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Now that my eyesight has adjusted a little, I make my way across the yard, through the gate at the back of the garden, and up the trail to the hilltop. The faint strains of Vivaldi and the vague outline of Dad’s shelter against a dim red glow beckon me forward. I’ve missed this.
I’ve missed him.
“Hey, Lou.” He greets me without looking up from the six-inch Dobsonian telescope on the platform. His voice is hushed, though that isn’t necessary. There aren’t any neighbors close by, and stars don’t get spooked. I think he does it subconsciously, out of respect for the heavens.
“How’s the seeing?” I ask.
“Not bad,” he says, rising from his chair and moving over to the larger ten-inch, which is centered in the building and aimed in a different direction through the open roof. “Take a look.”
He’s aimed the smaller scope at the moon, knowing how I love to view the craters. They look amazing tonight, the air calm and the image steady. I can hear him fiddling with the keyboard on the bigger scope, muttering to himself as he inputs whatever it is he’s looking for. The motor whirs, adjusting the aim, and soon I hear the quiet sigh that means Dad has focused on his target.
“It never gets old,” he says. “The longer I observe, the more I see to appreciate and the more I love it.”
He spends most of his time viewing deep-sky objects, but I prefer things closer to home. Once I’ve sated my lunar appetite, I move to Jupiter rising in the east.
Before long my brothers join us, and we take turns viewing the Horsehead Nebula with Dad and watching Jupiter in the smaller scope, Dad chatting with whoever isn’t viewing. As much as he loves his astronomy, I think he loves sharing it with us more. Mom even makes an appearance a few minutes before midnight, failing to contain her shivering, though she’s wearing enough layers for a midwinter Arctic expedition.
“You’d better get back inside, sweetheart,” Dad says after a short time.
“You know I love to be out here, but I don’t know how y’all manage to stay warm,” she says through chattering teeth. “I just hate to miss out.”
Kaden stands up and throws an arm around her. “C’mon, Mom. I’ll take you back in. I have to get to bed anyway if I’m going to make it to the gym by seven.”
“Can I come?” Zach pipes up, abandoning his watch on Jupiter.
“If you can get yourself up, you can,” Kaden says, spurring a good-natured argument about how impossible it is for Zach to wake up to an alarm versus the maturity required to work out with the big boys.
I hear Dad laugh as their voices fade and he settles back in at the ten-inch. I take Zach’s place at the smaller scope and get comfortable for a longer look at Jupiter and its biggest moons, readjusting the aim every few minutes as the earth’s rotation pulls them from my field of view.
“Did you hear about Comet Siding Spring?” Dad asks.
“I didn’t. Armageddon?”
He chuckles. “Earth is safe for now, but it came pretty close to hitting Mars last month.”
“Really?” The image in my scope fades away, and I pull back to see that clouds have rolled in. I switch to watching Dad instead. He’s still bent into his scope, one hand on his knee and the other on the focus knob.
“Within ninety thousand miles—that’s closer than the moon is to Earth—and it dumped a couple tons of space dust on Mars’s surface.” He extracts himself from his eyepiece and checks the sky. “Looks like that’s it for tonight,” he says with a sigh at the clouds, putting the cap on his eyepiece. “Luckily, we already had machines there to observe the comet.”
“Yeah?”
He launches into an excited commentary about all the Mars rovers and orbiters and how they had been retasked to observe the once-in-a-lifetime comet encounter as he wheels the smaller scope back into the shed. His enthusiasm about the comet’s flyby and everything the scientists have been learning from it carries us all the way through cleanup.
“Do you think we’ll ever get people on Mars?” I ask as he locks the shed door and we stroll back toward the house.
“That sure would be something,” he says. “There are just so many obstacles. Funding, fuel, radiation, supporting humans for extended periods in space, achieving Earth-independency in the spacecraft... I think it’s possible, but we don’t have anything like the focus we had during the race to the moon.”
“How long would the trip take?” I ask, imagining what it would be like to go into space, live on another planet.
“Depends,” he says. “Throwing a dart from one moving planet to another is no small feat. The distance between the two is anywhere from thirty-five to 250 million miles. It could take anywhere from five to ten months, with current propulsion tech.”
How fast would the craft be moving to cover such a distance in such a time? My mind spins, numbers floating around and colliding like asteroids. Then, in a rare moment of mathematical clarity, they march together into a simple dimensional-analysis setup, distance and time clicking into position to yield miles per hour.
“Gracie? You coming?”
I’m standing stock-still in the middle of our backyard, eyes glazed and jaw hanging open. “Dad.”
Worry on his face, he moves back to my side and takes a gentle hold on my arm. “What is it?”
