Joe's Reviews > The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers

The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of my research, I wanted to know from a woman what an astrophysicist does, why she wanted to go into this field and what experiences she's had there. A compelling story would have to come from that, a woman in a male-dominated scientific field. On this basis, The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers by Emily Levesque surpassed all my expectations. Published in 2020, I finished this memoir with close to 10,000 words of notes, i.e. material. Here's a sample:

-- The love of astronomy stuck in a way that my love of braces didn't. I was an early and voracious reader, and a few years after Haley's Comet, I was learning about star clusters and black holes and the speed of light thanks to Geoffrey T. Williams' Planetron books, which chronicle the adventures of a little boy with a toy that transforms into a magical spaceship and sweeps him off to explore the heavens. I have a strong memory of being five, reading about how fast the speed of light was, and repeatedly flicking the light switch on and off in my room to convince myself that yep, once I flipped it on, the light arrived pretty much instantly. That seemed pretty fast to me.

Later, I inhaled every astronomy book I could get my hands on, watched Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye on TV, and went to every movie about scientists and space that came along. I remember particularly enjoying the movie Twister because it gave me an encouraging look at what scientists themselves might actually be like. The fictional tornado researchers on screen were doing cool and exciting research and having fun along the way, and the main character was a woman who rolled around in the mud and was obsessed with science but still managed to end the movie with a great kiss (a combination I'd already been warned might not be tenable in the long run thanks to plenty of other movies featuring women who Had to Choose between Careers and Men).



-- My dorm in particular was the stuff of anarchic counterculture geek dreams. When I turned up as a freshman, the residents were busy constructing a gigantic wooden tower that would ultimately stand more than four stories tall. As it turned out, this violated Cambridge building codes, so after a couple of days of climbing all over the thing and hurling water balloons from the top (it was impressively structurally sound; these were MIT engineers building it, after all), the tower was carefully lowered with much fanfare. In the next four years, I'd help my dormmates built giant catapults, human-sized hamster wheels, and even a roller coaster, all purely for entertainment and made primarily out of two-by-fours and optimism. MIT was my first real indication that the road to brilliance sometimes took a few turns that steered well clear of common sense.

Through all of this, I remained convinced that despite my battles with coursework, MIT was the place for me. I wanted to be a professional astronomer, despite having only the vaguest sense of what the job actually entailed. I'd worked out early on that it meant being in school for the long haul--most astronomers I'd heard of had PhDs--and that I'd probably be using some very large telescopes at some point, but the details were unclear. I'd seen astronomers on PBS or in movies and imagined people sitting behind some enormous telescope situated inside a dome so they could ... do something. It looked fun, and I'd liked our backyard telescope, so I filed this away as something I'd surely figure out when the time came.

-- It took just one night of observing for me to get hooked. I loved it. Loved gearing up and heading out into the cold clear autumn nights, loved juggling a log book and old computer and flashlight with frozen fingers, loved climbing a ladder and wrestling one of those fourteen-inch telescopes to point it perfectly toward a star of my choice. I loved the thrill that came when everything was working and I could leap back off the ladder to peer at some brand-new data and my own hastily scribbled notes, all under the dim red lights of the shed. (Many observatories used deep-red lighting at night to help preserve observers' dark-adapted vision).

I have an abiding memory of standing in the November midnight cold, reveling in every perk of my teenaged metabolism as I downed Reese’s peanut butter cups by the handful, and peering through the viewfinder of my telescope at the exact moment that a meteorite went streaking through its field of view from top to bottom. I was pointed at a miniscule area of the sky, and the odds of a meteor passing through that tiny spot at the very moment when I’d pressed my eye to the eyepiece were vanishingly small. I don’t remember crying out or saying anything or even moving. I just stood there, perched on a ladder, eye pointed through the telescope, knowing what I’d just seen.

Yes, I thought. This is a good job.



-- One colleague has lucky observing socks she dons for every run; another swears eating a banana at roughly the same time every afternoon staves off clouds. People have lucky cookies, lucky snacks, even lucky tables in the dining room they’ll sit at before runs. I’ve developed the strict habit of refusing to check the weather until the day of the run itself. I tell myself that this forces me to always plan for a clear and productive evening, but deep down, it’s just as about not jinxing the night as anything else. Some astronomers also seem to have famously bad luck on observing runs. In a few cases, it’s gotten to the point where colleagues on the mountain will groan if they see one of their supposedly cursed colleagues on the schedule, convinced their mere presence will summon clouds or rain or high winds and extend their bad luck to every telescope unlucky enough to be nearby.

-- I’ve disappointed plenty of people who have asked for the name of a random star only to be met with an “um …” or friends who have asked “Hey, what planet is that?” and gotten back “Er … I dunno … Jupiter, probably?” In astronomers’ defense, telescope computers are literally light-years better than we are, combining orbital dynamics and lengthy equations to pinpoint exact sky positions with a precision far exceeding anything we can distinguish with the naked eye. Still, it comes as a surprise to most people that many astronomers can’t really find that much in the naked-eye sky.

-- The 3:00 a.m. haze in particular is what makes music choice utterly critical to observing runs. Almost any astronomer you ask will tell you that playing the right music is a vitally important ingredient for any observing run, to the point that it acquires an almost talismanic quality. Many observers have music that they only play at the telescope or set up playlists matched to the steps of the night. Generally, most observers tend toward more energetic music as the night gets later. Someone who might have queued up Bob Dylan at the start of the night will have moved on to AC/DC by the time the early morning hours roll around.

-- If astronomers as a community were asked to pick a favorite observatory animal, it would likely be the viscacha. Viscachas are relatives of chinchillas but resemble wise rabbit grandfathers with tall ears, long curled tails, sleepy eyes, and long, drooping whiskers. They frequent many Chilean observatories, and their steady presence over the years has alerted astronomers to a funny quirk of these little creatures: they seem to love watching sunsets. They’re always there, always sitting stock-still, and always gazing directly at the sinking sun on the horizon.



Levesque discloses enough about her childhood and her academic and professional career for The Last Stargazers to be considered a memoir, but she also reaches out to a large number of her peers with questions like, Have you ever seen a UFO, or, for women, have you ever been harassed or made uncomfortable by men at work. She looks ahead to where her field is headed and how studying the physical nature of stars is changing. This would be a wonderful book to share with students interested in astrophysics (hint: take as many math classes as you can) or those like me curious about what an astrophysicist does and the adventures they have.

Emily Levesque was born in 1984 and grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts. She received her S.B. in physics from MIT in 2006 and her PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawaii in 2010. She is professor in the University of Washington's astronomy department. Her research focuses on improving our overall understanding of how massive stars evolve and die. She's written two academic books: a professional text on red supergiants and a graduate textbook on stellar interiors and evolution. The Last Stargazers is her first book for everyone. She lives in Seattle, Washington.



Previous reviews in the Year of Women:

-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox

-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
-- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw
-- White Teeth, Zadie Smith
-- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende
-- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion
-- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz
-- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey
-- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone
-- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling