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The Naked Sky
by Pauline Uchmanowicz; photos by Roy Gumpel

Then felt I like some watcher of the sky / When a new planet swims into his ken
—John Keats

My own flirtation with the cosmos began during the early years of the Apollo space missions. My father, then a fighter pilot who guided airplanes using celestial navigation, would point out the constellations in the night sky as I imagined astronauts walking in space. Later, I took a college course called “Astronomical Observations,” charting the movements of Mars and Jupiter using a trusty “Star-Planet Finder,” a paper diagram of the Western Hemisphere’s starry dome with a rotating wheel fastened to it. With fascination for the heavenly bodies still intact, last month I paid a visit to amateur astronomer Sean O’Dwyer, originator and keeper of the Web site thenakedsky.com.

A lad from Ireland, O’Dwyer’s passion for astronomy was launched in the wake of the Star Wars trilogy, gaining velocity courtesy of the bbc, which first aired Carl Sagan’s television series “Cosmos” in the early 1980s. “Sagan’s show was a mega-experience for any astronomy geeks watching because he had the latest graphics,” O’Dwyer told me. Often glued to documentaries such as Horizon, he received his first telescope as a kid, a birthday gift from his father purchased in a shop on Henry Street in Dublin. “Then I hit a hiatus in my teens and twenties and left it all behind for a career in graphic design,” he said.

The avocation rekindled following O’Dwyer’s marriage to Miriam Cooper, a New Yorker raised in Krumville. The couple tried Manhattan for a few years, eventually settling in the hamlet of Lyonsville, slightly south of Cooper’s childhood stomping grounds. The blackness of rural nights in Ulster County refocused O’Dwyer’s gaze skyward. Reflecting on the view, he recalled, “The first time I ever saw the Milky Way I didn’t even know what it was; I thought it was a cloud. But then I said, ‘No! My god, it’s the galaxy!’” Footnoting this celestial influence with a bit of kismet, he mentioned his wife’s maternal grandmother, the astronomer C. Doris Hellman, whose 1971 tome The Comet of 1577: Its Place in the History of Astronomy remains the standard treatment of the subject.

To celebrte his thirtieth birthday in 2000, the watcher of the sky bought a-telescope. He still remembers the day it arrived. Somewhat anticlimactically, stars appeared through the lens as points of light—the same way they look viewed through the Hubble telescope. “But when I pointed it at Jupiter, 30 billion miles away, it looked like a flat disk—like a communion wafer,” O’Dwyer testified, describing the object that consecrated astronomy in the collective imagination. “Unlike a star, it has a shape—height and width; a cloud band and four visible moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto) that cast a shadow as they pass. That’s what Galileo saw, objects actually rotating around other objects; it flipped him out and changed the world. So it’s always great to see that view through an eyepiece.”

An occasional idiomatic tick (“she rang” or “mum”) belying his Americanized accent, O’Dwyer speaks eruditely about the three basic telescopes with the measured authority of a master. Invented by its namesake, the Galilean is a handheld tube (think pirate’s spyglass) with a lens at one end. “He just had two bits of bubbly, impure glass and he held them up. The Chinese could actually see Jupiter with their naked eye. How? Well, they were Chinese! Who knows? Maybe good herbal medicine, but it’s recorded.” Sir Isaac followed his scientific forebear with the huge and heavy Newtonian. “Instead of using glass, he had the idea of using mirrors, the first stationed at the top and a huge secondary mirror at the bottom, one reflecting off the other. You insert an eyepiece in a side slot.” Light moves through the Galilean and Newtonian models in a straight line, bouncing off the glass or mirrors. But in a more modern contender, the short and stocky Schmidt-Cassegrain, light goes back and forth between different plates and bounces around, an effect known in astronomical parlance as “folding the light path.” Stymied by expense (a four-inch diameter Galilean lens runs thousands of dollars as do “motorized” versions that track objects as the sky moves), O’Dwyer chose a Newtonian, a low-tech scope with an eight-inch diameter lens.

Now when O’Dwyer studies a winter night he identifies Orion, Gemini, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, and other seasonal constellations, having absorbed the 110 items on the “Messier List,” a standard roster of objects drawn up by the Frenchman Charles Messier, a 19th-century comet hunter. According to the Lyonsville stargazer, “Amateur astronomers should start out looking for these items. Some are planets, some galaxies or nebulae, referenced as ‘M13’ (the Hercules globular cluster), ‘M42’ (the Orion Nebula), and so on.” As if drafting an installment of his Web site, for which he consults basic planetarium software, he held a dessert plate aloft as a model of our flat-plane galaxy and delivered a long, detailed account of M13. A densely populated grouping of stars, it contains hundreds of thousands of suns “all rotating around each other like a swarm of bees.” Hubble, Einstein, and Stephen Hawking also earned mention in his discourse.

O’Dwyer started his Naked Sky Web site as much to remember his own learning as to create a sense of community. “I’m enthusiastic about this stuff and so are a lot of people out there,” he relayed. An official from nasa, stationed at Langley in Virginia, regularly logs on and prints out the page, sharing the information with people whom he conducts on tours. The site manager explained to me the virtues of the Naked Sky as follows: “It’s a single page with lots of useful information stored in one place, so you can print it out and bring it into the field for reference. It will tell you which planets are up, whereabouts they are in the sky, and if there are any astronomical events occurring. There’s no red on the page because lots of amateur astronomers use a red light and the color wouldn’t show up.” Easy to navigate, the site also includes constellation maps, seasonal updates, fun facts, and engaging ideas. For example, under a brief headed “Orion: Hunter, Creep, Constellation,” O’Dwyer posts the question, “How did a big dumb lug like Orion get his name stamped all over the cosmos?”

As a grand finale to my visit, Sean led me outdoors to take a gander through his telescope. Saturn and its rings zipped by as I witnessed the earth’s rotation, spinning 1,000 miles an hour. Redirecting the eyepiece toward Jupiter, the planet appeared with a pair of black parallel stripes on its surface, three of its moons forming a straight line to the southwest. Finally, Earth’s own satellite shone through, large and vibrant. Contemplating the moon, I thought of Hubble’s greatest discovery, that our galaxy does not stand alone in the universe, and of O’Dwyer’s amen in its retelling: “What he saw blew his mind.”