The moon is huge from up close.
The straight line of a lunar morning cuts across the surface, running like a ruler’s edge out of the top and bottom of view.
From this close, the Man on the Moon’s face looks badly in need of acne medicine.
Craters bigger than Louisiana pockmark the surface. From above, they look like sand splattered by drops of water. The ridges of the deeper pits near the slowly-receding dark side trap the sunlight, casting black shadows that pool in their depths.
The moon’s eyes and mouth are flat wastes of dark gray rock. They are sweeping plains of cooled basalt that bubbled up in the moon’s youth, when meteors gouged gaping chunks in the surface.
For a few dozen students taking astronomy classes at the University, the view is like they’re hovering in space.
In fact, they are on the roof of Nicholson Hall, in the Landolt Astronomical Observatory.
“It’s just like flying over the surface yourself,” said Bradley Schaefer, University astronomy professor and Observatory director.
Schaefer threw one of his monthly “star parties” at the observatory Saturday, giving students and the general public a chance to see stars and planets up close through the Landolt telescope.
Built in 1939, the Observatory fell into disrepair in the early ’90s. When it was refurbished in 2005, it was named after Arlo Landolt, the longtime core of the University’s Astronomy Department.
On the outside, the Observatory is an unassuming green dome on top of Nicholson. On the inside, it looks like a science-fiction movie.
The long brass tube of the telescope dominates the room, stretching upward through a narrow slit in the roof.
The room is lit only by two dim, red light bulbs meant to preserve viewers’ night vision.
With the press of a button, gears whirl to life. The dome slowly rotates into position, its narrow slit pointing toward Jupiter.
Schaefer then scampers over to the telescope, rotating it by hand into position with broad, smooth motions. The huge cylinder pivots easily, and giant barbells of counter-weights and a swivel work silently as Schaefer hunts for the planet through the eye-piece.
Once he finds it, the crowd lines up, each student taking a turn to stare at the stars.
Schaefer’s students are here for extra credit. When they’re not in the long line that snakes around the wall inside, they’re out on the balcony, staring into smaller telescopes, studying star charts and pointing up at the sky.
“No way — that’s fake,” says Jennifer Harrison, psychology freshman, as she peers into a short, fat scope, marveling at the moon.
One of the stars the students are hunting for is Algol, which is undergoing an eclipse.
“It’s the demon star,” Schaefer intones, cackling lowly and loudly like a mad scientist, the red lights shining sinisterly on his face.
Sirius — the brightest visible star besides the sun — is high in the sky, twinkling visibly like a far-off disco ball.
Schaefer, who’s bouncing in and out of the room talking to students, stops to explain why.
“There’s a lot of atmosphere between us and them,” he said. “That light has a lot to go through before it hits our eyes.”
Light refracts as it travels through the atmosphere, causing shimmering and blurring effects. As the bodies and planets sink lower in the sky, light has more atmosphere to go through, so the effect worsens.
Jupiter, for example, gradually gets blurrier through the telescope as it nears the horizon.
Still, the view of the planet is stunning. It is wrapped in dark bands, tremendous jet streams bigger than Earth that slice across the planet.
Two of the planet’s moons float brightly nearby. Io, the hot one, is full of magma and active volcanoes that hurl plumes of fire miles into space. Europa, the cold one, is covered with frozen oceans hundreds of miles deep — oceans Schaefer says could possibly harbor life.
Throughout the night, Schaefer moves the scope several times, from Jupiter to the moon to the Orion nebula, where stars peek out from a light-years wide cloud of stellar gas, like headlights in the fog.
It’s these objects — planets and nebulae — that are Landolt’s specialty.
The telescope’s 11.5-inch lens, made by legendary craftsman Alvan Clark, is relatively small by modern standards.
Schaefer said the telescope is primarily used to teach classes and for amateur observation. The scope is too small and too poorly located for cutting-edge research.
“There’s too much light pollution around here,” Schaefer said. “This would have been up to research standards around 30 to 40 years ago.”
 
 
____
Contact Matthew Albright at [email protected]