dollars on it.”
ut that works for him. “Just at home here in my back yard, I can see thousands of galaxies.”
Hampton is president of the Blue Ridge Astronomy Group, which formed just in the last few years. They hold star parties on the square in Burnsville; Hampton writes a newspaper column for the Yancey Common Times Journal, and now the group has started a project in connection with Mayland Community College – an observatory that will be part of the Estatoe Regional Center of Science and Crafts.
The telescope is ordered, and Mountain Heritage High School’s carpentry program is constructing the walls. “This is really a broad base community effort,” says Dr. John Boyd, president of the college.
“Most of the observatories with big telescopes are research observatories,” says Hampton. “The purpose of it being there is for the public. I hope that this observatory will get a lot of younger people interested in [astronomy].”
Green Bank, W.Va. isn’t just in a dark zone of the state light-wise – it’s also in a National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) – for 10 miles around, there is no cell phone service, there are no radio or television stations. An Electromagnetic Interference Tracking Truck (named EMITT), white, with antennae on top, heads out any time radio interference is picked up – it might be a malfunctioning microwave oven – in one case, it was the electronic blanket in a pet bed.
Green Bank is home to what could be considered the Mecca of astronomy in the region – the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The biggest structure there is in fact the largest human-made moving structure on land in the U.S. – the giant Robert C. Byrd Telescope. It weighs 17 million pounds; its dish measures 2.3 acres and it took nine years to build.
Vivian Gibbons, on staff at Green Bank, drives the shuttle bus from telescope to telescope across a 2,700-acre property that was once 12 family farms. A little green alien dangles from the rear-view mirror. We pass the 20-meter telescope, built in 1994, currently measuring continental drift as part of a larger array of telescopes. The first Green Bank telescope, built in 1959, was part of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) back then, before the study moved to California. The 40-foot telescope was built in 1962, and it’s used for research by students from sixth grade to graduate school. The 140-foot telescope (1965), now retired, was used for astrochemistry and pulsar research.
A pheasant flies off into the trees. All the telescopes point upward, past the mountains into blue skies.
The visitor center alone is a fascinating place, exploring the history of astronomy, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, how radio telescopes work. Researchers are using Green Bank to study pulsars, gravitational waves, the nature of the Milky Way, the origins of the universe. And they’re making important discoveries here in relatively new fields of astronomy – for instance, astronomers working with chemists have found that there are sugars – some of the building blocks of life – present where stars are being formed.
Astronomy, the exhibits point out, attempts to answer big questions: Are we alone? How big is the universe? Will the universe ever end?
Astronomer Dr. Karen O’Neil is site director at Green Bank. A native of Charleston, W.Va., she’s worked here for 10 years, five as director.
O’Neil says the big questions were part of what drew her to astronomy. At the same time – “I am a scientist,” says O’Neil, “so I will only go back as far as the science will take me.”
In astronomical terms, that’s a pretty long way.
Retired in the Virginia mountains, Elaine Osborne is one of the founders of the Echo Ridge Astronomical Society. She was born in Roanoke, grew up in Madison, N.C. and Independence, Va., worked in Alabama and retired in Grayson County, Va.
“When I was young my parents, along with my siblings, would sit out at night in lawn chairs and look up at the sky,” she remembers. “In the summer we slapped bugs and in the winter we wrapped up in quilts. Living in a dark area we could see the sky filled with twinkling diamonds in patterns marching from the east to the west. My parents knew a few of the constellations, but mostly we lay back on those lawn chairs in the peace and quiet and enjoyed the sight.
“But for me, I was intrigued by these twinkling stars – where do they come from? Why are there different colors? An endless list of ‘whys.’”
Big questions, answered, or not, in a big sky.
Back on a hilltop in Botetourt, Nikki Nakdimen, of Troutville, channels Joni Mitchell and Carl Sagan: “Really, we’re all just stardust, anyway. If you want to be closer to God, be closer to the universe.”