Fernbank Science Center Observatory
We had a lovely night at the observatory at Fernbank. The weather was cool and clear. There weren’t many people and when there aren’t many people that means you get a chance to look at a variety of celestial bodies.
Outside, one of the smaller telescopes was trained on the moon, and the other was trained on Saturn. Inside we saw first a set of binary stars in the constellation of Cancer. Then we went to look at the moon and Saturn again. Then they turned the large telescope and we saw the moon through it.
The woman at the inside telescope was trying to encourage an older woman, who’d been standing at the door, to look at the moon.
“Do you want to look at the moon?”
No, the older woman waved her hand, shook her head.
“Are you sure? Don’t you want to look at the moon?”
Again, the older woman demurred, shaking her head no. Which made you wonder why she was at the observatory.
“Ah, come on, mom, look at the moon!”
The elder woman shyly acquiesced and looked at the moon and the younger woman introduced her mother to the few of us who were there.
We went outside to look at the moon and Saturn again, then inside to where they again turned the telescope and this time we looked at Arcturus.
Outside we went to view Saturn and the moon again. And the man with the telescopes outside was talking about Mars with a very serious young man, telling him it wasn’t much to look at now as it’s too distant, but it was great viewing several years ago. I said we’d come down a couple of times for that event, when Mars was so close. He said he’d missed the legendary night when he was told it seemed most of the Southeast made an appearance to look at Mars. We had been there on that night.
Back to the large telescope and this time we were going to be looking at a globular cluster of 300,000 stars. I can’t recollect its name. We were told to look at it indirectly in order for it to come into focus.
H.o.p. was first up. I was standing beside him to help support him so that he wouldn’t accidentally take hold of the telescope. He was silent at first. Then he went, “Ah!!! I see it!” Then he laughed. Then he REALLY laughed, delighted, and everyone else laughed with him because his excitement was infectious.
I didn’t have a tripod and tried to get a picture as best I could, inhaling, letting out all my breath and bracing myself on the observatory wall. The image is blurry but still kind of nice.
Several years ago we tried to make it a regular thing, going to the observatory. One day H.o.p. said he didn’t want to go any more. I never could understand why, since he enjoyed it so much. It was confusing. Why don’t you want to go, I asked. He finally said he was too short to comfortably look, which I wasn’t quite sure I believed, I only knew he obviously didn’t want to talk about it, but I accepted he might just feel a little too unstable standing at the stools used for younger people, unable to brace himself on the telescope.
Recently he asked to start going to the observatory again, and explained that he had stopped wanting to go because when he looked through the telescopes it had made him feel like he was floating away.
But now we’re back. And it’s nice. There’s just something pleasant about the observatory, gathered together with people who like to make a night of it looking at the stars.
Leave a Reply