Star Points for April, 2004; by Curtis Roelle Leslie Peltier: A stargazer's stargazer Something wonderful is happening with Venus tonight. Later in this article will be details for viewing it and when. Now that spring is here so are spring projects. One of my projects was the addition of a second solar panel for the observatory. Technically, the observatory isn't solar powered; it uses a battery. However, the battery's charge is maintained using energy from the sun. Last year during Mars' very favorable opposition, it was noticed that the battery had all but lost its charge. Several weeks of using the observatory for several hours night after night running the telescope's polar clock drive, powering a video camera, monitor, and VCR used to capture the planet's image had slowly drained the battery. My good friend Tom loaned me a second panel that will help the observatory keep up electrically during times of celestial feast. Solar energy is a fabulous gift from nature. The sun gives its power for free and delivers it in places where electricity is unavailable. There is no bill to pay and, unless your battery fizzles, no unexpected blackouts. In the wake of hurricane Isabel last year our house was out of power for several days but the observatory remained operational. In the late 1980's a new energy technology called "cold fusion" attracted a lot of attention. The idea was that energy could be drawn simply and efficiently from the atoms in a pail of cold water. To be honest I was secretly relieved when science rebuffed the promise of cold fusion. Cold fusion would have decentralized the power industry. I imagined an explosion of lights everywhere in the world where none had been before. Each light pole with its own water filled jar spraying photons without ever ceasing. Power would be cheap and so would the pollution of the night sky with excessively overabundant night time illumination. Mankind's birthright of a star studded sky would be lost forever. This notion of the night sky as a birthright was first expressed by a 20th century amateur astronomer named Leslie Peltier. Peltier was born in the last year of the 19th century on an Ohio farm. Like many of his generation he grew up without electricity in the home. Both sets of my own grandparents were farmers too. Their houses were electricity free until the early 1950's. As you can imagine, for those living on farms in light-less communities the view from the porch at night would be of a sky peppered with so many stars that familiar constellations would be nearly unrecognizable. For many today who have never witnessed such a spectacle, the very idea may seem to be nothing short of fantasy. Yet it did exist and still does in certain parts of the world. In 1905 the child Peltier wandered into the family's darkened kitchen one night with his mother for a drink of water. Outside the kitchen window he noticed a splash of stars and asked his mother what they were. "Those are the Seven Sisters," she told him. "Sometimes they are called the Pleiades." Thus began Peltier's life long passion with the stars. He saw not only Comet Halley in 1910 but also the bright winter comet which came that same year. As a teenager Peltier discovered the library and was soon bringing home book after book about the stars. He used the star charts in them to familiarize himself with the constellations and to learn the names of stars. He earned enough money to purchase his first telescope by picking strawberries at two cents a quart. The $18 mail order refractor telescope had a small lens two inches across. When it arrived he learned that it came without a mounting, so he fashioned one from a used fence post and an old grindstone. Peltier moved up to larger and larger telescopes. His father even helped him build an observatory with a nine foot diameter dome on the farm using simple hand tools. Over the years Peltier discovered 12 comets and six novas. By the time Peltier published his 1966 autobiography "Starlight Nights" he had moved to the outskirts of a small city and was using a 12-inch Alvan Clark refractor, which was built in 1868, inside of a 22 foot dome. Peltier lived until 1980. Later in life he revisited his family's former farm. He noticed that it and most of the other farms nearby had glaring blue mercury vapor yard lamps. Of this experience he wrote that "the stars no longer come to the farm. The farmer has exchanged his birthright in them for the wattage of his all-night sun. His children will never know the blessed dark of night." "To me, April smells like freshly plowed ground," Peltier wrote fondly. This April you can familiarize yourself with the same celestial cluster of stars which first caught his eye as a small child nearly 100 years ago. Tonight (Sunday, April 4) the brilliant planet Venus lies on the eastern edge of Pleiades star cluster. The dazzling planet acts as a white dot laser pointer leading you directly to the cluster. Venus will become visible while twilight is still bright. The cluster will become easier to see after the sky darkens. Use binoculars to get the best view of the cluster. Although it's called "the Seven Sisters" you'll see that it has more than seven stars. How many can you count?