Mr. Olcott's Skies - An Old Book and a Youthful Obsession

By Thomas Watson

A passion for star-gazing often starts in a modest way, with a small telescope. For some, that modest beginning becomes a theme that resonates through a lifetime. Mr. Olcott's Skies is the story of one such beginning, and of how a small telescope and an old book set the author on a long and often indirect road to the stars. It's the tale of a journey that has only just begun, and of the discovery that you really do need to look back the way you've come, to understand where you are.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Desert Stars Publishing
• Release date: May 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781497714786

Thomas Watson

I am a writer, amateur astronomer, and long-time fan of science fiction living in Tucson, AZ. I'm a transplanted desert rat, having come to the Sonoran Desert of the American Southwest many years ago from my childhood home in Illinois. I have a B.S. in plant biology from the University of Arizona, and have in the past worked as a laboratory technician for that institution. Among many other things, I am also a student of history, natural history, and backyard horticulture.  I also cook a pretty good green chili pork stew. But most of all, I'm a writer. The art of writing is one of those matters that I find difficult to trace to a single source of inspiration in my life. Instead of an "Aha! This is it!" moment, I would say my desire to write is the cumulative effect of my life-long print addiction. My parents once teased me by claiming I learned to read before I could tie my own shoelaces. Whether or not that's true, I learned to read very early in life, and have as a reader always cast a very wide net. My bookshelves are crowded and eclectic, with fiction by C.J. Cherryh, Isaac Asimov, and Tony Hillerman, and nonfiction by Annie Dillard, Stephen Jay Gould, and Ron Chernow, among many others. It's no doubt due to my eclectic reading habits that I have an equal interest in writing both fiction and nonfiction. The experience of reading, of feeling what a writer could do to my head and my heart with their words, eventually moved me to see if I could do the same thing for others. I'm still trying to answer that question.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

WORDS ARE THE PIGMENTS of the Muses

The writer uses

To paint on the canvas of his pages,

For ages and ages,

Thoughts...

William Tyler Olcott, The Prism of Thought

THROUGH THE WRITTEN word it is possible to influence the lives of many people across great spans of time and distance. Written records, especially books in their many forms, provide human ideas and the words that express them with a persistence they would otherwise lack. That persistence allows those words and ideas to reach out to people the writer could never directly address. Writer and reader may never meet, face to face. They may not, and in fact often do not, live in the same episode of history. One result of this persistence is the ability of the written word to influence people long after the writer is dead and gone. This influence has been known to change the course of human history. More often than not, however, it merely shapes the lives of individual men and women.

William Tyler Olcott sought to influence people he would otherwise never meet, by way of the written word. His goal was to share the wonder and beauty of the night sky, as seen through the lenses of eyes and telescopes, and as understood by the science called astronomy. To achieve this end, he wrote books.

Born in 1878 in Connecticut, William Tyler Olcott lived to the age of thirty-two years before the stars took control of his mind and imagination. As the story is told, in 1905 a friend of his wife introduced him to the constellations, an experience that opened a realm of knowledge new to him, and one he found impossible to resist. Within two years of his night sky revelation, he had written the first of the six books he would produce in order to share the adventure of star-gazing with others. Field Book of the Stars was published in 1907, and was followed in another two years by In Starland with a Three Inch Telescope. All the while, he studied astronomy and made astronomical observations, fueling the obsession that drove his desire to write about the stars.

In 1910 he attended a lecture given by Edward C. Pickering, a professor of astronomy at the Harvard College Observatory. Afterward the two men met, and when Olcott expressed a desire to make observations that might prove useful to science, Pickering explained his need for volunteers to observe and record variable stars. Mr. Olcott did far more than volunteer his time to observe variable stars; with Pickering, he founded the American Association of Variable Star Observers, arguably the longest lasting and most successful pro-am collaboration in the history of astronomy, and possibly in all the history of science. It is therefore no surprise that when amateur astronomers today think of Mr. Olcott’s work, they think first of variable stars and the AAVSO.

I became acquainted with the man and his work before I ever heard of the AAVSO, by way of the last astronomy book Mr. Olcott wrote, just seven years before a heart attack would claim his life, far too soon. This last volume, Field Book of the Skies, was written in 1929 to be a volume in the Putnam Nature Field Book series, a set of works aimed at folk seeking nontechnical references to various aspects of the natural world. Mr. Olcott’s last book survived through four editions, the last being edited by R. Newton and Margaret W. Mayall. Twenty-five years passed between the first and last editions. Sixteen more years would slip away before I came across a copy in my hometown library; there’s no telling how long it sat there, or how often — or how little — it was used.

But find it I did, and the power of the written word, bound into a book, to shape at least one aspect of a life was invoked, forty-one years after the words were written...

BECOMING A STAR-GAZER

MEMORY IS A COMPLICATED thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Barbara Kingsolver.

ASTRONOMY HAS BEEN a part of my life, in one form or another, for as long as I can remember. Amateur astronomy as a hobby dominated my teenage years, armchair astronomy held and exercised my imagination for a long time afterward, and when I took up visual observing again in my late forties it almost immediately resumed its dominant role among my varied interests. Considering all of this, it’s only natural to assume that this fascination is deeply rooted in some childhood experience, a potent event, one of those turning points in a life that shapes all that follows down the course of a lifetime. Perhaps it was a particular cosmic event, an eclipse or a comet, that filled my imagination with starlight and moonlight. Or maybe an inspirational moment with a parent or a trusted mentor, one that opened my eyes to unsuspected possibilities, and then sent me on a lifelong hunt for wonders in the sky. Surely there is something that looms large in my memory, a life-changing event that sent me on a path lit by the stars and the Moon.

That would indeed make a grand start for this story, but the truth is I can’t remember exactly how I came to be so interested in astronomy. It seems it was actually a lengthy process, one that unfolded steadily through my childhood. Star-gazing cannot be linked to a single, precise moment of inspiration that shaped this aspect of my life for all the years that followed. The stars and the Moon and the planets have always drawn my mind and imagination up and away from Earthly things. In childhood memories of the books I read, only dinosaurs offered any meaningful competition to outer space for my attention and imagination.

I do, however, have memories of that process as it unfolded through my life, childhood memories of the sky at night. Each added its increment to the mosaic of experience that formed the foundation of the amateur astronomer I am today. Some of these night sky memories are from times when I was very young, so I know my exposure to the celestial sphere, and to astronomy, began at a very early age. My siblings and I were raised by people, my parents and an assortment of well-educated grandparents, aunts, and uncles, who delighted in pointing out marvels of the natural world. They believed that the questions of children regarding that world deserved solid answers, that when a child pointed at a flower or a bird and said, What’s that? an answer more specific than flower or bird was called for. They accomplished this in part by learning the answers themselves, where necessary, and by having books for young readers on hand to stoke the curiosity these wonders provoked. My siblings, my cousin, and I were encouraged to look things up for ourselves. The stars at night were just one of many such subjects the adults in my family offered up to us, the one that for some reason sorted out to the top of my list.

I was taught, at a very young age, the location of the North Star. As long as I could see the North Star, they said, I would know how to find all the other directions. Facing that star, west is left, east is right, and south behind you. This knowledge was imparted with such seriousness and gravity that I assumed getting lost was a common event, a clear and present danger for children especially, and that people learned to find the North Star so they could find a way home. For years afterward I was afraid that if I wandered into the woods to the east of the house, I would need to sit and wait for it to get dark before I could find my way out again. When I was a small boy I suffered from an intense fear of the dark. Waiting alone until it was dark in a scary forest so I could figure out which way was north seemed like a really bad plan. It took me a long time to summon the courage to go and explore those woods.

I have an especially vivid memory of a photo of circumpolar star trails, printed in the book A Primer for Star-Gazers by Henry M. Neely. (I learned the title long after the fact.) My father used Neely’s classic book to learn the names of stars and constellations, so he would be able to point them out and identify them for his children. For some reason that image of stars tracing arcs around Polaris absolutely fascinated me, even though I had no idea at the time what it really meant. (I may have been all of five or six years old at the time.) That picture became so firmly planted in my brain that, many years later, I recognized it when I came across a copy of Neely’s book in a used bookstore. Seeing that picture taught me something of the power of memory, as for an instant I was no longer in that bookstore, but in my parents’ bedroom, peering at that amazing image in the book, which lay open on the foot of their bed. (And yes, I bought that copy. Of course I did. And if you have a copy of your own, turn to page 13 to see the photo I’m talking about.)

My father was no amateur astronomer, and so was not particularly knowledgeable about star-gazing when he moved his growing family away from Chicago, and out to a small town east of Joliet. Under the darker skies of rural New Lenox, wonders such as the Milky Way and the Big Dipper were easy to see, and the natural curiosity of his children was aroused by such sights. When we asked, Daddy, what star is that? he wanted very much to answer, and to answer correctly. He needed to learn a thing or two, beyond knowing how to find the North Star. Neely’s book gave him the resource he needed to stay a question or two ahead of us.

The case could be made, I suppose, for Neely’s A Primer for Star-Gazers being the seed that was planted in my mind, eventually to grow into an inclination toward matters astronomical. I know I found the book at once fascinating and largely incomprehensible. Through it I first became acquainted with the idea that the stars could be used in a sort of connect-the-dots game, one that placed horses, swans, bears, and scorpions in the sky. It was also filled with strange, hourglass-shaped charts that I could not fathom. To whatever degree it influenced me, I