A Night for Starry-Eyed Astronomers

The cry went up from the far side of the forest-dark parking lot: “We’ve got Linear!”

I strolled over and squinted through a telescope trained just over the tops of the pines.

“Ah,” I said. “Linear.”

Just over the branches, I beheld a tiny whitish speck floating in gauze. It could as easily have been a smudge on my glasses, but it was a recently discovered comet never seen before by the two busloads of astronomy buffs meandering around the lot on the flanks of Mt. Pinos.

“Beautiful!” a woman murmured as she peered at the speck of dust floating somewhere between us and Venus. “Just beautiful . . . “

Beautiful? I couldn’t see it. But I lack the gift of astral wonder and these people had great quantities of it, requiring nothing more for their viewing pleasure than the simple ability to look up. Just the sun in the morning and the moon at night--not to mention unfathomable billions of swirling nebulae, galactic firebombs, white dwarfs, red giants, miscellaneous celestial objects, shooting stars, dying stars, faded old ready-for-my-closeup stars.

The outing was organized by the Ventura County Astronomical Society for its Astrocon 2000, an international conclave of 275 amateur and professional astronomers. As the buses rolled out of Ventura on Friday evening, it was announced that on the way up we’d be watching the ancient sci-fi thriller “It Came From Outer Space.”

“But we all came from outer space,” an astronomer joked as he picked at his box lunch of fried chicken and macaroni salad.

It was a fine movie, with deadpan dialogue that provoked much hooting.

Scientist No. 1, viewing the just-landed flying saucer: “That’s really something.”

Scientist No. 2: “Yes. It’s the biggest thing that has happened in our time.”

After two hours, we rumbled through the towering pines and up the steep, narrow road to Mt. Pinos, at 8,831 feet, Ventura County’s highest peak. As the sun set, we caught sight of local astronomers in the parking lot, chatting quietly and looking up as they awaited the night’s first stars.

A dozen or so telescopes were at the ready, mounted on tripods and aimed at cosmic points of interest. Some were as compact as boomboxes, and others were the size of cannons; some were equipped with computers that automatically locate heavenly objects, while others were carefully manipulated by hand.

“Nothing wrong with computers,” said Dave Holland, the Simi Valley amateur astronomer who ran the trip. “But I’m of the old school. I learned to star-hop just by studying the charts and looking at the sky.”

The scopes’ owners, our heavenly hosts for the evening, were introduced by first name and diameter of lens. A couple of women from Thousand Oaks chortled to each other about “telescope envy,” but as the mountain sky grew darker, so did the seriousness of the crowd. Alan Zucksworth gazed skyward and pronounced it good.

“We have nothing like this in Dayton, Ohio,” said Zucksworth, an engineer who works for the Air Force there. “This kind of darkness is like a religious experience for astronomers.”

Light, I quickly learned, is the astronomer’s enemy. Many speak of light pollution with bitter regret, the way surfers speak of sewage fouling the waves. Mostly middle-aged, a few of my bus mates talked of retiring soon--in New Mexico, Arizona, anywhere the sky is black and the stars are white and there’s no infernal glow of human enterprise to ruin the view.

From time to time, meteors flashed across the sky and the astronomers let out excited whoops, like kids at a fireworks show.

I drifted from scope to scope, taking in a million-mile blanket of stardust here, a globular cluster in the constellation of Hercules there.

“You can see H-Alpha in Sirius on this 20-incher,” a man told me, “but there are some tellurian lines to confuse matters for you.”

That’s OK. Confusion under the stars is a good working definition of day-to-day life, whether you’re looking at H-Alpha in Sirius or H-Alpha in Sirius is looking at you.

Joanne Hailey, who lectures at a planetarium in Des Moines, was staring at the stars unaided by any 20-incher. I asked her if people could really make out crabs and archers and warriors up there, or whether that’s not some gentle 3,000-year-old hoax, like the older boys at summer camp asking you to fetch the keys to the oarlocks.

“Just look at Cassiopeia!” she said. “See her up there? See, there’s her knee and you can go up from there, to the tip of her throne . . . “

She told me an elaborate story about how Cassiopeia’s boastfulness ended up imprisoning her in the night sky. I asked her whether astronomers in Iowa ever sing the old standard, “Fly Me to Des Moines.”

“Just look at Cassiopeia!” she said.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.