Star Gazing
by Tom Verde

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From nursery rhymes to Shakespeare to popular science fiction, the stars have captivated the minds and imaginations of poets, philosophers, and dreamers, not to mention scientists, for eons.

What is about these cosmic balls of gas and chemicals glittering in the night sky that draws us towards them?

Mahon: "If you accept the current thinking on that...of the universe as a continuity of chemistry and matter...we're connected to the stars and our connection is our chemistry and our bonding and how we're put together."

Phil Mahon runs the Star Hill Inn, an astronomy resort in Sapello, New Mexico, about an hour east of Santa Fe. Though a Mecca for amateur and even some professional astronomers, in search of clear night skies, free from artificial light, Star Hill is open to anyone with a curiosity about or appreciation for the stars.

Mahon: "Astronomy is the kind of hobby that lends itself to pursuit at many levels. You can do it on a level of a lawn chair and just looking up at the night sky or you can be sitting behind the telescope with electronics and computers and recording images and trying to figure out patterns and times that things happen and so on."

With its rustic, yet comfortable cabins and its setting among the rugged ponderosa pines of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the southern Rockies, this 200-acre resort is not unlike other mountain retreats...with the possible exception of the 20-foot high, five-ton, rotating, steel-framed observatory smack in the middle of the grounds.

Mahon: "This telescope and observatory used to live on Mount Evans at over 15,000 feet, Mount Evans in Colorado, and the facility that owned the telescope was upgrading to a larger instrument and Star Hill was contacted by a third party who purchased this instrument and put it here at Star Hill where we use it with our program of guests who come to visit using it."

To give you an idea of how much bang you get for your buck from this baby -- which, incidentally, rents for about $100 an hour, over and above the $80-$140 per night for a room at Star Hill -- the lens can focus in on objects six to seven billion light years away. Now for those of you who don't know what a light year is -- and believe me, I had to ask -- that's the distance light will travel in a year at 186,000 miles per second, roughly six trillion miles. Now, the closest star to planet Earth, with the exception of the sun, is Proximus Centauri, a mere four light years away. Still, neither you nor I, nor anyone else listening to this broadcast is about to get there in our lifetime.

Mahon: "If you were to get on a commercial airliner and fly to Proximus Centauri at four light years away, jet airliners go about five hundred, six hundred miles an hour, it would take you 33 generations to get there."

Though you have to go south of the equator to see Proximus Centauri, the observation deck at Star Hill is the perfect place to view countless other stars and constellations, with the help of several of the Inn's electronically controlled telescopes, much smaller in scale than the one in the observatory. As I mentioned before, you don't have to be an astronomer, amateur or otherwise, to appreciate the night sky here. Viewed with the naked eye, this sparkling canopy stretches from horizon to horizon, as if someone dipped a paintbrush in a can of stars and wiped it across the heavens. Still, there's no experience like one's first glimpse of the moon through a high-powered telescope.

I'll tell you, those craters looked as big as continents, the so-called seas were clear and pronounced while the terminator, the line separating the quarter moon's light from darkness was shadowy and kinda creepy. The moon is an easy target for those new to astronomy because it's so big and bright, but with a little guidance from Mahon, and once you learn how to keep your eyelash out of the lens, it's not so tough to locate some of sky's most stunning formations like Antares, a brilliant diamond-like star in the constellation Scorpius, or the lagoon nebula, a grayish cloud of new stars...new being a relative term, meaning somewhere between ten and twenty thousand years old. Some visitors, like Harald Bardenhagen of Cologne, Germany, travel half way around the world, and stay up all night once they get there, to see such objects in the skies over Star Hill.

Bardenhagen: "It's a very good site for star-gazing because the sky is dark. But this is such a nice sky, it would be a shame to sleep now."

That sure is my heart's desire for a dream vacation...star-studded nights, and sleep all day long.

In Sapeillo, New Mexico, I'm Tom Verde for The Savvy Traveler.