Sky & Telescope September 1998 [antikvár]

focal pointA Trail to the SkyChristopher Cokinos tries "starpacking" in the Montana wilderness.Some would scoff at hiking just zk miles from ourtrailhead to a tiny Forest Service workstation in Montana's West Pioneer Mountains. But our backpacks were stuffed with a week's worth of food and clothes, not to mention star atlases, binoculars, field guides, and two used paperbacks by astronomer Harlow Shapley. We were "starpacking," 1 told Elizabeth, on whose pack my tripod was slung. The telescope case refused to fit in my 45-pound pack, so I carried it like an attaché as we trudged up the rocky trail. Three days from Kansas, we breathed laboriously at just over 8,000 feet, carrying more weight than we'd ever brought even on longer backpacking excursions. Our lungs burned in thin air, and for distraction I tried to recall the topo map's meadow, to imagine how much sky I'd have to probe.I recalled the previous sum-men With the truck parked nearby, we'd slept outside a cabin nestled in the dry foothills of the East Pioneers, under a Milky Way so bright it cast shadows. So this summer I knew I'd bring my 90-mm f/11 scope a gem well suited for birds and stars even though Foolhen Cabin required backpacking to reach it.I wanted dark skies, new nebulae and Strix nebulosa, the great gray owl, elusive as mist. I imagined each dusk scanning trees for a remote-country owl I'd never seen before and then, as darkness fell, turning my eyes toward Messier's green-gray star clusters and galaxies.Almost immediately I questioned my decision. It wasn't so much the awkwardness of carrying the case but the unexpected proHferation of mosquitoes. We were hiking to a cabin at the edge of a meadow filigreed with creeks. It would be wet. There would be bugs. Fog. As we trudged through Sun-dappled forest, I put on bug netting and lowered my expectations with each footfall.It was wise to do so. Most nights were cloudy, and one clear night coincided with a lovely exhaustion. We were tired from daytime hikes to mountains, including one we nicknamed Hungry Vista Peak. The West Pioneers are rolling, green mountains more like the Smokies than the Rockies, but they afford grand views. From Hungry Vista Peak I could see rangesthe East Pioneer, the Beaverhead, the Anaconda like a maw's jagged teeth waiting to shred clouds. We named flowerslupine and shooting star and spied on elk.Still, I needed real stars.I woke in the predawn on our fourth day at Foolhen. Eachevening I had carefully set out my parka, star charts, and red-cellophaned flashlight. On my walk to the outhouse I saw a sky full of stars and hurried back to the cabin, where I moved my things outside. As 1 selected eyepieces and opened my charts, I noted the low temperature. A frost had killed the mosquitoes. I smiled as I peered through binoculars to confirm a familiar signpost: the great galaxy in Andromeda, so familiar and coldly awesome. Encouraged, I placed the scope and tripod on old boards laid across a muddy path.Not as transparent as last summer's sky, this one above a black meadow rimmed by black trees still held sights new to me. I craned to see Sagitta's diminutive Arrow shcing toward prey. I was after two of Messier's objects, the globular cluster M71 and M27, unpoetically named the Dumbbell Nebula.Just below the imaginary line between Delta and Gamma Sagit-tae, I gendy panned until I descried M7rs "small and faint" round shape, 13,000 light-years away, as compact as pearly everlasting, as wispy as salsify. But I sensed a slight lightening to the east and hurried, unable to relish this latest globular cluster 1 pushed up, above Sagitta, stepping off the Arrow's point. More quickly than I expected, I was struggling to keep die Dumbbell in the eyepiece. It was bright a close 900 light-years away, as the chart reminded me, its "shells puffed off by dying stars." The light seemed like a smudge of chalk on blackboard, a child's doodle.My view again was quick as the mount slipped against the high angle. Besides, "rosy-fingered dawn" colored the east (I'd brought The Odyssey too). I would have to wait for a November night on the Kansas prairie for extended views of these particular treasures. As I hurriedly found the feathery photons of a new galaxy M33 in Triangulum I thought of what Harlow Shapley had written: to be a participant is in itself a glory."I never did see Strix nebulosa, though we watched one afternoon a rare flammulated owl sleeping in a sunlit cavity of a dead tree. The gray mist of the great owls remained unseen, but I'd spied other gray forms, quiet as owls, if not as elusive. Like all the gods, the worid takes many shapes. Perhaps as that dawn approached the mountains, a great gray owl heard some rustling human by a cabin and turned its head with eyes wide to capture the shape the light gave me, a mere acolyte. ^LEE CHRISTIANSEr^Christopher Cokings is a writer from Manhattan, Kansas.10 September 1998 I Sky & Telescope