So interesting to see Singapore mentioned the way it is. Wonder who was there and met the author...EVERY ENTHUSIAST has a shrine. In baseball it's Cooperstown, Montana for fly-fishing, Alaska for hunters, London for book collectors. For backyard astronomers, the shrine is in Vermont, the largest astronomical gathering in the world, at a place called Stellafane.
Every year, in late summer, thousands of astronomers and amateur telescope makes converge on a desolate, windswept hill in southern Vermont, near Springfield, with a zeal usually reserved for religious pilgrimages. Lourdes for astronomers. They come year after year, waves of folks, in vans and cars with personalized licence plates -like QUASAR or STARMAN- on expensive motorcycles, driving Beemers, dusty old Volvos, and light-duty trucks. They lug telescopes by the hundred and chatter in a language all their own.
Many of these faithful are men, but there are some women too. And this year I saw my share of children. There are babies in carriages emblazoned with firey comets, elementary-school kids wearing astronaut hats and moon shirts, restless tenageers awaiting the ride home or the ring of the cellphone. They come from all over, from parts known and obscure. Kansas, Colorado, Florida, Singapore. Like the relentless pull of a neutron star, Stellafane draws this horde of people stripped of all pretension and jobs. There are no doctors, machinists, or lawyers here. Just astronomers.
Chris