Why do we stargaze? Why are we (tele)scopists?
These questions have crossed my mind many times over my lifetime of stargazing and scoping. My first attempt to explain why I do so and am so, was in an article I wrote, with ample assistance by J. Kelly Beatty and published by/in Sky and Telescope (February, 1993), entitled “We Stargazers”.
My first memory of stargazing was of my brother and his friends using a circular star chart from Encyclopedia Britannica and 7X35 binoculars to identify a bright object in the sky they hoped was an early satellite or a UFO. My second memory was of a sundog. It scared me. My first telescope experience was an out-of-focus view of a bright star through a single lens objective 40mm refractor with a plastic eyepiece. I was mesmerized by seeing a disk. I remember not being able to understand why I was seeing a disk. And, I recall other first-observations, even today some sixty years after my first look through the 40mm scope. I recall discovering a star above a neighbor’s house which, when I looked at it through my first real telescope, a 2.4 inch achromat, I saw a sizable disk and rings. I recall discovering that the star Mizar, when I looked at the double Mizar/Alcor the first time, was itself a close visible double star. I recall my first view of the quasar 3C-273, dusky markings and a bright polar cap on the surface of Mars, the Veil Nebula, the open/galactic clusters in Auriga, et alia.
I do not just recall these first-observations. I recall the emotional reaction I had to these first-observations; a palpable sense of serene connection.
And over the decades, as I have continued to observe, time and again I return to these same first-observation items, and when they appear in the eyepiece, I have that same feeling of serene connection.
It is not just first-observations which created and the memory of which recalls this feeling of serene connection. There are events which do the same. There is the meal shared after a night of stargazing. Parts of club meetings and star parties. Long nights in the high school physics lab listening on a radio to portions of the Wagner’s entire Des Ring der Nibelungen broadcast by Minnesota Public Radio. And then there were specific pieces of music; Debussy's Clair de Lune, The Moody Blues’ “Cold hearted orb that rules the night, removes the colors from our sight, red is grey and yellow-white…pin-**** holes in a colorless sky let insipid figures of light pass by, the mighty light of ten thousand suns, challenges infinity and is soon gone, night time, to some a brief interlude…”, Ralph Waughn Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, et alia.
There are the memories of other stargazers and scopists, memories of events with them which elicit the same emotional reaction; speaking with Mike Palermiti mere minutes after the Space Shuttle disintegrated on its return, an email with Bill Burnett of ITE asking me how I could ever possibly visually tell the difference between a 1/6 waterfront error and a 1/8 wavefront error, Bob Summerfield of Telescopes To Go explaining to me that the reason a 60mm fed my desire to observe was because I brought a pre-existing desire to gaze/observe to the scope (whereas the experience of such scopes squashes the desire to engage in stargazing by many others), looking at the first live feeds of a martian rover with Rico Tyler on the laptop obtained as a result of his being named a National Science Teacher of the Year, lunch with Story Musgrave, listening to Jack Horkheimer with Debussy’s Arabesque playing in the background, listening to Sandy Wood on StarDate, Tammy Plotner’s invitation and welcoming to a Hidden Hollow star party, reviewing the MK67 with Jeff Barbour and Cor Berrevoets, invited by the incomparable writing talent of Neil English to review and provide a forward for his Chronicling the Golden Age of Telescopes, Fathers John Neville and Myron **** guiding me in the use of a 20cm Cassegraine-Coude, having been invited by a gentleman whose name I cannot remember but whose personality I do remember to observe in a very old observatory with a venerable seven inch refractor in Michigan and record in a very old journal the brightness of a variable star, another gentlemen in Michigan who made me a paper time conversion wheel, the professional astronomer at Yerkes Observatory who wrote back to me as a teenager and congratulating me on my observation of Mizar’s companion, et alii.
As I matured in the hobby, I came to possess (mostly from other observers who have shared their experiences) words to describe why I felt what I felt, and why I returned to those first-observations. There is something about consuming, with my eyes, the light emanating from or reflecting off of celestial objects, which continues to draw me to the night sky. And there is something about the nearly indescribable wonder of finely crafted glass, in well crafted tubes and mounts, which causes an emotional reaction when, after some brief period of observing, I step back and just look at the telescope itself. A half century ago I ground and polished an eight inch mirror. I can still recall the smells of the slurry, the tactile sensation of moving pyrex glass on a plate tool, of examining the surface through a microscope and Foucault/null test apparatus. And I often to this day feel the ethereal sensation of being in-and-of the night.
As I read articles written by astronomers and astrophyicists, and as I interacted with superbly skilled and experienced amateur observers, I realized and became comfortable with the self-knowledge that I am not an cosmologist or an astrophysicst or even an astronomer. I am not even the dedicated proficient stargazing and scoping hobbyist who deeply understands the electronics of the mount, the technicalities of astrophotography, the arrangements required for star-parties, the physics of class-glass.
I am a stargazer and a scopist of the night.
And I have found an article written by a philosopher which, when I read it, immediately elicted that same feeling of serene connection. The article is entitled “The Discovery of the Archimedean Point”. It appears in a book entitled The Human Condition (pages 257 to 268) by a Hannah Arendt. A sobriquet of Arendt’s is that she is the greatest American philosopher of the twentieth century. This book was required reading of the Basselin Fellowship of The School of Philosophy of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. in the A.D. 1970s in two seminars taught by phenomenologists. Some may remember a set of books prepared and published jointly by the University of Chicago and Encyclopedia Britannica entitled Great Book of the Western World. In the proposed second collection (prepared to cover twentieth century works) was included Arendt’s The Human Condition.
This article has given me new insight into why, as a stargazer and scopist, I feel a sense of serene connection and melancholy.
Our Cloudy Nights institution is hesitant about allowing philosophy to creep into discussions in its various forums and threads. It is correct to be cautious. Such discussions often go-off-the-rails.
However, speaking only to those of us who are scopists and stargazers, I recommend reading this article. Perhaps for you, as it did for me, it will provide a basis for understanding the reason we acquire feelings of serene connection when we stargaze and when we scope. Reading it may even engender a new feeling of cosmic connection.
Edited by Otto Piechowski, 04 June 2025 - 12:38 PM.
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