The night we saw Saturn’s rings
When Heloise asked for a telescope last Christmas, I felt both excitement and dread. I loved astronomy as a kid, and one of my uncles had even given me a serious, equatorial mount telescope he was no longer using. It came with a red sun filter that allowed me to see sun spots, a green one for the moon, too. But my interest, unfortunately, also coincided with the opening of highway 640, a few kilometres away, and a brand new off-ramp to our town. One night someone, somewhere, flipped a switch turning on a half-dozen sodium monstrosities… and killed our sky.
The Milky Way disappeared, just like that. Even the Big and Small Dipper (s)—stubborn staples of our Northern Hemisphere—demurred, quietly, and all but faded away.
I never observed much after this.
…
You don’t want your kids to lose that thing that shines inside them once it’s ignited. That’s precious as hell. But I could sense her disappointment growing as the months went by. Space, it turns out, was rarely more than a few blurry dots in an all too small peephole. Sometimes the dots were Jupiter’s moons, sometimes they were a conjunction of planets. But they all looked like dots. Dots, dots, dots.
Last weekend we had a family gathering at my in-laws, and we brought the telescope. The night was clear, and while everyone sat in the darkness around the campfire, hoping for the fleeting trail of a shooting star, I tried to find something, anything, of interest. But it wasn’t working, and Héloïse had given up on me.
I moved to the front of the house, away from everyone. The moon came up, gigantic and much too bright. And then, higher and to the right, above the fields, I spotted it: another dot, but bigger than the surrounding ones. I wasn’t really expecting anything at this point, but I steered the viewfinder in its general direction, twisted the shaky knobs of the cheap tripod until a white blob appeared, and focused.
Saturn. Tiny, sure, but dear god: a perfect sphere surrounded by perfect rings. Just like the books. I went back to the campfire. Moments later, Héloïse was again looking into the eyepiece:
— Whoa!, she said.
— Whoa!, her cousins said.
Finally.
