Stargazer Wannabes

When I was a little girl, I wanted to go to the Erie planetarium very badly, but it was closed for a period of time during the peak years of my interest, so I never got there. In fact, at 53 years old, I've never been to any planetarium anywhere. Not one. But on Monday night, I did make it to an observatory: The Cincinnati Observatory, built on a hill in the Mt. Lookout neighborhood of the city in 1873 and now a National Historic Landmark.



I visited with my friends Robin and Wanda as a part of a non-credit class offered by the university called "Behind the Scenes at the Observatory." This was my designated new thing for October, so I was the instigator behind our outing. We weren't entirely sure what to expect from the class--we just wanted to see the building and, if the sky was clear, the stars. I'd driven Observatory Avenue through Hyde Park a hundred times or more over the years, but I'd never seen the observatory. Where was it? We were delighted to find out that the two building site is tucked away on little Observatory Place in a park-like setting, smack dab in the middle of a lovely residential area.



The class was taught by a former UC astronomy professor who also happened to live in the Mt. Lookout neighborhood where the observatory sat neglected by its owner, UC, back in the late 1990s. UC wanted to demolish the two charming brick buildings and sell off the land, but the neighbors banded together to form a non-profit that eventually raised enough money to buy and renovate the buildings. Now it's an historic landmark and a prime site of astronomy education in our area. My friend, Angie, tells me she's even attended a wedding held on the site. Heavenly!

I'm very sorry to report that Monday night was cloudy, so we never got to look at a single star: that was disappointing. The good news is that the professor was quite a storyteller, and while I can't even begin to recount the long and vibrant history of the Cincinnati Observatory, I will recount the quirky bits of the story that grabbed my attention. I should warn you: the things that stood out to me were mostly not about anything important. If you want to know the history of the institution, here's a website that tells it very, very well: http://www.cincinnatiobservatory.org/history.html

I learned that the Observatory moved a couple of times and that it was founded by a man with the fabulous name of Ormsby McKnight Mitchel. If I'm remembering right, he helped found an organization that helped raise money to build the Observatory and buy the big, super-expensive telescope, made in Germany. What grabbed my attention there? The wonderful name of his organization: The Society for the Propagation of Useful Knowledge. I think I stopped listening for several minutes after that, just spinning that name around in my little brain. I think a bad poet lives in my head, gathering names and stories and expressions for some future use. I tucked that one away for safe keeping. When I tuned back in, the professor was talking about someone's death--was it the delightfully named Mr. McKnight Mitchel? Alas, I'll never know, because I was too ridiculously tickled by the way our professor described the mystery man's cause of death: "He died from the rigors of wilderness," he said. What?! You can die from the rigors of wilderness? Well, of course you can, but it's the expression that grabbed me. I don't want to be morbid, but I am just dying to die from the rigors of wilderness now. I'm not sure what that entails, but I can tell you that the bad poet in my head is in love with the expression.

Professor Stargazer spent a fair amount of time talking about the Observatory's first home on top of Mount Ida. If you know Cincy, you know that there is no Mt. Ida. That's because John Quincy Adams was a huge supporter of the project, so the whole darned hill was renamed for him: Mt. Adams. Back to Ida, though. I have no real memory of who Ida was, but I will never forget that she is reported to have lived in the trunk of a huge Sycamore tree. I have to tell you, this story made me laugh so loud that Robin leaned over and said to me, "What?! It wasn't that funny." Not funny?! She lived in a freaking tree trunk! I don't know a darned thing about tree dweller Ida, but I have a sneaking suspicion that she might have died from the rigors of wilderness. I have to admit that I really hope she did.

At some point, we made it into the amazing telescope room, a round room with a humongous telescope and a roof with a pulley system that opens up a slot for the scope to point at the stars or planets or moon and that spins the whole metal cap of the roof so astronomers can follow the same spot in the sky all night long. Remarkable! I know I should be able to tell you amazing facts about astronomy here, but as usual, I was dazzled most by stories and words. First, a word. Scintillation. Who knew? Who knew there was this word to describe the way the fast variations in light make a heavenly body appear to twinkle--or make a super hot road appear to have moving heat waves hovering above it. Well, somebody knew that these things were scintillating, but I did not. I never could have imagined the final story that caught my attention either: that a depressed astronomer working alone one night hanged himself from the giant telescope on Mt. Lookout. Some believe his ghost haunts the building.

I enjoyed our night, though we all would have loved to have looked through one of those big telescopes. Luckily, there will be clear Cincinnati nights in the future. Now that I know where this little gem of a historic site sits, I'll be heading back. Here's our happy trio of stargazing wannabes:



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