Connecting the Dots

A thin beam of dimmed headlights slid around the last curve of the snaking switchbacks to Lookout Mountain Observatory, the doors of a shuttle bus swung open and a crowd of eager star gazers piled out into the night.

“Good evening! Welcome to Lookout,” calls Judy Beck, a member of the Asheville Astronomy Club and physics professor at UNC-Asheville. “We’ve got lots of telescopes. Just walk on up and ask these folks what they are looking at and they will happily show you.”

The Asheville Astronomy Club is one of the largest and most active in the nation, and club members live to share their passion for the stars.

“We are like travelers around the sky. We are good at pointing things out to people and giving them some short little trivia they can take home with them,” says Dominic Lesnar, the club president.

Of course, anyone can do astronomy, any time, by simply stepping into their backyard. But having a tour guide to the constellations makes all the difference.

“I can look up and say ‘ooohh, aaahh,’ but it is nice to have people explaining what you were seeing,” says Carolyn 

Williams, who made the trip up the mountain from Asheville.

As Gabbi Mellow ponied up to the eye piece of a Celestron telescope as big as a cannon, she gasped and recoiled in amazement.

“There is so much there we don’t normally see. That’s the crazy part,” says Mellow, whose boyfriend brought her to the star gaze on a date night.

Some in the crowd spent months on a waiting list to land one of the 300 coveted spots at Lookout Mountain—an observatory managed collaboratively by the club and UNC-Asheville—but you never know where you might encounter these astronomy hounds. Aside from special visits to schools and community groups, club members often pitch their telescopes for spontaneous night sky viewing sessions in public places.

“For anyone who drives by and wants to take a look,” explains Knox Warde, an active club member. “Getting people interested in astronomy and science is a good thing.”

When Warde moved to the Nantahala River in Western North Carolina, he envisioned days filled with whitewater paddling. But lately, he’s found a different hobby.

If he wakes up to a sunny day with nowhere to be, he packs up his solar telescope, his folding easels and foam board eclipse displays, slips on one of his many astronomy themed T-shirts, and heads into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where he sets up an impromptu astronomy station outside the Oconaluftee Visitor Center. A line forms around him in no time.

“I actually have some people say the highlight of their visit to the park was looking at the sun through a telescope,” Warde said.

Thanks to the Asheville Astronomy Club, anyone with a library card in Western North Carolina can check out a telescope and view the night sky on their own. The club piloted its first telescope loaner program at the downtown Asheville library a few years ago. They quickly found one wasn’t enough.

“There was a 20-month waiting list to check it out, so we got a second one, and then a third one,”  says Warde.

After the club donated a telescope to the library in Franklin, North Carolina, the interest was so great—spurred in part by the coming solar eclipse—that the library director landed a grant to buy seven more.

The Asheville Astronomy Club draws members from a two-hour radius who crave a support group for their hobby, like George Stephens of Clemson, South Carolina. He discovered his inner astronomer during night motorcycle rides on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

“I’d stop at an overlook and lay on my back and just scan the sky with my binoculars for an hour, and turn around and head back home,” Stephens says.

When he graduated to a telescope, he looked up the club to find kindred spirits. Lesnar, a self-described “rouge astronomer” before he connected with the club, got addicted to astronomy as a boy after his parents bought him a cheap telescope.

“It was a portal to another world for me,” he says. “I saw a view of Saturn and forget about it, I was hooked.”