To the Stars

GODDARD, Kansas - A friend from work wanted to check out the observatory on Lake Afton. I certainly didn't have anything better to do, so we set off going west with a couple of other people.

The journey was on a country road, through the Kansas of my imagination. There were cows aplenty, in a large fenced-in grazing areas, two-lane roads that went straight as far as the eye could see. The conversation was cow tipping. This was Kansas, although every few miles there was an "exburb" development -- the trappings of suburbia artificially placed even farther outside of the city than originally planned. It seems like an odd combination: to live in the country as if it was still the city. But many people, not just here in Kansas are signing up: exburbs are the fastest growing areas in the United States.

Lake Afton is a country campground 20 miles outside of Wichita. Around one end of the lake is a small observatory. I say small but I really have no idea what the average size of an observatory is. I do know the movie "Contact" with Jodie Foster, and in that movie the observatory was much bigger. This looked more like an elementary school with a dome sticking out of it.

After paying our $3 admission fee (for a two-hour program; I love Middle America prices!), we were escorted inside the dome. The schedule pointed to a five point program this evening:

1. Jupiter
2. Vega
3. Planetary Nebula
4. Space Globules
5. Milky Way

It seemed a tad front-loaded to me. Jupiter's cool, and I've heard of Vega, but Space Globules just aren't my thing.

Our instructor screamed astronomer: approaching 50, white pants with a white shirt, nervously running through a presentation he's probably given 30 times.

"Jupiter is the biggest planet in the Solar System," he said -- three times.

I heard much about why Vega is blue, nebula are decaying stars and the comparative sizes of Jupiter's moons. I've since forgotten it all, so that speaks to how worthless it was.

Outside the observatory, we were back to cow tipping when two men approached us and wanted us to look inside their telescopes.

"Is it yours?" I asked one of them, as looked at the M51 Galaxy.

"Hell no," he said. "I couldn't afford this. It's his. He's a pharmacist." The telescope was nearly 10 feet tall -- I had to look at most objects with the help of a step ladder.

They showed us several objects -- the Owl Nebula, a spiral galaxy and M13 -- that brought the sky to life more than rehashed physics lessons inside the telescope. The view from the telescope wasn't terribly clear anyway, the lens wasn't terribly long. But the visit out there was enough to remind myself of the strange things that are above us every night, but usually blocked out by Taco Tico and Wal-Mart signs.