Night Shift at the Observatory
The log book at Ardnamoine Observatory is a hardback ledger, and by tradition every observer writes the conditions at the start of their shift and something else at the end.
The something else is not specified. That is the whole tradition.
Tomas has been reading backwards through it for four years, on cloudy nights, of which Ardnamoine has an abundance.
22.11.98. Cloud, total. Nothing. Made soup. Soup was the astronomical event of the evening.
04.03.02. Clear, seeing 3/5. Saturn showing well. Rang my brother to tell him. He was asleep. Told him anyway.
17.09.09. Cloud. Cloud. Cloud. Twenty-two years I have been coming up this hill.
He can date the entries by handwriting now without checking. There are eleven observers across sixty years. He knows their moods. He knows that Iain McCall got funnier after 1985 and that whoever wrote through the mid-nineties was going through something and never once said what.
And he knows Ellen.
Ellen Vashti observed at Ardnamoine from 2011 until she died in 2019, which Tomas knows because he looked it up, not because the log says so. The log does not do announcements. Her last entry is:
03.02.19. Cloud, breaking after 2am. Got forty minutes on M42. Worth the drive. Always is.
And then the next page is somebody else's writing, and that is the whole of it.
Ellen's entries are the reason Tomas reads backwards. She wrote to the next person. Nobody else did that.
Whoever's on Thursday — the dome motor sticks at 210°. Give it a shove, don't force it, it's older than both of us.
If you are new: the good thermos is the dented one. The undented one lies about temperature.
To whoever is up here on a bad night reading this instead of working: same. Carry on.
That last one is what got him, in his first winter, at 2am, in cloud, when he was twenty-four and had begun to suspect he had made a serious mistake with his life.
He has read it perhaps three hundred times.
Tonight is cloud. Total, unmoving, forecast to hold.
Tomas does the checks, records the conditions, and settles in with the ledger and the dented thermos. He is up to 2013 in his backwards reading. Ellen, aged whatever she was, complaining elegantly about a grant application.
At 1:40 the cloud breaks.
It is not forecast and it does not last. He gets nineteen minutes.
He does not waste them on anything ambitious. He puts the scope on the Double Cluster, because it is easy and because it is the first thing he ever found on his own, and he looks at it for nineteen minutes with his hands going numb, and then the cloud comes back over like a lid.
At the end of the shift he opens the log.
He writes the conditions. Then he sits for a while with the pen.
He has been writing careful, factual, professional end-notes for four years. Data quality. Equipment issues. The dome motor, which still sticks at 210°, which he still does not force.
He turns to a clean page and writes:
05.11.25. Cloud, breaking 1:40–1:59. Nineteen minutes. Double Cluster, no reason, just wanted to.
Dome motor still sticks. Don't force it. It's older than both of us.
To whoever is up here on a bad night reading this instead of working: same. Carry on.
He closes the ledger and puts it back on the shelf, where it will sit until Thursday, when somebody else comes up the hill.