First off, I began my trip to the astronomy park with gutter-low expectations. I told myself:
- I probably won’t be able to find it.
- It’s cloudy, so no one will be there.
- If they are there they will be nerds and not speak to me, unless they are male nerds, and then they will feel the draw I have on male nerds and they want to speak to me so much that they will not even look at me.
- If I get there and there are telescopes sitting about for public use they will be unmanned and I won’t be able to use them, but at least I will have scouted out how to get there.
- If nothing else, this will be an adventure, because I have never driven on any of these roads before. In my mind Hwy 367 ends at Hwy 40 and beyond that there be dragons.
In reality:
- There were no dragons, or at least, no dragons I could see, because as soon as I drove past a few blocks of Smoothie Kings and Dominos I was on a two lane road gouged through the heart of a forest. I could see it was a forest because I set out before dark, thankfully. And you may think the GPS built into the Mini would be handy here, but no, because I can no longer see the heads-up display that is now hidden behind the steering wheel, “behind” being the operative word, because my butt is smaller now so I sit lower.
- So I was a little lost and disregarded all the signs pointing to auxiliary entrances until I found the main entrance, where I was met by a deer tearing into some shrubbery. A few yards past that there was a very fancy main building, yet I kept driving, certain I would see a sign pointing to the Astronomy Park. No. Instead there was an absolutely gorgeous lake that emerged out of nowhere, and an agriculture area, and a private road that led to what Google maps seems to suggest is a Busch family swimming pool compound.
- Eventually I dodged out to the main road again and took an auxiliary entrance marked “Astronomy Park;” who would have suspected that.
- There were people there, and a very sociable dog, and a representative from the Astronomy club, and her son, who showed me photos he took of the Andromeda galaxy.
- This man brought his hand-built telescope which is a work of art:
- The representative gave me the heads up that I could also go in the shelter and look into the big telescope, and assured me that the man in there would show me where the “eye hole” was.
I shouldn’t have worried, because the view finder was at the top of the step-stool.
(By the way, you can see by the clouds sunset is coming in. The club often assembles in the hopes that if it’s cloudy that it’ll be clear later.)
- The big telescope was pointed to Venus, he said. I added, “The evening star,” thinking I would make up for my obvious ignorance by throwing out some bit of trivia. Then I looked in the telescope and saw an obvious black and white orb-shape, shadowed like a croquet ball, and immediately said, “Oh! It’s round, like a planet!” The man, no doubt struck dumb by my ignorance, didn’t have to educate me because I immediately added, “Oh, duh, Venus, it is a planet.” He was nice enough to say other planets do look like flat discs but Venus is close enough to the sun to catch a direct beam that casts shadows.
- Then we talked at length about Galileo, and I mentioned the opera I saw about Galileo, because I was still trying to establish some nerd credentials, until some Scouts arrived and I took my leave.
- The trip home was over a more familiar route. It was one we took to see the neighborhood nuclear dump site.
Of course when I told Gary about it this morning he started pricing telescopes, especially one where you can bring up Venus on a menu. I begged him to sleep on it at least one more day.