Sky and Telescope - June 2017 - 45

Under the Stars by Fred Schaaf

Night Train
Summer memories are shaped by the rhythm and the motion of the sky.
Man goes nowhere
Everything comes like tomorrow
But she took that last ride there by his side
He spent his whole life pursuing the horizon
Riding the rods
Sleeping under the stars
Playing the odds from a rolling box car
- Robbie Robertson, Hobo Jungle

© CA N STOCK PHOTO / NU T TAW U T

M

any of us who love astronomy have
indeed spent our whole lives pursuing the horizon. And the zenith. And
the rest of this dome of endless mystery,
glory, and beauty we call the sky.
Two other major themes connected
to astronomy leap out at me when I
read or hear Hobo Jungle: sleeping under
the stars, which June's warmer weather
makes more comfortable; and night
trains, the sound of whose rolling -
regulated, slow or fast, mostly smooth
but weighty - reminds me of the
motions of the heavens and Earth.
Sleeping under Stellafane's stars
40 years ago. The great outdoor meeting of amateur telescope makers and
amateur astronomers in Vermont called
Stellafane, a name which means "the
holy place of the stars," takes place near
new Moon when the Green Mountain
corn is high. That's typically late July or
early August, long after June, of course.
But summer is a great hill or plateau of
similar weather and the same ﬂowering
plants. We do have to wait later at night
in June to see the late summer's prime
stars and Milky Way. June nights are
so short at mid-northern latitudes (and
are only deep twilights a little farther
north) that you almost have to stay up
until midnight or 1 a.m. for a sufﬁciently dark sky.
Surely the best place and time I've
ever slept under the stars was on Breezy
Hill at Stellafane in 1977. Actually,
there were a lot of clouds that year -
but that made the periods when the

stars broke out all the more wonderful.
Also a bit troublesome was the fact I
arrived a day early - unannounced,
an unknown 22-year-old with my
15-year-old friend and fellow Cumberland Astronomy Club member, Chuck
Fuller. Chuck's folks were dropping us
off because they were heading to Maine.
We discovered too late that we weren't
supposed to be there that day. But we
were allowed to put up our little makeshift transparent tent in an unused
campground spot - provided we did
some chores.
In the end, the only chore we performed was clearing some brush away
from the area near the camp house and
Porter Turret telescope. A man who
looked familiar - from the pages of
Sky & Telescope - sat watching us. But
before long he motioned us to stop and
come over to him to talk. The man was
one of my astronomical heroes, the
greatest of deep-sky pioneers, Walter
Scott Houston.
Our experiences with Scotty and
other parts of the Stellafane weekend
were unforgettable. But an evocative
one that ﬁrst night was bright but

distant lightning and then a nearby
ﬁre. We learned the next day that the
ﬁre had been set to burn out a hornet's
nest. But what I remember best was
the silhouette of Walter Scott Houston
against the mysterious ﬁre.
The motion of trains, stars, and
Earth. Even the great New England
devotee of nature and wilderness, Henry
David Thoreau, was thrilled by the plaintive night call of a machine - the train
that passed right by his Walden Pond.
One element that makes many a June
nightfall a time of peace is the wonderfully slow coming out of the stars -
especially the fairly low Summer Triangle
- in the longest twilights of the year.
The gradual movement of the stars from
hour to hour across the sky is like that of
a slowly rolling train. And yet it's not the
stars that are in motion, it's the Earth,
in its rotation. As astronomy author Guy
Ottewell (universalworkshop.com) has
so well put it, "Horizons roll, and not the
standing stars."
¢ Contributing Editor FRED SCHAAF
has been writing about the skies above
us for more than 40 years.
s k y a n d t e l e s c o p e .c o m

* JUNE 2017

45
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Sky and Telescope - June 2017

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