Looking Up in Peachtree Corners

When the brilliance of a clear night sky meets up with a young and impressionable mind, a lifelong fascination can result. Peachtree Corners resident Jay Brantley certainly exemplifies that.

“It started when I was about eight and I got a pair of binoculars and gazed up at the night sky, “he remembers. “I looked at the moon and it felt like I was pretty nearly on the moon. When I was 11, I got my first telescope and things evolved from there. The rest of the house would be asleep, and I was out with my telescope pointing it at the moon, the planets and the stars.”

Brantley started out wanting to be an astronomer, segued into engineering but has maintained his interest in Life, the Universe and Everything (to borrow from a book title) ever since. “There’s just something magical about it,” he said of astronomy.

Rafael Garcia, a retired architect and another longtime Peachtree Corners resident, has a similar childhood tale to tell. “Back around 1968, I had a little refracting telescope in Puerto Rico. We had a second story that had an opening to the sky, and I loved going up there. I could find many things other than the moon,” he said.

Garcia is of the generation that came of age during the moon race of the 60s-and says that also contributed to his decades-long fascination. “The whole concept of space travel was embedded in my psyche,” he said. “I saw the moon landing live on TV, so it’s always something I’ve been fascinated by. And I have always liked science.”

Stars in their own backyards

Amateur astronomers have been prowling the night skies of Peachtree Corners for decades in parallel with the professionals who staff observatories and research black holes, the origin and evolution of stars and the formation of distant galaxies.

The backyard astronomers aren’t necessarily looking to push the boundaries of knowledge — they delight finding brighter sights, like the moon, the planets and their moons and even much more distant objects like the Orion nebula, star clusters and the Andromeda galaxy in the midst of a city where light pollution has grown steadily worse. Or they head for darker environs such as the north Georgia mountains to look for fainter objects. Others combine a love of roaming the universe with astrophotography, capturing breathtaking images of Saturn’s rings or streaking comets.

The technology involved with telescopes for the backyard buff has advanced steadily and prices have come down in the last 10 to 20 years, cutting out the tedious work of finding and then tracking celestial objects. These aren’t your grandpa’s telescopes.

“At one point, someone — it must have been my wife — gave me one of those department store telescopes,” said Ludwig Keck of Peachtree Corners, “and it illustrated very well why you shouldn’t have one of those. They make big [and to his thinking largely unfounded] claims on what you can see. They come with a tripod and a mount that aren’t very stable. And, of course, it has no drive, so you have to constantly reposition it.”

Modern consumer telescopic equipment of the last 10 to 20 years is a far cry from that. Motorized mounts and computer control make celestial tracking objects a snap — no constant repositioning.

Enthusiasts say you can program the equipment for a nighttime tour of whatever planets are visible, for example. Pair one of those higher-end telescopes together with a laptop, or even an app-equipped iPhone or Droid, and you’re in business.

Eyepiece and phone cameras can yield spectacular photographs. Even that app-equipped smartphone by itself can find and follow landmarks in the sky — no telescope required.

Spectacular night shows

Of course, one thing that hasn’t changed from the old days is the awe and wonder of having a front row to the universe.

Jay Dunn is an assistant professor in physical sciences at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College. He teaches taught a slate of astronomy and physics courses and co-presides over the observatory on the Dunwoody campus, apparently the closest such facility to Peachtree Corners.

He says a major factor in his continued passion for the science is watching the amazed reactions as visitors peer through the eyepiece of their 14-inch telescope. “Even with less interested astronomy students, when they look through the telescope, they might drop an expletive,” he said.

Unfortunately, the observatory building was shuttered at press time due to COVID-19 restrictions. Dunn said they plan to reopen after getting the go-ahead from Georgia State officials.

Dunn is a professional, published research astronomer but is well in tune with what visitors like to see. He says the moon is most popular, particularly in the first quarter because shadows create an extra viewing dimension. Saturn and its rings also rank high.

Peachtree Corners sky watchers don’t disagree. Brantley says Jupiter, Saturn and distant galaxies are the preferred observational targets as objects that one can get more detail on, in contrast to stars. And when he points his 150-millimeter refractor telescope at the moon and invites youngsters to peer through the eyepiece, “They are absolutely mesmerized.”

Speaking to that same sense of youthful fascination, Keck was a Boy Scout leader and before taking kids on a campout, he’d consult a star chart and to learn what could be seen and what part of the sky it could be spotted in.

“I remember one trip where the Scouts were rowdy and talking and wouldn’t go to sleep, so well past midnight, I told them we were going on a star walk. After some hemming and hawing they complied,” he said. “We walked to a big field. And they were just fascinated. It was beautiful and clear and there were so many stars it was hard to pick out the constellations.”

The astronomy bug can be passed down through the generations. Garcia said his daughter is a semiprofessional photographer who does a great deal of astrophotography. He himself has linked an eyepiece camera to his motorized refracting telescope to take moon and eclipse shots and has posted them to a local photography club website.

Advice for stargazers

A word of caution — patience and technique are key for such photography. Forsyth Countian and retired broadcaster Jim Ribble has shot a plethora of sky pics. He says with fainter objects, the necessary light-gathering can take hours.

If he’s photographing Orion, for example, he might take hundreds of shots and then uses software to stack the 30-second frames into one, brilliant whole. He uses an 11-inch telescope and explains that the bigger the telescope, the more light it can gather, a key factor that outshines that of simple magnification.

And he enjoys the challenge. “It’s pointing the camera at a dark spot in the sky and realizing that it’s filled with incredible, colorful objects,” Ribble said.

Getting started in the hobby is akin to others, said astronomy buffs, as you can pretty much spend as much or as little as you want — $100 perhaps for a decent pair of binoculars to as much as $13,000-$15,000 for a very high-quality telescope.

With more time post-retirement, Garcia looks to point his higher-end refracting and reflecting hybrid telescope upward to find more galaxies as well as observing some of the planets. More digital photography is in the offing as well. And he’s among those who think that the SpaceX program and NASA’s plans to return to the moon and go onto Mars may fire up additional interest in celestial gazing.

For Brantley, there’s a strong linkage between astronomy and elemental questions of existence and origin. “You ask yourself the existential question ‘Are we alone?’ You look at another galaxy and it’s like our own, with billions of stars. Is there life there? There’s a philosophical debate on that and a religious debate. These are questions we’ve been asking ourselves since the dawn of humanity.”