Sharing the Sky Web Log 14

Star Night at Mercy College

David H. Levy Doveed

            On April 19, 2010, 49 years after my Bar Mitzvah in 1961, Sharing the Sky celebrated its first Star Night at Mercy College.  Located in Dobbs ferry, a town north of New York City and next door to the Village of Sleepy Hollow, site of Washington Irving’s famous legend from 1820, this institution is the recipient of the first telescope STS has been able to give away in a number of years.  The telescope awarded was a “David Levy Comet Hunter” 6-inch f/5 Maksutov-Newtonian reflector.  It has a near perfect primary mirror whose secondary is supported by a correcting lens.  The well-constructed tripod arrived a few days before I followed with the optic tube.   

            Unlike the big event we have every spring in Tucson, this Star Night was designed for a small audience.  About 25 people showed up for the event and for the lecture that preceded it.  The purpose was to announce the availability of a new course about astronomy, literature, and music, and also to promote the general astronomy course the college already has offered for several years.

Though small, this audience was highly motivated.   They were attentive and interested in the story of how astronomy and literature can be related by means of a personal story.  To them, it seemed perfectly natural that a passion for one field, like astronomy, should not preclude an interest in a second area, like literature.  Using examples from literature I have studied, I told them about how Jane Eyre, in order to catch an early morning coach to Lowood School,`could not have dressed by the light of a half-moon setting in the west, unless she was dressing at midnight.   I was proud to point out this Bronteian slip, which was really not an error at all from someone familiar with the phases of the Moon.  One participant suggested that Brontë included this “mistake” on purpose, to test the alertness of her readers.  It would be interesting to find other tests scattered throughout the great novel.  I also mentioned how Lord Byron, in Canto X of Don Juan, predicted how

“…full soon

Steam-engines will conduct him to the moon.”  

In these two simple lines Byron predicted the mighty December 1968 launch of Apollo 8, the first craft to carry humans to the Moon, 150 years later.  

During the lecture I described a number of things we would be doing together at Mercy.  At the top of my list was the idea of evening observing sessions.  A first step: naming the telescope.  A telescope’s mirror is its beating heart, and to award it that piece of individuality one must give it a name.  After a year of trying to eke out a name for the Meade 14 at Corona Foothills Middle School, the best the kids could come up with was “Uncle Guy.”  The folks at Mercy had loftier goals, and quickly suggested Athena, the Greek goddess to whom the Parthenon was dedicated.  After the lecture was concluded, Athena and the group went outdoors for our first observing session.  We gazed first at Saturn.  Even though the eyepiece yielded an abnormally low power, we could still make out the thin ring emerging from last year’s ring plane crossing during which the planet, in its 29-year orbit of the Sun, caused its ring system briefly to vanish.  Our second target was a field of stars between Pollux and its neighbor Castor.  To me it is a field with which I was quite familiar, for that is where I turned a different telescope on my first night of comet searching, on December 17, 1965.  Next came the bright star Pollux, one of the two bright twin stars of Gemini. We closed with a look at Mizar, the magnificent double star in the Big Dipper’s handle.

A view of Mercy College's main entrance.  Our star party took place near here, on the shore of the Hudson River.  Photo by Doveed.

Mercy has plenty of space from which one can enjoy the stars.  We began on the field between the library and the Hudson River, and then headed to the east side of the library and finally found a spot surrounded by trees that was comfortably dark.

I hope this particular Star Night will be the first of many.  Mercy College has a very good astronomy program, one that is trying to merge the purity and beauty of the night sky with some of humanity’s ageless accomplishments in literature and in music.  As we listen to the simple notes of Beethoven’s Sonata in A (Moonlight), or imagine Shakespeare viewing the great new star of 1572 (which he hints at in the opening lines of Hamlet), we gaze at the starry sky with renewed enthusiasm and optimism.