Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 2, 1994 TAG: 9407040085
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SALLY HARRIS SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The sky. Darkness. Stars and planets. The crescent moon. Endless space.
On the ground, a few students huddle on a hillside amid fireflies and weeds and mooing cows, setting up three telescopes to look at things Galileo saw nearly 400 years ago.
"You realize we're on this teeny little planet and realize how cosmic everything is - things you don't realize just going through everyday life," said Dan Fisher, past president of the Christiansburg High School astronomy club.
Kurt Grosshans, a chemistry teacher, started the club to give students more knowledge of the universe around them and to teach them to use a good telescope to find things in the sky.
On clear nights, they take to fields close to town, but far enough away to escape the man-made lights that frustrate stargazers. The students have progressed beyond mere stars and planets and are most interested in deep-space objects - supernovas, nebulae, globular clusters and galaxies.
One recent warm evening 11 students, Grosshans and Detective Gary Brumfield of the Christiansburg Police Department, who has come to be an honorary member of sorts, set up telescopes to look for the constellation Scorpio and its globular clusters.
What are globular clusters? Grosshans asks. Clusters of stars, the students answer. Why are they unique? Because nobody knows why they cluster and because they're the oldest things known in the universe.
How old? Grosshans asks.
"A couple of years older than you," a voice from the darkness says. They are, after all, high school students.
Fifteen billion years old, they say finally.
True darkness has to fall before they can see Scorpio, so they while away the time looking at the shadowed craters on the crescent moon, Jupiter and its gaseous bands and Venus, which looks like a faraway headlight.
And then a commotion: Grosshans has put a 9mm lens on his Newtonian telescope and has found the great red spot - a storm larger than Earth - on Jupiter just above the bands.
"Whew, cool," said one student's voice in the darkness.
"That is awesome!"
Even Grosshans is excited. "I have never seen the great red spot," he says.
And just then he finds something else - something left naturally by the cows in the field - stuck to his feet.
"See why we need an observatory?" he asks, wiping his smelly shoes on the grass.
They need an observatory for several reasons, he said. They can permanently install Bertha, the club's big 1-foot high, 11/2-foot diameter telescope.
"We used to take it out in a pickup," Grosshans said, "but the mirror gets out of alignment and has to be collimated."
With an observatory, they could set up their telescopes permanently and wouldn't have to lug them around and assemble them.
The group started a fund-raising campaign earlier this year, a campaign doomed by the icy winter. They got an anonymous donation of $100, a gift of $50 from the First National Bank of Christiansburg and $10 from Blue Ridge Cellular. But they need $1,500 to build an observatory.
Until then, it's these fields.
With 20 members now, the club owns two telescopes; members have two others; and Grosshans has one.
As they watch the heavens, the clouds start to roll in, ruining their view of Scorpio - though they do see Antares without a telescope.
This is a volunteer thing they're doing - there's no class, no grades, no reward except knowledge.
Grosshans, they said, tells them about things that are happening in the universe, but "it's important that we actually see what we're talking about," member Jared Espley said.
And in the future, when exciting discoveries are made, they'll be able to understand and appreciate them, said Matthew Lucas, next year's vice president.
They look forward to July 16, when the Shoemaker-Levy comet, which has broken into several pieces, will hurl into Jupiter with 20-million megatons of force - more than all the nuclear devices on Earth. They've been watching and photographing Jupiter so they can compare it before and after the event.
"We can't see the actual collision because it'll be on the other side; but we'll see a flash reflected off the moon," Lucas said.
Afterward, he said, the cloud cover will be seriously disrupted. "We can't say exactly what will happen because nothing like it has ever happened. It could just burn up in the atmosphere."
"But it's the first time we've had forewarning of what's going to happen," Fisher said.
As the students stand around the dark field, they talk about the future - many of them are seniors planning to major in engineering, physics, astronomy. They talk about the club, about classes, about the whistle and whippoorwill and tree frogs that punctuate the dark night.
But mostly they talk astronomy.
"What's M57?" Grosshans asks.
"A supernova that kind of coughed," comes the answer.
Correct, as usual.
\ Donations for the observatory can be made in writing to Kurt Grosshans, Christiansburg High School, 100 Independence Blvd., Christiansburg Va. 24073.
by CNB