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The center of his universe

The observatory’s aluminum roof slides open, revealing an 18-inch telescope Ferris uses to scan the heavens in search of material for his writings — or in hope of making the next big cosmic discovery.
(Allen J. Schaben / LAT)
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Times Staff Writer

Timothy Ferris lives in a neighborhood of exquisite proportions. Just beyond his front door, time and space rush forward to greet him. The stars are his neighbors, the universe his friend, and on clear summer nights, the glow of galaxies nearly 30 million light-years away rains down upon him.

“You see those two bright stars?” he asks, pointing overhead. “That’s Castor and Pollux.”

Like a captain on the deck of a ship, he stands high above the ground on the viewing deck of his observatory in rural Northern California. A westerly wind gusts around him and swirls through the black walnut trees and oaks to the east. The colors of a late spring sky leach into the night.

“Now look to the left, twice their distance apart, and go up.”

The crescent of Venus, the rings of Saturn, Jupiter and its moons are all within reach, but Ferris is on the trail of Comet C/2001 Q4, otherwise known as Comet NEAT. A skillful observer and guide, he hands over a pair of binoculars, and there, caught in the reflecting mirrors, is this star with a broad fuzzy tail, seemingly motionless, 29.8 million miles away.

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Ferris first described Rocky Hill Observatory, named for his wife’s family farm, in his 2002 book, “Seeing in the Dark.” In these pages — an intimate portrait of stargazing and stargazers — he transforms the night sky into a panorama of extraordinary beauty and dynamism accessible to anyone with a telescope and a willingness to stay awake through the night.

Few contemporary writers are as well equipped for such alchemy. Ferris has been writing about space since Rolling Stone published his first article on cosmology in 1974. A popularizer of relativity, string theory, fermions and quarks, he has a knack for making the unfathomable fathomable and, like his friend the late Carl Sagan, he reminds us that dreams often pave the way to the stars.

No more so than in his own backyard. But Rocky Hill is less a place to view the stars than a place to savor the possibilities of life and to think about worlds well beyond our own. More than a country retreat, it is a place of epicurean elegance and inspiration. No wonder space is never a dark, cold vacuum in Ferris’ prose but instead a fantastic destination of color and light.

“Now let’s see what we can really see.”

At the center of the viewing deck, Ferris’ telescope responds to a series of computerized instructions and rises toward the sky. From here he draws a line of light to the stars. From here he is connected to space.

Escaping the city

Like the best journeys, this one begins in a rocket ship. The Mercedes SL55 may have four wheels and three mappings of suspension, but in Ferris’ hands, the 500-horsepower V-8 roadster is a booster rocket in disguise.

“I’m a sucker for a big ride,” he says. Ferris will turn 60 later this summer, but he looks a youthful 40. The long, wavy hair that stood out in earlier author photos has been trimmed, but a childlike enthusiasm animates his manner.

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Get him started on Formula 1 race cars, spaceships or the blues, and there’s no stopping him. Nor would you want to.

As he backs out of the driveway of the San Francisco apartment he keeps with his wife, Carolyn, he is pleased to see that their 18-year-old son, Patrick, has placed a “Kerry for President” sticker in the kitchen window. Their four-level home on Telegraph Hill has a clear shot of Treasure Island and the Berkeley hills. Step out onto a deck, and there’s Coit Tower just over your shoulder and the Filbert Steps at your feet.

Heading out of the city, he finds an opening in traffic, taps the accelerator and the supercharger kicks in. The license plate, LOWORBT, is an understatement. He takes the 101 Freeway onto small country roads, passing the Sleepy Hollow Dairy, the Pegasus Ranch, Ernie’s Tin Bar and the Valley of the Moon, home of Jack London’s lost dream.

As oak trees give way to grape fields, he turns off the main road and easily hits 60 before pulling off the oleander-lined driveway into the motor court. A working farm, Rocky Hill has five vineyards and produces commercially sold olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

The Ferrises live in one of two ranch-style homes built on the property in the 1950s. Carolyn’s sister lives in the other. Their grandfather, San Francisco investor and philanthropist Benjamin Swig, purchased the property a little more than 40 years ago.

Plain and simple, their five-bedroom, four-bath home sits on the brow of a small hill looking across a valley to a counterpane of oak forests and vineyards. The house is so integrated with the landscaping — Mexican primroses, wisteria, trumpet vines and oaks — that it seems impossible to talk about one without the other. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the view over a small patio, a patch of lawn and a slope lavishly covered with lavender.

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“If it had a subtitle” — Ferris sits in his remodeled kitchen, talking about the book he’s currently working on — “it would be something like ‘How the Discovery of Science Ignited the Democratic Revolution.’ ”

Once a small Pullman-style kitchen, the room now features a large island design. The look is clean and spare. A plate of cherries and a vase of roses sit on the counter. Translucent glass cabinets, the usual complement of stainless-steel appliances, an espresso machine and a coffee grinder take up the perimeter. An antique hutch is set against one wall.

“It was no coincidence that the democratic impulse occurred at the same time of the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries,” he explains. “The rise of fascism and communism in the last century need some explaining, but it is a story that has a rather optimistic conclusion.”

Just off the kitchen is a seating area with a roasting fireplace lined with 600-year-old stone lintels from France. The living room is sparsely decorated with antique and modern furniture. A large oil-on-canvas abstract by Carolyn hangs above the dining room table. The color scheme — oranges and greens set against a shade of white that seems to levitate off the walls — is both subdued and bright.

There is in the world of Rocky Hill a sense of wealth and of privilege that even Ferris notices. “This is a much better life than I deserve,” he admits. “But the ability to do this is not my invention. I was born into a hard work ethic, and I’ve kept to it.”

The workshop out back

The observatory is 200 yards from the house. The walk is described in gorgeous detail in “Seeing in the Dark”: “A two-day storm has scrubbed the sky clean of haze and left the fruit trees in the orchard bare, their dead leaves spread like vendors’ wares in soggy puddles of russet and yellow at their feet. The vineyards flanking the path are soaked, their leaves hammered into sheets of glistening gold.”
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Pilgrimages to these sites, says Ferris’ friend and colleague Edwin Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory, alter your mentality. “There is the mission of getting there, and once there, you’re on sacred ground. It may be dedicated to modern research science, but it is a lofty — and I don’t mean physically — enterprise trying to cipher the most extraordinary details of the whole cosmos.”

The sacredness of Rocky Hill lies in its connection to the land. The observatory can be reached either by following the driveway past the third house on the property, a two-story farmhouse where the ranch manager and his family live, or cutting through the orchard, skirting the tennis court and pool. On the right are a vehicle shed and barn; on the left a storage facility for the balsamic harvest. Up ahead, a horse paddock backs against a tall stand of pines. Quail run through the grass, hares through the undergrowth.

The observatory is no different from the other structures on the farm. Sided with red clapboard, trimmed in white, it sits on the crest of a hill. A modest planting of yarrow, lavender and poppies edges the path to the front door.

“Every good observatory embodies a coherent central philosophy,” Ferris writes, and the central philosophy at Rocky Hill is simple: “We wanted it to have a small ecological footprint,” he explains. “We didn’t want to drop some spaceship here. We wanted to mimic the farm structures.”

Although Ferris hoped to keep construction simple by building on a level site, he soon decided that a hillside location would give him a better vantage of the sky. The result — a three-story building on its western exposure, completed in 1993 — gives the design a certain architectural distinction.

“This,” says Ferris, opening the door with surprising flourish, “is the machine for happiness.”

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Inside, the faint smell of his Macanudo cigars hangs in the air. On the desk are a large hydrangea blossom, a clutter of notebooks and three gooseneck lamps. On one table is a microscope, on another, a volume of Horace, open to the satires.

A mahogany bookcase frames a set of double doors. Ferris opens them, perhaps unaware of the drama, and there in the second room is the center of the building, the omphalos: a single concrete column sunk 30 feet to a rock-solid stratum of clay, upon which the telescope is mounted. Not connected to the building itself, this pier provides a vibration-free station for the telescope; and just on the other side of it, a staircase leads to the roof.

Ferris takes the 12 steps to the top, releases a wooden latch and starts pushing against an aluminum joist. Slowly, the roof wheels back until it sits on top of the front half of the building. A bat zips out, startled by the commotion.

Rocky Hill Observatory was a dream that began in childhood. Growing up in South Florida, Ferris stared into skies that were dark with stars and bright with promise. He watched the rocket launches from Cape Canaveral and, although his first telescope had “less light-gathering power than an ordinary pair of reading glasses,” it showed him the ice caps of Mars. After that, there was no turning back.

But he never saw himself as an astronomer. Through his undergraduate years getting a degree in English and communications at Northwestern, a stint at the New York Post and teaching gigs at Brooklyn College, USC and Berkeley, his love of words and writing was too great. He published his first book, “The Red Limit,” in 1977, when he was 34, and has followed with eight other titles, including “Coming of Age in the Milky Way” and “The Whole Shebang,” and a host of radio and television gigs. In addition, he is a contributing writer to Automobile magazine and is trying to finance a documentary version of “Seeing in the Dark.”

Ferris has “an ability to be very down to earth about remarkably profound things,” says Krupp. “It is not simply the fact that he is writing about a topic because that is the sensible thing to do — looking for a task and then fulfilling it — but there is passion with these things that he has chosen.”

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Although his intellectual ambition is deep and pronounced, Ferris considers himself an amateur stargazer, a term of distinction — for, as he reminds us, the root for amateur is amator, love, and love is what seems to drive him.

A sweep of galaxies

Summer nights at Rocky Hill begin after 10, when the glow of twilight is gone and the stars stud the sky. Ferris sits on a small white stool on the viewing deck, huddled over a 12-inch computer screen, his face awash in its ruby glow.

“What am I looking for?” he asks. “I don’t know.”

But never has idleness seemed so purposeful. With mouse and keyboard, he begins running a program that will image about 30 galaxies, situated at the zenith where the bowl meets the handle of the Big Dipper, about 30 million light-years away. Although past observations have included supernova and asteroid searches, tonight he’s simply adding to an ongoing list of galaxies that intrigue him for their shapes, patterns and intimations of behavior.

With a slight whir, the telescope — an 18-inch f/4.5 Newtonian reflector fitted in a carbon-fiber tube on a restored 1972 Beyers mount with a Bisque computer control system — adjusts itself. Its components have been cannibalized from other telescopes, and the final assemblage, painted jet black with body shop enamel, looks something like the barrel of a cannon. Ask Ferris how much it costs and he’ll try to remember. “About as much as a new Chevy,” he guesses.

Although Ferris’ time at the observatory is usually spent alone, he is occasionally joined by his family, as he was in August when Carolyn and Patrick spent the night with him on the deck watching the Perseid meteor shower. It was warmer than tonight, though, and with the wind still gusting strong, Ferris heads downstairs. He closes the double doors behind him, grabs an LP of Bukka White and places it on the turntable; the sounds of the Mississippi Delta soon fill the room. He lights a Macanudo, refines the exposure and draws up the first galaxy.

“We’re gathering light that has been streaming its way to Earth for 20 to 30 million years,” he says, “gathering it on a silicon chip that is no larger than the size of your baby fingernail.”

If it’s an apology, it is hardly necessary, for on the screen with startling immediacy, set in a patch of dark sky dotted with stars, is this ghostly swirling shape, this hurricane of light, its white center the axle from which sweep broad, languorous, cloud-like emanations. Soon more galaxies pop up, sideways, straight on and oblique, these swirling concentrations of stars, these caldrons of interstellar gas and dust blending, colliding and fusing.

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Sit with Ferris as he talks about what he’s seeing and you sit at the crossroads of the past and the future. Not only do you look back to the achievements of previous astronomers — like William Herschel, whose 18th century star charts are still being used — but you are also filled with a sense of possibility for what we know and a sense of humility for what eludes us.

Although he applies as much precision to the process as he can, there is — even with such achievement — a feeling that this technology is as crude as a stone ax.

Perhaps it can be no other way, that our desire to see and to know will always outpace our abilities. Perhaps this is, in part, what philosopher Karl Popper meant when he wrote, “The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance.”

Three hours later, close to 1 a.m., Ferris is done. He shuts down the computer, pleased with his work. He climbs the stairs, pulls the roof over the telescope and secures the latch. On the walk back to the house, the Milky Way is a narrow band of light stretching from horizon to horizon.

Some say these worlds are but a glimpse of a greater divinity. Some say they are merely a measure of man. Ferris claims neither. Between heaven and Earth, he will argue, it is sometimes just enough to be here.


Thomas Curwen can be reached at thomas.curwen@latimes.com.

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