By Brian Kevin & Will Grunewald
From our November 2024 issue
“FLASHMOB!” is what Jon Silverman posted in all caps one recent Tuesday evening, alerting 555 members of the Central Maine Astronomical Society Facebook group that, after months of canceled events — a consequence of cloudy skies and smoke from western wildfires — conditions for the following evening were at last looking ideal: calm, clear skies and a new moon.
And so, the next night, they gathered. Silverman, the club president, parked along a dirt road in Whitefield, a stone’s throw from Clary Lake, then followed his headlamp’s red beam (the better to preserve night vision) toward a meadow and the domed shack known as the Brower Observatory. Built by club members in 2001, using wood from an old chicken coop, it’s named for the late Maine astronomer Stanley Brower, who donated the slitted, 10-foot-diameter fiberglass dome that crowns it. Inside, atop a concrete pier designed to hold substantial weight, sits a Meade Newtonian reflector telescope with a 16-inch aperture and f/4.5 focal ratio on a motorized equatorial mount that moves with the Earth’s rotation to continually track the night sky.
If you don’t know what most of that means, just know that it is a humdinger of a telescope, tall as a point guard and thick as a tree trunk. But if you do recognize those specs and are keen on discussing them, know that you will fit right in at one of the Central Maine Astronomical Society’s monthly-ish “star parties” (“flashmob star parties” when they’re scheduled impromptu), held at a handful of surprisingly sophisticated observatories tucked away on back roads from the Kennebec Highlands to the Camden Hills.
“We’ve got the big guns out tonight,” declared one of the 15 or so star partiers who assembled in Whitefield, admiring half a dozen telescopes on tripods, all lined up outside the observatory and pointed at a brilliant sky. As one cluster of attendees oohed and aahed over an antique Unitron 152, another lined up behind a Takahashi refractor, occasionally acknowledging the binary stars it was pointed at while discussing the merits of its fluorite objective lens. Still another gaggle headed out to the middle of the meadow, toting a tablet and a Vespera Pro smart telescope with an apochromatic quadruplet lens system and an integrated 12.5-megapixel camera for frictionless astrophotography. Make no mistake, amateur astronomers are gearheads as consummate as any geek-den techie or shade-tree mechanic.
“We all suffer from GAS — gear acquisition syndrome, lethal to your pocketbook,” explains Jacob Gerritsen, a longtime member of CMAS (say it like “sea mass”) who occasionally hosts star parties at his own Galaxy Quest Observatory, in Lincolnville. Gerritsen bought the land in 2006, looking to escape the light pollution surrounding his home in Camden, and he and friends spent about a year putting up a handsome shingled building with a roll-off upper half: start a motor from the control room and a chain will yank the shed’s top away from its bottom, sliding it along an I-beam track.
It’s a similar setup that Josh Zukerman, another CMAS star-party host, is building on his back 40 in Rome, in the Belgrade Lakes region. An IT consultant by day, he first felt the pull of the cosmos when a favorite science teacher pointed his gaze upwards at Oakland’s Messalonskee High School. Setting out to buy his first scope, a decade ago, he cold-emailed Silverman at CMAS, seeking advice. When he finally bought one, a club member helped him set it up, and these days, Zukerman sits on the club’s board. “The camaraderie is great,” he says. “You get to meet these people, get together and talk shop: astronomy, telescopes, life.”
Maine has six such amateur astronomy clubs, according to Dwight Lanpher, an astro-enthusiast in Northeast Harbor who acts as a liaison among them. Altogether, the clubs boast maybe 150 dues-paying members, Lanpher says — some recordkeeping is out of date, so a precise number is tricky — but they have far more reach via social media, and curious guests are typically welcome at star parties. Each August, during the Maine State Star Party, close to 100 people descend on Washington County’s Cobscook Bay State Park for a weekend of stargazing, speakers, lively rounds of astronomy Jeopardy!, and more. Roughly a third are telescope-toting folks who would self-identify as astronomers, says Charlie Sawyer, who founded the event in 2006.
“But in my opinion, all who look up to the skies in wonder are, in a sense, astronomers,” says Sawyer, president of the Downeast Amateur Astronomers club. He often invites local school groups and other star-curious neighbors into the six-foot-diameter dome he installed on his front deck, in Pembroke — what he’s proud to call the country’s easternmost observatory. “It’s a people’s science,” Sawyer says, “and I think most people are interested in astronomy. It’s just about finding the time to go out and look.”
Back in Whitefield, as the star party stretched on, CMAS founding member Colin Cassie fiddled with an eyepiece up in the Brower Observatory, aided only by the dim red glow of an LED strip. “Astronomers do it in the dark,” he muttered. Cassie, who’s been grinding his own mirrors and building and repairing telescopes since he was a teenager, affixed the eyepiece to the scope, then stood back and offered it to the five others crowded into the dome (three men and two women — which, it must be said, comes uncharacteristically close to parity for Maine amateur-astronomy circles).
The star-partiers took turns peering and marveling as Cassie expertly reoriented the scope from one celestial object to another. First, the Hercules Cluster, a gorgeous and densely crowded scatter of speckles known to astronomers as M13, its designation in an 18th-century astral inventory called the Messier catalog. “Three hundred thousand stars in that cluster, and we’re only seeing the very brightest,” Cassie noted. Then, the Ring Nebula, M57, and the Dumbbell Nebula, M27, a pair of faintly blue-green cotton-candy wisps against the bottomless black. Then, good old Saturn, whose rings were all but “edge on” with respect to the Earth, a phenomenon that plays out roughly every 15 years, when the Ringed Giant briefly looks more like the Giant Bisected by a Faint Black Bar.
There were gasps and giggles and occasional flurries of Q&A, and as Cassie stared out the dome’s narrow opening, he couldn’t resist quietly exulting in the chance to indulge his hobby after weeks of subpar conditions. “Not a breath of wind. No clouds. No twinkling,” he murmured. “It’s a rare night.” — Brian Kevin
Eyes on the Skies
Observatories have been helping Mainers stare into space for a long time.
The observatory at Bowdoin College had a 100-year stargazing run, from 1891 to 1991. Then, it was decommissioned, and the attractive red-brick building, with its granite-block base and aqua-green dome, went from catering to celestial concerns to serving decidedly terrestrial ones: an irrigation pump, for the adjacent athletic fields, was installed inside. Over time, trees grew up around the observatory, blocking what had once been an expansive view of the night sky.
Last year, though, the college quite literally moved in a new direction with the observatory, jacking the whole building up on wheels and rolling it a few hundred yards, to a spot in the middle of a wide-open field. The aim is to reopen it next year, with a large telescope that will become a focal point in the physics department’s expanded astronomy offerings. When the observatory comes back online, it will join observatories at Colby College, Bates College, and the University of Maine in studying the stars.
But observatories aren’t only the domain of higher education. In South Paris, the Roger Twitchell Observatory is run jointly by the Oxford Hills School District and the Oxford Hills Community Education Exchange, hosting monthly “open observatory” nights. In Pownal, the privately owned Blueberry Pond Observatory offers night-sky tours for a fee. The owners of a family farm in Waterboro, Ossipee Hill Farm, are presently raising funds and laying plans for what they hope will be the largest observatory in the state. And amateur astronomy clubs have their own outposts all over Maine.
At Bowdoin, the reopening of the old observatory will be good news not just for students with an interest in the cosmos but for community members too. A new accessory building is going to house smaller telescopes that will be used for academic purposes as well as for public night-sky viewings. All those distant stars seem to have a way of bringing people together. No irrigation pump has ever done that. — Will Grunewald
Check out our Stargazer’s Guide to Maine for tips on where to best view the cosmos, how to photograph the night sky, and more.
