The routine was pretty much the same each time. It started with a phone call, "Hey Rich, are you guys ready to go? What time are you going to pick me up?" to which he'd reply, " about 5 o'clock ". That would usually give me enough time to take my 8" reflector apart, drag it downstairs and get my camping gear together. Just a sleeping bag would do, we'd only be on the mountain one night. It's one of those warm Saturday afternoons in the San Francisco Bay Area. The weather report promised 95-100 degree temperatures in the Walnut Creek valley we'd be passing through on our way to Mt. Diablo. It's June, July or August, it really doesn't matter, all we know is that it's the right time for us to have a 'star party'. The summer of '72 was one of those idyllic times when life was still simple, and aside from part-time jobs, we were still unencumbered by adult responsibility.
Rich, his brother Stan, and Ken will soon be stopping by; we'll toss the telescope into the back of the VW van and start our one hour drive from Oakland to Mt. Diablo, the second tallest mountain in the East Bay. We always chose Diablo since Mt. Hamilton, the tallest, already had an observatory on its summit and it just wouldn't do for camping and amateur star gazing. It's much too serious and intimidating a place, more like a library than a campsite. In a moment we're on the MacArthur freeway passing through East Oakland suburbia. Soon, the Caldecott tunnel has disappeared behind us and we're headed south on highway 680 to Danville. We haven't seen each other for a few weeks so we talk about college, women, and camping. I sit in the back seat worrying about the 8" mirror falling out of its mounting and rolling around in the rear of the van. I polished that thing to a ten millionth of an inch accuracy and it simply wasn't meant to be bounced around this way!
Off the freeway, we enter the ranch lands of golden grass dotted with the familiar scrub oak and manzanita bushes so common to northern California. We always stop at the Alpha-Beta store in Danville to stock up on our favorite junk food. Roaming the aisles with our shopping cart, I grab three six-packs of Coke while the others collect two bags of chocolate chip cookies, Oreos, potato chips and cheddar cheese. And, oh yes, mustn't forget the one pound link of salami! After paying at the check- out counter and surreptitiously ogling the pretty cashier, we toss the soda into the ice chest, and begin the long winding drive up the mountain to the campgrounds near the summit.
We drive up to the main gate, pay the Ranger the overnight fee, and get a free map of the mountain. The map is unceremoniously stuffed into the glove compartment where it joins its twin from the last trip here. We continue driving along incessant winding roads that always make me queasy; then, just as my stomach prepares to offer an even stronger protest, the 'Juniper' camp area appears around the next turn. The van is unpacked, the tent goes up and the telescope is put back together. The long wait begins. It will be a few hours until twilight is over and the fun can really start. In the meantime, we sit around the picnic table talking non-stop and watching the raccoons argue over scraps of left-over food in the next campsite. Sometimes we hike up the hill where, legend has it, some careless climber lost his footing and fell down the mountain fracturing his neck. It's a very deceptive climb. It starts as a gentle upgrade, but the last 200 feet are almost vertical on heavily-eroded soil with annoying bramble bushes everywhere. The effort of the climb is worth it because the view from the outcrop at the top is spectacular. It also kills time. Tonight, lacking the inclination to mountain climb, we bring out the frisbie from the car trunk and after tossing it around for a while, it eventually finds its way over the side of the mountain. Swell.
Sometimes our jaunts to Diablo coincided with the East Bay Astronomical Society's 'star party' and we would watch as other amateur astronomers unload their telescopes and set them up. "There's Paul Zurakowski and his 16" Maksutov, and over there is Denise Ferrichs and her 6" Newtonian." Everyone would be killing time, waiting for the sun to set and the stars to come out, by talking shop. "Paul, how long did it take to grind the corrector lens?" "Oh, I don't know Sten, a few weeks or so...' "What were you able to figure the optics to overall?" "About 1/10 wavelength of sodium light...Are you planning to do some astrophotography with your 8?" "Yeah, Paul, I want to go after the Scutum star cloud again, you know the one I'm talking about?..Right.. Well, last time my tracking wasn't so hot and when I developed the film all the star images were badly trailed."
Nighttime arrives to an expectant audience. Sunsets are dramatic from up here. The air is dry and warm enough so that we can wear cut-offs and T-shirts until midnight. Looking down into the valley you can see street lights begin to turn on. The illuminated freeway from Orinda to Walnut Creek splits in two as it meets 680, and then dives south through Danville toward the Livermore Valley. It looks, for all the world, like a river of light flowing from some iridescent spring in the East Bay hills. Here and there you see, in the darkness of the surrounding hills, constellations of street lights where small communities of humans go about their evening rituals. All that activity, all those lives being played out anonymously, represented microcosmically as flickering points of light. Even the complex tapestry of human activity can sometimes look as cold and impersonal as the night sky.
Twilight ends, and as the Milky Way begins to show itself, we walk over to the telescope and point it at the brightest thing in the sky, usually a planet or the moon. Funny, how we are actually bored by what the average person rarely sees 'close-up'. "Ho Hum, the moon again!". But the moon, this time, isn't completely dull. Its ragged, silvery crescent turns dull red and becomes deformed as it sets on the western horizon. In a 8" reflector Venus is an easy target, its featureless gibbous disk almost blinding in brilliance. Jupiter is usually the next to follow. Its striped disk, red spot, and the four Galilean moons are easy targets and they all fit nicely within the low power field-of-view of the eyepiece. A common game played under these conditions is how soon can you spot Jupiter or Venus. If you know exactly where to look, you can see them before the sun sets. Some people search for the elusive "green flash" that sometimes occurs when the sun's limb barely peaks above the horizon.
Once darkness set in, the whole universe awaited us. We all had our favorite objects to look for in the sky. Rich unpacked his hand-held telescope and, with his head propped up on a log, reconnoitered the Milky Way. The rest of us hung around the 'scope munching on junk food, savoring the complex nuances of Coke and Oreo cookies, while looking at the globular cluster in Hercules, and the Dumbell or Trifid Nebulae. Once these familiar objects lost their appeal, I would drag out my star chart, and the hunt for even more challenging splendors would start. Tomorrow's favorites perhaps? It's pitch black, and you're sitting on the ground with Norton's Star Atlas in front of you holding a flashlight. "Let's see now, Chart 14. There's Spica over there, and if we go west past those four fainter stars that form an arc, we'll get to a slightly brighter star just north of Delta Corvus." You look at the chart one last time, burning the angular relationships among the stars into your memory. Espying the part of the sky you are interested in, you line up the telescope on that star just north of Delta Corvus. It takes a few tries because all the stars are so bright that it's easy to get lost. Finally, you get the telescope pointed in the right direction, "Great, there it is. Now let's go after the Sombrero galaxy!" Back to the chart, "OK, if we step due north of this star about twice the diameter of the full moon, the galaxy should be dead center in the eyepiece near a 7th magnitude star." Back at the 'scope, we carefully scan across billions of cubic lightyears of space in a few seconds, and there it is! It's magnificent! I offer-up my prize to Ken and Stan. "But its just another fuzzy blob!" they exclaim. At the limits of my vision perhaps it does look that way, but as the neurons in my brain are processing this real image, they are also recalling that breath-taking picture I once saw of this galaxy taken with the 200" telescope on Mt. Palomar. NGC 4594, the Sombrero galaxy in Virgo, always thrilled me as a child. It was one of the very first galaxies I ever saw in a picture book on astronomy.
Once the sky show was over, I would get to work setting up my camera to take guided photos of the Milky Way. With camera strapped securely to my telescope, I would spend hours moving the telescope ever so slightly to keep up with the motuion of the stars. Once developed, the photographs would show the Milky Way star clouds as they really look, though not to human eyes.
From about 11 PM until 1 AM we continued to munch junk food and watch the slow motion of the heavens above our heads. The conversation would ebb and flow like a river with innumerable catch basins, finding its way from one subject to another, many having nothing whatsoever to do with what we were seeing through the eyepiece. "Hey Rich, how many times have you seen 2001?" "Oh about 12 times I guess." "Have you heard the latest about the Star Trek movie?" "Yeah, it sounds like they're calling it quits again. Rumor has it that someone is working on another sci fi movie called 'Star Wars' or something. It'll probably fizzle out too. It's a real drag, there haven't been any good sci fi flicks for a really long time now. How was Berkeley last year?" "Great! I Aced Calculus and Intro Mechanics, but E and M was a bit rough going though. We always wind up using vector differential operators in electrostatic theory before we even get to them in the Calculus course...How's Economics going?" "OK. The econometrics material is real neat. Turns out that most of the poor souls taking the course have never had Calculus so they didn't know how to handle the 'rates-of-change' stuff without a lot of help from the Prof."
Being the aspiring astronomer, I would inevitably get asked questions about the things we were seeing, but without fail, we would eventually find ourselves talking about the origin of the universe, its evolution, and theology. This part of the conversation would usually degenerate quickly into shooting down the Fundamentalists who refused to acknowledge the scientific world view.
It's pretty quiet now, all the two-legged noise makers have gone to bed, and the only sounds are the crickets chirping or the occasional clatter of raccoons raiding the garbage cans. It's amazing how terrible Coke and salami can taste at 1 AM. The cresote-saturated log feels solid beneath you as you sit next to the telescope watching the city lights of Walnut Creek. On the western horizon, Mt. Tamalpias and the lights of San Francisco intrude on the inky blackness of the star-speckled sky. Ken and Stan would run out of things to say, roll out their sleeping bags, and crash in the tent. I linger just a little while longer. I need one last look at M13 before it sets. Perhaps a glimpse of M42 in Orion as it rises.
The telescope stands there, its dark angular silhouette blocking out San Francisco and thirty miles of rocky Pacific coastline in the distance. I point my flashlight at the sky and its beam leaps towards Vega. Perhaps one of the photons I have just launched towards that distant star will arrive there 26 years hence, when I turn 46. I'll never know. I do know that the light I am now seeing from Vega started its journey before I was born.
With the universe before me, should I try one more time to find M33, or go after one of those globular clusters in Sagittarius before it sets? NGC 6637 is supposed to be very beautiful in a wide-field eyepiece. How about another look at the Ring Nebula in Lyra, or the Andromeda galaxy? The possibilities are endless. Rich and I use his wide-field refractor to hop from one star cloud in the Milky Way to another. We're not looking for anything in particular, just drinking in as much of this celestial view as we can before the sun rises and this cosmic majesty becomes a fading memory. Occasionally, a meteor flashes by and slices the star lanes in two with its fleeting tail. High overhead, a jet plane glides silently through the constellations, eclipsing an occasional star with its wings, the passengers completely oblivious to the role they have just played. Humans flying through the air in a tin can, suspended somewhere between the earth and infinity, reading their magazines and having their dinners, perhaps.
It's midnight on the mountain. We give our eyes a rest from gazing into the abyss, and switch-on Rich's 10-band radio. We've been scanning the skies with our eyes, now it's time to listen to its radio emissions. Of course I know that hearing the faint whispers of the heavens is doomed to fail. Like looking into a mirror, all I will hear from the sky is human technology reflected back at me by the ionosphere above. Like an invisible blanket covering the planet, the ionosphere will reflect the radio signals from distant transmitters into our radio if their frequencies are less than about 100 megacycles. Our radio, if it is sensitive enough, will be able to detect these signals easily. Transmissions at higher frequency will pass through the ionosphere into space. Rich and I take turns twisting the tuner dial and listen to the babble of voices and programs drifting in and out of radio focus. Voices upon voices, some bright, some dim, giving the illusion of distance. Between stations, the rising and falling hiss of radio static can be heard from the millions of electrons dancing randomly inside the circuitry of the receiver.
Occasionally, we stumble upon inhuman voices, strange rhythmic rumblings that warble at us from out of the darkness. Though I can count the stars in distant Pleiades and number the star clouds in Andromeda, I haven't a clue about what those sounds are, who makes them, and to what purpose. We hear the rhythmic "pock...pock...pock..." of the WWV time signals that relentlessly sound out the passing seconds in our lives. At several frequencies, buzzing sounds emerge from the radio like a swarm of angry hornets. At others, deep bass morse code pulses and sounds, completely indescribable, disturb the silence. Onward we go until the shortwave chatter of California is replaced by the longwave whisperings from distant lands. Like islands in the radio ocean, one comes upon those outposts of humanity suddenly. As the ionosphere rises and falls, becoming more and then less reflective, the signals rise and fall in volume like waves crashing upon a beach. It is an eerie feeling sitting here under the stars, listening to those distant lands. It doesn't take much imagination to think that we are tuning in to the patter of interstellar commerce. Vega IV's transmission on quantum philosophy. The plaintive, automatic transmission from some civilization in M82, long since vanished. No one has ever been able to find the key to deciphering their message. And there, somewhere from the depths of the Milky Way's core, the booming radio voice of beings who are known only as "The Survivors". Legend has it that they watched the birth of our sun. Although their message was translated long ago, no one has been able to understand what they are saying - our civilizations, after all these millenia, have no common points of reference. Of course all of this is just my imagination getting the better of me. But what if it were true? Wouldn't it be a more exciting world to live in?
Soon, our exploration of the radio universe comes to an end, and having exhausted the novelty of the night sky, we pack up our equipment and hit the sack. The next morning, we awake to find the valley covered by an undulating blanket of grey fog. It's a quiet trip back to Oakland, not because of exhaustion, but rather because we leave behind the delightful vista of an unobscurred universe, replacing it with a cluttered view of the cityscape. The mundane and routine replace the cosmic and mysterious as the '9 to 5' rhythm of our summer jobs resume. We sit back and let the van carry us back to the 'real world'; we leave behind the fading memories of ancient siderial wonders.