8 ADIRONDACK LIFE September + October 2019A
t 9:30 on a summer night, four adults gather
at a picnic table in Keene’s Norton Cemetery,
waiting for the sky to darken. Already, the
Adirondack ceiling is sprayed with stars, the
Milky Way splashed above, Jupiter on display. Stare up, and
the planetarium-perfect curve of the universe is so disori-
enting, you might cling to the picnic table to get your bear-
ings. By 10, as the sky grows inkier and surrounding head-
stones fade, fireflies reflect the overhead show.
Beth, from Saranac Lake, and Emily, my neighbor in Jay,
chat while the night’s unofficial host, David Craig, buzzes
around his eight-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, rigged
with a DSLR camera and autoguides for astrophotography.
Dave recently retired from MIT Lincoln Laboratory after
working there—telecommuting from Keene—as an elec-
tronics engineer for 39 years, though he’s still involved,
part-time, with a NASA project. But in his free time he’s
an amateur astronomer whose idea of a good time is look-
ing at galaxies and nebulae and inviting other astronomy
enthusiasts to join him. Tonight he predicts that three of the
four Jovian moons—including Io—will be visible and thatThe Gatherers
Finding kinship among six million
acres and billions of stars
BY ANNIE STOLTIE
Lagoon Nebula
astrophoto by David
Craig, taken at the
Norton Cemetery,
in Keene.SHORT CARRIES
Saturn will rise in the horizon at about
10:15 p.m.
We take turns looking through Dave’s
telescope, reverently, solemnly, like
accepting some kind of communion.
There’s the occasional “wow.” We see
bands of orange clouds across Jupiter
as the planet flickers like a hot sun—
the result of atmospheric turbulence,
explains our host. With trained eyes,
Jupiter’s red spot can be seen, a perpet-
ual hurricane the size of several Earths.
Below the cemetery the twinkle of
headlights snakes up from Route 73.
Soon more people emerge at the picnic
table—Alice, from Keene Valley, and her
visiting daughter-in-law and grandchil-
dren. They, too, peer into the scope.
By now, we can see Saturn, a golden
oval. Dave tells us its rings, made mostly
of ice, are about 10 yards thick, extend-
ing out 175,000 miles from the planet.
Alice asks about an overhead constel-
lation—“That’s Corona Borealis,” says
Dave, easily. Emily mentions spotting
a hiker’s head lamp on a distant peak
during a previous gathering. Summits,
Dave explains, are ideal for stargazing,
but who wants to haul more than a hun-
dred pounds of telescope and accesso-
ries up a peak? This public cemetery,