STARRY, STARRY NIGHT
My older brother became fascinated with astronomy at a young age. One year, he got a telescope for Christmas. It may have come from Sears, or another of the mail order giants. We pored over their catalogs before the holidays.
Our farmhouse had three bedrooms and six inhabitants. I slept beside my sister, on the “against-the-wall” side of the bed, so I wouldn’t fall off. On clear nights, when stargazing was too splendid to keep to himself, my brother would use a yardstick to reach over her and tap me on the shoulder.
“Come outside,” he’d whisper. “I found something good.”
I’d crawl out the foot of the bed and head to the pasture with him. It might be a double star or the Andromeda galaxy. Maybe the red spot on Jupiter was especially clear that night, or her moons, or the mysterious rings that encircle Saturn.
Whatever it was, I dutifully peered through the lens of the telescope and marveled at the wonder of it all while he explained the earth’s rotation and how to identify the constellations.
Eventually, my brother moved up in telescopes, until he had one roughly the size of a hot water heater. (I exaggerate, but only a little.) He gazed at the night sky from a few different hemispheres during his tour in the Navy, and he’s visited observatories and joined astronomy clubs wherever he’s lived since then.
He tried to advise me on how to spot the Southern Cross when I lived in Panama, but I was never sure I found it. Identifying constellations was easier when we were kids and I could follow his hand while he explained the coordinates.
I smiled to myself the day we opened our elementary science books, and read about The Human Eye and its two kinds of light-detecting cells—rods and cones. I already knew about them. My brother had taught me not to look straight at the dimmest stars, but to try and see them from the corner of my eye, where my “rods” would detect them. Rods are better in dim light, he said. The cone cells at the center of my vision were better with brighter light, and seeing colors.
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