“Elon Musk is screwing us!” exclaimed Jim Lynch, president of the Cape Cod Astronomical Society, and it was funny but he meant it, and by “us” he meant all astronomers:
Musk’s minions are launching the bulk of 60,000 communication satellites going into orbit, which leave streaks and static light that flummox those trying to look into deep space and track faint objects.
Lynch was showing people around the Werner Schmidt Observatory at an open house May 18. We weren’t on some dark mountaintop; we were on the Dennis-Yarmouth High School campus off Station Ave, in the middle of the mid-Cape. But we were inside a dome that opens like the famous ones (though far smaller) to allow a PlaneWave 12.5-inch telescope to train on galaxies with names like M-51 and M-81.
The day had been promising, bright blue, but by evening a cold haze crept in, a common impediment for local stargazers.
“With the constraints of our weather, well, this isn’t the greatest place to be an astronomer,” Lynch admitted. “When it gets hazy like it does on the Cape, anything toward the horizon is toast.”
But there are clear nights, and the observatory also can grab images of the sun, which is good for high school students taking a very short field trip to look a very long way.
Amateur astronomers started the society when Halley’s Comet (formally named “1P/Halley”) showed up in 1986. The observatory is named for a chemical engineer born in Germany who retired to Cape Cod in the 1970s and was intrigued with optics. He funded construction and the dome has been a curved fixture at D-Y since 2004. With a 20-year lease just signed, it should be good for a few more lightyears with expected improvements like better tracking technology.
On the wall in the room below, where computers help process faint light into cosmic images, there’s a homespun plaque like you’d see in someone’s kitchen. It reads, “Dome Sweet Dome.”
Charlie Burke, the observatory’s director, explained that he can take prolonged exposures, maybe 60 or more seconds at a time, combine or overlay them, then apply filters to clean out static, hone edges, adjust color.
This is not Hubble but still a breathtaking experience, pointing a scope toward the Ursa Major area of a night sky to find M-109, a spiral galaxy with a bright bar through its middle. This light left that source millennia ago, but then again it’s in real time; we’re seeing what arrives here and now, nothing fabricated, only magnified.
There are some dark places left on Cape Cod better suited for stargazing, and when the society took a field trip to the National Seashore last September sure enough Elon Musk showed up: A Falcon 9 rocket launch streaked overhead, and photographer Mary Lou Ricci memorialized the moment (as well as the red light astronomers use to keep their night vision):
This was dramatic, but bittersweet. Astronomers prefer to celebrate the cosmos rather than capitalism. They love technical inventions and mechanical innovations, but the point is not profit. It’s about appreciating far-flung beauty and revealing creation’s faint, awe-inspiring fingerprints — at D-Y High, on Station Ave.
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It really bothers me to watch a baseball game and be assaulted by corporate graphics - even projected on the pitcher's mound. I can't watch anymore. Now the likes of a gold-plated toddler corrupting the night sky - sickening.