Dan's Papers - August 24, 2007 - Viewing the Stars through the Big New Telescope in Montauk

Last Sunday night, at nine p.m., my girlfriend and I drove out to Montauk to the Theodore Roosevelt State Park where, in the darkness of a field there, we were told that a brand-new telescope on display, set up so that anyone who stopped by could look through the eyepiece and see the planets and stars, up-close and personal.

The telescope is the brainchild of Jay Schneiderman, whose family owns the Breakers Resort and Cottages in that town and who has pursued a career as a local politician, winning the Supervisorship of East Hampton for two terms, and then getting elected for two terms as a County Legislator representing this area. He is a popular man that people like and look to, and he is always full of ideas about what might or might not good for our community.

Schneiderman is the man who got the idea to put a telescope in Montauk - actually, the idea is to have a full-blown Observatory - about three years ago, when someone told him that this very powerful telescope from the observatory of the ill-fated Bio-Dome in New Mexico would be up for sale at the bargain price of $250,000.

Schneiderman went about persuading everybody that this would be a really good idea for the Theodore Roosevelt County Park in Montauk because there are so few lights in that park and the stars in the sky are just awesome. He got no argument. And when the time came, the vote to buy the telescope went through. And here it was, the first use of this telescope on the stage set of Montauk.

We drove up the driveway toward Second House, the historic Inn where Teddy Roosevelt and General Shaftner headquartered their troops while overseeing maneuvers at Montauk in 1898. But halfway up the driveway, off to the left, I saw what I was sure was the evening's performance. There was the faint glow of red neon tubing coming from a clearing just outside an outbuilding on the property. There were perhaps a hundred cars parked neatly in rows in a gravel parking lot. It was an eerie sight.

"That's got to be it," is what I said.

We stumbled out of the car - this was indeed a very dark landscape without anything to light our way - and headed toward the red glow by holding out our cell phones upside down in front of us and watching where we stepped by the light of the screens of our cell phones.

The telescope could not be missed. It was about ten feet tall, sat on an enormous tripod, and was about as big around as a rain barrel. It was pointing, if you could call it that, at a bright star in the sky.

"I don't see it," a man was saying, peering through the eyepiece.

An astronomer holding an electronic remote control was alongside him, monitoring him.

"It's very faint," he said. "Like the powder from a doughnut."

"There it is," the man said. "There it is."

About fifteen people stood patiently in line to get their peek through the eyepiece. We got in the back.

"So what is this?" a woman asked as she got to the telescope.

"It's an entire galaxy exploding. It's ten million lightyears away."

"Why can't we look at Jupiter?" the next person, an older man, said. "It's right over that itty bitty exploding galaxy."

"We were looking at Jupiter until ten minutes ago."

Besides the people standing in line, there were a whole bunch of people sitting on benches at picnic tables in this clearing. And they were looking up. It was an absolutely amazing sky, a great dome of stars and planets and galaxies and well, a few blinking items that apparently were airplanes. The red neon, some sort of chemical inside a plastic tubing, snaked its way around the site.

Every once in a while, a collective gasp went up from the crowd sitting at the picnic tables.

"A flash from a shooting star. Over there."

"I just saw one. It was the other way. Just over the tree in the back."

Everyone was looking at something that had nothing to do with the telescope, but did have to do with astronomy and was the reason we had decided to take the drive out there. This was the big night of the annual meteor shower that comes to the United States every August.

"There's another one."

"That's an airplane."

"It's trying to get away."

The shooting stars, or meteor shower flashes, were, according to another astronomer who was over at the picnic tables, grains of sand burning up in the atmosphere about a hundred miles up. There was this long, long trail of meteor dust, part of the orbit of an asteroid that was forever circling the sun in exactly the same orbit each time. And each time, as the Earth passed through the orbit of this asteroid, bits of its dust got caught up in our atmosphere to make this sparkly nighttime trail. It would be at its peak at about two in the morning, far too late for just about anybody there.

"There's another one."

A few people lay down on top of these picnic tables. There were eight tables. You could get sixteen people on them lying down head to head or feet to feet. We found a vacant one and did just that. It was quite relaxing.

Every once in a while, however, the highbeams of a car on the driveway would shine up the hill as someone drove by. People would shield their eyes.

"Jeeez," somebody said. "They're trying to blind us."

"I see the rings of Jupiter," somebody at the telescope said.

"There are no rings around Jupiter. You're thinking of Saturn."

At one point, my girlfriend and I returned to the back of the line by the telescope to look at Jupiter, which by popular demand, had been returned to the eyepiece by the astronomer using his remote control.

"Can you see the moons of Jupiter?" the astronomer asked me.

"I see what looks like three tiny stars, two on one side and one on the other."

"But Jupiter is kind of blurry."

"The telescope has to get the humidity off its lenses. It does it automatically."

"How long does that take?"

"Okay, next," the astronomer said. So I left and my girlfriend looked for a while.

"When the lens clears, you'll see these horizontal stripes on Jupiter," the astronomer was telling my girlfriend.

We left a short time later. But when we got down to the car, my ipod, which had been in my pants pocket, was not there anymore. I was sure it had come out when I was lying on the picnic table. So I went back - bravely using only one cell phone - but couldn't find it. Then, I did find it, in the bottom of one of the pockets of my pants I had looked in before unsuccessfully.

"It will be nice when they have an observatory," I said. It appeared that they had trundled the thing out along the tubes of red glowing lights from the outbuilding. When they were done, they were going to trundle it back. It probably weighed about a thousand pounds.

"I think they're onto something," my girlfriend said.

I had backed out of my parking space with the headlights off so as not to shine the lights on the telescope up the hill. Now I turned them back on.

We drove down the driveway the way we had come and went back through town, stopping at John's Drive in to get ice cream cones.