Window to Universe Is Often Ignored

Like Sputnik, the Garvey Ranch Observatory in Monterey Park is a relic from the dawn of the Space Age.

The 7 1/2-inch telescope, never an optical marvel even in the Kennedy years, casts a weak eye toward planets and galaxies dimmed by city lights. The 24-foot-wide dome, built of sheet metal on a wooden frame, was once powered by a small electric motor, but it broke down so long ago that no one can remember when.

To swing the dome into position, you now have to employ a technology straight out of the Flintstones: You grab wood-handled ropes and pull.

“One strong, motivated guy can do it,” said Tim Thompson, president of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society, who notes that the job is tougher than it should be. Age and weather have warped the dome. The wheel assembly was damaged in the 1987 earthquake.

More ropes dangle from the center of the ceiling. These open and close the dome’s narrow aperture and must be coordinated with the deftness of a puppeteer--otherwise, the whole mechanism jams.

“It usually works,” Thompson said, maneuvering around the dim planetarium on a night when the telescope was pointed toward Mars. He cracked a grin. “But not always.”

Every Wednesday, at 8 p.m., the observatory opens to the public. Viewing is free, although the bargain fails to draw much of a crowd. Many nights, no one shows up but hard-core members of the L.A. Astronomical Society, who operate the facility as part of an agreement with the city. They use the observatory--and part of the old ranch house attached to it--as a clubhouse, a place to talk about celestial events and plan “star parties” and work on building their own telescopes.

“The skies out here are kind of muddy,” conceded Simon Fourstar, 31, a new member. He drives in from Santa Clarita--far better stargazing territory--to gain instruction in building an 8-inch reflector. With a telescope scarcely half that size, Fourstar can pull in the faint outline of the Ring Nebula, but he wants to look even deeper into space. The next step is polishing the mirror, a process that can take months.

“I didn’t want to start playing around with a $120 piece of glass,” he said, “without someone showing me.”

The observatory is a convenient roof, but it is not really what binds these amateur astronomers. They share a fascination as deep and timeless as the universe itself. Peering at objects millions of light-years away, things much larger than the solar system, they wonder how, and why. They struggle to grasp a vastness that can never be comprehended.

“Looking into the sky is a really cool thing,” said Fourstar, who calls himself a space nut. “Looking into the sky with a telescope you built yourself is beyond cool.”

About a dozen society members gathered this night in the cluttered room adjoining the observatory dome. Dusty wall paintings depicted alien landscapes and galaxies spiraling in the blackness. Metal globes of Earth and the moon lined the mantelpiece like bowling trophies. Other accouterments were purely functional: two lathes, a milling machine and a cabinet filled with abrasive for grinding lenses.

At a sturdy wood table, Peter De Hoff, 26, and his girlfriend, Ming-hua Nie, 28, were beginning work on an 8-inch mirror. Longtime member Herman Meyerdierks, 71, who has built five telescopes over the years, showed them how to lay out wet newspapers so the flat, disk-shaped grinding tool wouldn’t slip. He wet the sand-like abrasive and rubbed it across the grinding surface with his fingers.

De Hoff, a UCLA graduate student in plant molecular biology, became interested in astronomy while in junior high school. His dad bought a cheap telescope with hopes of seeing Halley’s Comet.

“For some reason,” De Hoff said, “we couldn’t find it.”

The search hooked the youngster, however. He and Nie were about to pack their camping gear and a borrowed 8-inch reflector to spend the weekend in the desert. They wanted to see Jupiter and some well-known star clusters and nebulas. And, of course, they looked forward to the light show caused by the annual Leonid meteor shower, when Earth passes through the remnants of an ancient comet.

There was a time, before the lights of Southern California got so bright, that you could have stood in a yard here and seen the display, or the sprawl of stars in the Milky Way.

Richard Garvey Jr. lived in such a time, in the 1940s. His father was considered the “father of Monterey Park,” a land baron who owned 6,000 acres and gave his name to Garvey Avenue. The younger Garvey was an amateur astronomer and something of a playboy. As America emerged from World War II, Junior was planning his ranch house and the cylindrical tower that would contain his telescope.

The project was not finished when Junior crashed his car south of Tijuana in 1948, killing himself and four others, including the daughter of theatrical producer Arthur Hammerstein. The tragedy stalled work on the observatory for more than a decade.

During that period, the space race began, triggered by the successful launch of Sputnik in 1957 by the Soviet Union. In May 1961, in one of his most stirring addresses, President Kennedy urged a joint session of Congress to commit to landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

Also that year, Bill Levin, proprietor of a camera shop on Garvey Avenue, approached the city about completing Garvey’s observatory. The city put up $10,000 for materials and Levin himself built the refractor telescope. The dome was in place two years later.

The ranch house, now part of Garvey Ranch Park, is divided between a civic museum (on display: scale models of every California mission) and the observatory.

A circular foyer contains posters and laminated news clips about astronomers and a signed photo of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto. A winding staircase leads up to the dome like a secret passageway--its walls painted black, except for renderings of planets illuminated by black light.

Mars blazed through the telescope for anyone who wished to look, its image dancing in the distortion of the upper atmosphere. But the amateur astronomers remained in the workshop and talked of other faraway places--the Orion Nebula, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, the Albireo double star.

Byron Russell talked of observations he’s made from the roof of his apartment building in Koreatown. Virginia Bogdanovich recalled flying to Munich with her daughter to see a solar eclipse. Shirley Sunada described star parties in Ventura County’s Lockwood Valley, with all the scopes set up to scan the heavens.

No one from the public wandered in for a free look. Sunada shrugged.

“It’s a great telescope,” she said charitably, “especially for observing the planets. But it seems to be the best-kept secret since the Manhattan Project.”