Stellafane Convention | The Skywatchers

Since 1926 hundreds of amateur astronomers and telescope makers have gathered on a Vermont hillside at the Stellafane convention, their own “Shrine to the Stars.”

I’m standing on Breezy Hill in the black ink of a Vermont midnight in mid-July, surrounded by savants and telescopes. “Switching to M11,” somebody whispers as the barrel of his scope swings through the dark. “The Wild Duck Cluster.” We pilgrims from near and far crane our necks at a firmament so sharp it crackles. “Check out M31, the Andromeda Galaxy,” says another, in the hushed tones that seem appropriate for the darkness. “Just rising over that white pine.” We can’t see one another’s faces, just the muted red flashlights that bob around like will-o’-the-wisps, occasionally glinting off the obsidian skin of a homemade scope.

Nearly a thousand of us have come to Stellafane, the annual convention of the Springfield Telescope Makers, which has taken place on this hallowed hill since 1926. This year there are visitors from Brazil and Ireland. One man rode his motorcycle straight through from Toronto. Another walked more than 250 miles. We all fumble our way across the grassy hillside, waiting our turn to peer through the 12-inch Dobsonian or the 25-inch Newtonian at the arcing dustcloud of an ancient supernova, or some ghostly nebula hiding in the dark. With scopes this powerful, even the dullest patch of seeming nothingness turns out to be shot through with stars. I lean into the eyepiece of a 5-inch 1906 Clark refractor, restored to its gleaming brass youth by its new owner, and gasp: Saturn hangs so bright that it feels etched onto the glass. To become a member of the Springfield Telescope Makers, you have to make your own scope. The housing is pretty straightforward and leaves lots of room for creativity, which is on full display during Stellafane (adapted from the Latin for “shrine to the stars”): from hand-carved wooden telescopes to one made from tin cans, plywood, and a metal salad bowl, with three crutches for a tripod. The challenge is the mirror, which concentrates the light of the sky into the eyepiece; its surface must be blemish-free to within millionths of an inch. That’s something the Springfield Telescope Makers have been accomplishing by hand since 1923, when Russell Porter trained the first 16 people in the art, which involves placing the glass disc of your mirror blank on a barrel and slowly grinding the surface with increasingly fine grit while circling the barrel to even out the curve. Then you perform a Foucault Knife-Edge Test, developed in 1858 by Léon Foucault (yes, the pendulum guy), using a pinpoint of light, reflection, and a razor blade. Shadows indicate fine imperfections that can then be ground away. How fine? “Remember when NASA screwed up the Hubble Telescope mirror?” one club member says. “They were off by a couple of microns. Any amateur telescope maker with three razor blades and a lightbulb would have seen that problem.”

That steampunk vibe permeates Stellafane, a throwback to that great Modernist era of exploration when cutting-edge science was within reach of anyone with some basic supplies and the right DIY spirit. Porter became hooked on “the wonderful mechanism of our universe,” as he put it, during 11 years of Arctic exploration, teaching himself to make telescopes at a time when that was the only way to get one. He found a ready audience in Springfield, Vermont, a mill town in the heart of Precision Valley—the Silicon Valley of its day—where American machine-tool manufacturing first wowed the world. Springfield was a hotbed of mechanical know-how, scientific curiosity, and cool tools. In 1925 Scientific American ran a story on the group, triggering an explosion of interest in amateur astronomy.

Stellafane’s heart is its bubblegum-pink clubhouse. Stories differ as to the origins of the alarming color; Porter’s daughter claimed that he requested spruce-gum pink, a subtle shade lost on the paint mixer. But once in place, the hue became as much a part of the Stellafane identity as the wrought-iron logo over the door: a man with a top hat and umbrella peering through a giant refractor. The Heavens Declare the Glory of God! reads the inscription on the eaves, taken from a psalm. A sundial protrudes out of the back wall. Along with Porter’s sketches of the original club members, the inside walls are strewn with arcane formulas and symbols worthy of the Freemasons. Out front is the Porter Turret Telescope, which looks like a cross between an old Dutch windmill and a machine-gun emplacement, and still uses some of the original 1930 hardware. Days at Stellafane are devoted to displays of new homemade telescopes, solar observation, and workshops (“Telescope Making Demo: Dobsonian Basics,” “How to Use a Medieval Astrolabe,” and so on). But as the light fades, the scopes come out, and soon Breezy Hill bristles like a porcupine. Strangers cluster in the dark and swap stories. Tom from Springfield, the third generation of his family to be a Stellafane member, built his first scope when he was 13 years old: “There’s nothing that beats looking through the telescope you made and seeing Andromeda for the first time. Wow!” He’s been coming back ever since. “It’s the innovation you see. People who think outside the box. No two telescopes are the same. Every year when I come here, I see something new.” Paul from Lowell is at his first convention. He’s built a set of four-foot-long red binoculars out of sonotubes. “I want to plug myself into the universe with both eyes,” he explains. “When you look through both eyes, instead of squinting through one eyepiece, everything jumps out at you. It’s like you’re flying through space.” John from Long Island has a cannon of a scope, so long you have to climb a stepladder to look into the eyepiece. His 32-inch lens is one of the largest homemade lenses in the world. After he finished it the first time, the company that was supposed to add the mirror coating cracked it, and he had to start over. How many hours has he put into this thing? “I dunno,” he shrugs. “A few thousand, easy.”

Phil from Boston is at his 40th Stellafane. He made his first scope as a teenager, won an award, and went into optics. One of his lenses now sits on Eros, the asteroid visited by NASA in 2001. Another was used to fit the Hubble Telescope with its corrective lenses. Phil is showing off his Gregorian telescope, a multimirror design from the 1600s that requires heroically precise optics but makes for spectacular planet viewing. “Why?” I ask him. “Why do it yourself, when Google can serve up eye-popping images of these same objects in seconds?” In response, he chokes up. “I’m a spiritual person,” he says. “When I go up into the White Mountains with a scope and look at the Orion Nebula, I see it with my own eyes. I see all the atmospherics going on, the subtle textures on the nebula. It’s not just an image on a computer screen; it’s the real thing. To me, it’s a slice of heaven. Just look at the gables on the clubhouse!” The heavens declare the glory of God. And the firmament sheweth His handiwork. So says the psalm. But religion is not what drives these children of Galileo to cast their nets across a billion light-years of cosmos and a billion years of time. They’re here to celebrate the still-astonishing news that with good hands and a questing mind, mere mortals can make meaning of the night. Conference details, an events calendar, and information for beginning stargazers at: stellafane.org. To view photos of handmade stargazing equipment, go to: YankeeMagazine.com/Telescopes