Nighstalkers
If you plan to spend an evening with the Orange County Astronomers, the largest such amateur club in the country, be prepared to feel really, really small.
By C.J. BahnsenIt’s not until we’re cloaked in full-on night that I glance it over the southwest ridge: a brilliant flare, as if a celestial match were lit, then flicked hard and away. It burns for almost three seconds, pierces the indigo skin of outer space, then disappears. “I just saw a shooting star,” I mutter.
Next to me, at a telescope that resembles a mondo black bazooka on a tripod, Don McClelland acknowledges my awe with a faint grin lit by the tangerine glow of his scope’s computer LED. From out of the deeper darkness a male voice confesses: “I see those, too, after about nine or 10 Coronas.” I never do find out to whom it belongs.
This is because I’m standing in near-absolute darkness in Black Star Canyon—just north of Silverado, near the western edge of Cleveland National Forest—among about 50 of the 800 active members of the Orange County Astronomers, one of the nation’s largest amateur astronomy clubs. (Motto: “Bringing the universe into focus since 1967.”) We’ve gathered for the group’s monthly star party, on a wild fragment of the Irvine Ranch Conservancy’s 50,000 acres. It’s a black soup: Only the person at your shoulder is knowable; the rest are shadows and voices.
This is the first time I’ve ever looked through a telescope, unless you count the Cap’n Crunch spyglass I had as a kid. I wouldn’t know the North Star from a Christmas tree light, but now I can see M13, aka the Great Globular Cluster, in the northern sky, its hundreds of thousands of stars forming a kaleidoscopic core. “Isn’t it breathtaking?” McClelland’s voice asks as I peer into his scope’s eyepiece.
It’s more than that, actually. It’s a revelation for someone mired in a self-important, center-of-the-universe South County beach life. The spiraling arms of a faraway galaxy beckon, and, like the strangers surrounding me on this inky night, I suddenly understand something vital and troubling about life on terra firma.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Black Star Canyon is one of the association’s two “dark sites” (the other is in the Anza-Borrego Desert, in eastern San Diego County) shielded from urban light pollution by the Santa Ana Mountains. Getting here was a long, curving drive down Santiago Canyon Road—my rearview mirror swarming with Harley choppers throttling to Cook’s Corner—then a couple of jackknife turns. I ended up on a dirt drive, descending through a secretive farm gate to a sunken plateau fringed with brittle chaparral, willow and sycamore growth.
Star parties take place during the darkest time of the month, on moonless nights, starting half an hour before sunset and running until midnight. No entertainment, refreshments, or raffle drawings; just a chance to scope-hop with people who keep their heads above the clouds.
When I arrive at dusk, more than 30 vehicles already are in the clearing. About 20 high-tech telescopes set up about the grounds are pointing aloft.
Computerized scopes have ushered amateur astronomy into a new user-friendly realm. One can now punch in a GPS coordinate and the lens will swivel to a specific celestial object, the computer telling you how many light-years across it is, or how many suns or moons are in the vicinity. The scopes look like alien probes on three-point landing gear. Their owners, predominately males, fuss over them in reverent tinkering. One middle-aged man kneels before a daunting lens as thick as a telephone pole, his hands laid on it as if doing a Spock mind meld with its computerized brain. A tobacco-skinned old man strolls about the common area, hands clasped behind his back. He draws my eye because his face seems completely absent of stress, emanating inner peace; he moves with a relaxed lightness, his eyes sharp and tranquil while other invited guests nervously thread around the scopes, as if trying not to awaken them.