During summers as grade school students in Woodland Hills, Calif., Dr. Steven Reeder and his brothers would set up cots in their backyard and sleep beneath the stars, gazing at the cosmos.
“We'd fall asleep gazing upward, using binoculars and just the naked eye,” recalls Dr. Reeder, who currently practices family medicine in Mesa, Ariz.
Despite his longtime fascination with the night sky—including long-standing subscriptions to the magazines “Sky and Telescope” and “Astronomy”—he didn't seriously start the hobby until 1991, when he volunteered to teach content required for an astronomy merit badge to a local Boy Scout troop.
“One year, we took the scouts to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff [Ariz.], the site where Pluto was discovered,” he said. “We had a great time with that old telescope.”
Before long, he bought his first gadget for stargazing: a 4-inch reflector telescope.
“You couldn't see much with it, but I could see the rings around Saturn,” said Dr. Reeder, who is a former Boy Scout but never earned the astronomy merit badge.
In 1999, he acquired an 8-inch telescope, which is now the smallest in his collection. “It was computer driven, so it was much easier to find things and look at stars that had exploded, as well as distant and close galaxies, and nebula,” he said.
Determined to “see” even better, Dr. Reeder designed and built an observatory in his backyard in the summer of 2007.
The observatory “resembles a playhouse—a requirement of my psychologist wife—but it functions quite nicely to keep the weather out and the equipment safe,” he said.
The equipment includes a computer-driven 14-inch Celestron telescope on a German equatorial mount.
The device “is like a built-in planetarium, so if you fix on a couple of stars, the computer then sets up like an observatory. You can tell it to focus on Orion or wherever, and it will go right there,” he said.
One night, he hosted a group of 50 Boy Scouts, which was “a little hectic,” he said. “They were more interested in the telescope's laser pointer than in the celestial sights.”
These days, he spends about 1 night a week in the observatory gazing at the sky, drawn by what he described as “the grandeur of it all.”
Stargazing “provides a feeling of how much God has created out there,” he said. “It's a sense of the divine, something much greater than us. It is a remarkable thing.”
Dr. Reeder went on to note that when a person travels to remote areas and view the stars clearly, “your thoughts generally turn to things of divine character, and you wonder if there are other civilizations. Then you go into the city and man-made light blocks all that out. It's almost like a metaphor for our time. Our technology takes away some of the good and divine thought that we all have when we're out in Mother Nature.”
One event he observed from his backyard perch was the explosion of the comet Tuttle in October 2007. The comet “was in the northern part of the sky and it suddenly fell apart and gave a gorgeous view in the telescope, this nice little ball of snow and ice and rock,” Dr. Reeder said.
One highlight Dr. Reeder saw came in 2001, before he built his observatory, when Mars and the Earth reached the closest points in their respective orbits. “That was a wonderful sight,” he said.
Dr. Reeder's youngest son, who is now 21 years old, shares his interest in all things astronomy, but his wife sometimes calls herself an “astronomy widow,” he said. “She's good-natured about it. She says that unless she sees somebody waving back at her, she's not really interested.”
As a dedicated astronomy buff, Dr. Steven Reeder spends about 1 night a week in his backyard observatory.
Dr. Reeder photographed the Sombrero galaxy using his telescopic equipment. Photos courtesy Dr. Steven Reeder
A Breathtaking Night Under the Stars Is Remembered
The first time I went to summer camp as a child, I earned a badge for the constellations. And to this day, I could probably still distinguish Auriga from Lepus, if only I could see them.
You see, from a stargazing perspective, I am unfortunate enough to live near Los Angeles, where the night sky is orange thanks to the smog. And if by chance I see anything that resembles a star, it's probably an airplane.
Truth be told, this isn't really a problem anymore, since my stargazing is sadly limited to a forlorn glance at the sky while unloading groceries from my car. But there was a time when I saw the night sky in its formidable splendor. That was back in the early 1990s when I attended medical school at Loma Linda (Calif.) University.