In your tenure at the University, you have no fewer than 60 opportunities to soak in the last particles of dust scrubbed from bodies that fixed the stars.
You can do it every other Friday, beginning an hour after sunset. Take the curve of McCormick Road up Observatory Hill, past a population of Persian silk trees, which by that hour will have folded up their delicate compound leaves for the night. It's worth looking to your left as you near the top. There's a bedraggled old cottage, vaguely identified by a U.Va. sign: "Alden House." But keep going. Tonight's prize is higher up, closer to ... the sky? Which is what most of tonight's visitors have come to observe.
If you come on a warm, clear night, there will be lots of visitors: kids and parents, retirees, students, a professor and one or two Charlottesville newcomers who have just discovered there is a late 19th century astronomical observatory on top of this hill. (They'll be forgiven for not seeing it earlier: It's pretty well guarded by trees.)
Two Fridays a month, these pilgrims trail up the hill and park outside the observatory's 45-foot dome. They trickle in and line up behind the second-largest refracting telescope in the world. They see, focused by its 26-inch glass lens, light that has traveled trillions of miles through a universe that is infinite. And still expanding!
You're not here to see that.
You're here for something that sits, not illuminated, in a small room in the basement. Skip the telescope line. Wander instead toward the stairs, back through the rooms of the observatory museum. There are some gorgeous pictures: full-color (false-color) photos of nebulae and galaxies. They weren't taken here. The ones taken here were black-and-white and grainy, sexy only to scientists.
They started taking pictures here in 1914. The project was astrometry: measuring distance to stars. You see, if you are clever and painstakingly careful -- if you are, most famously, Galileo -- you will notice that throughout the year, stars shift a tiny step in relation to their neighbors. (Orion's shoulder sags a touch. Libra's balance wobbles.) If you measure the steps, and you believe the earth orbits the sun, you can determine the span between your eye and the star. It helps to take pictures. Capture a constellation once, then again exactly six months later, and you can pin down precisely how far a star has walked. And just like that, you know how far it is from your hilltop perch.
The fellows at McCormick Observatory pinned down thousands of stars. They left their logbooks in the museum. See if you can find entries dated and timed. They will run all through the year, all hours of the night. When you spent nights photographing stars, one of the astronomers said, it was a terrific pain to spend days teaching undergraduates. You had to sleep in the observatory, between takes, if you slept at all. Mornings, you had to trudge down a road lined with silk trees (leaves uncurled now), down to the waking world, to students who had never even looked through a telescope.
There was one little comfort up here. That's still there now. That's what you're here to see.
Wind through the backroom of the museum until you see the staircase leading down. Follow it to the door marked "bathroom." Open that softly and flick on the light and you will see, reclining in the corner, a luxuriantly curvaceous, barely-ivory creature with a quartet of perfectly clawed paws: a gorgeous, century-old bathtub.
You should see if the water still runs. If it does, you should close the door quietly and let the tub fill, resuspending grains of dirt left by star-catchers 80 years ago.
Not everyone can do this. Everyone in the world can look at stars. They can even make their own measurements, if they really want. But lucky you, in four years at the University, can go two Fridays a month to marinate in the minds of some of the first people who ever did. You can bathe in the bathtub of someone who calculated your place, relatively speaking, in the universe.
Rachel's column runs biweekly Thursdays. She can be reached at carr@cavalierdaily.com.
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