One of the moments I remember well from the early aughts was a conversation I had with my dad about an article he’d written for the popular astronomy publication Sky & Telescope. The conversation I remember was about the reader response to his article: environmentalists up in arms about the deforestation of a Connecticut mountainside in the name of stargazing. What may have gotten lost in the shuffle was that at the time Dad had another hobby besides astronomy: building a yard! Perhaps I didn’t understand this clearly in my youth, but people don’t just create yards because chainsaws ‘go brr’ or because exercising control over a landscape is fun; he did it so we, his kids, would have somewhere to run and play. That yard has given us decades of good times, though it really was a spectacular spot for stargazing too, especially laying back on the rock for a panoramic meteor shower viewing.
Astronomy is an enjoyable hobby, but here’s another one: finding the real tangible objects that connect to you recollection. I wanted to hold this article in my hand and prove that this happened, and especially see this supposed reader response that he’d described. I didn’t have a year or a title, just an author, an era, and Google (and this research was in 2021, when Google was still good.) The article didn’t exist anywhere online, but an index of Sky and Telescope does! With that in hand, I was able to figure out which issues had what I was looking for. Naturally I tracked down a hard copy and scanned the article for posterity, like I do. Here it is in full:
My immediate reaction is that it’s hilarious, and it should have been clear from the tone that it’s not entirely serious. The influence of John McPhee is clear in the joy with which he recounts the geological history of our home (though I think it’s Plagioclase, not Marble, mixed in with the Quartz.) He ends it with a rousing call to action, to get out and interrupt photons on their aeons-long journeys with your own retinas. “Why not just look in a nice coffee-table book at photographs of Nebulae and planets? That’s not our way, is it?” Surely deforestation isn’t really a requirement for soaking up some starlight. It reads as a fun excuse to infodump about his favorite topics of the day: astronomy gear, landscaping gear, and geology. Its theme is to touch grass and pursue your passions; something still relatable today, a quarter century later!
The next issue does, as he claimed, contain some less-than-thrilled reader responses:
Apparently the letters were “Overwhelmingly negative” and Sky & Telescope felt the need to remind readers that this was an opinion piece and that they didn’t endorse clearcutting! One of them, however picked out that the article was run on April Fool’s day!
While the readers of S&T back in the early aughts may not have appreciated it, I think it’s great at what it’s doing (using a humorous premise to explore different interesting subjects end encourage the reader to do the same) but I like it most as an echo of a particular place and time.
