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By Root 170 0

skies above Alabama, and I could even convince the other kids that it really was the Milky Way they were seeing and not just clouds in the sky as they always seemed to think. Once, I even saw a real comet through binoculars when my father dragged me out of bed one cold winter night in 1973 and drove us to the top of a dark mountain to see what was supposed to be the spectacular Comet Kohoutek but instead looked to me like a shaky little smudge and please could I go back to sleep now? But I was never one of those kids who built his own telescope by grinding mirrors from blanks or who memorized the locations of each of the nebulae hidden among the constellations or, even, who could tell you that the bright light above the just-set sun was, in fact, not an airplane but the planet Venus. I could passionately describe the rings of Saturn, the number of moons of Jupiter, the rocky plains of Mars, and, of course, the icy spires on Pluto, but the fact that these distant worlds were up in the sky above me was never really part of how I thought about them, much like when I think of Antarctica now I think of pictures and descriptions and maps, but I never really think about the fact that if I jumped in a boat, turned south, and started sailing, I would actually end up there.

I did get a telescope for Christmas when I was in the third grade—the seemingly perfect gift for a kid like me—but I could never make it work. My brother was capable of constructing elaborate LEGO structures for any purpose and could make balsa wood airplanes that looked sleek and flew straight and were painted beautifully. I was lucky if my LEGO constructions stayed together and were made of more or less the same colors. My attempts at balsa airplanes usually ended in my deciding that, really, I had meant to make that model of an airplane wreck, and yes, it would be fun to burn the whole thing now. Trying to make the telescope work went little better. I needed to carefully align mirrors and keep the tripod steady and adjust eyepieces, and it never worked. I think I found a single star once—though in retrospect, knowing now what a star should have looked like in such a small telescope, it is entirely possible that I only looked at an out-of-focus streetlight with a shaky telescope.

One night in the late fall when I was fifteen years old, I was awake late enough to find myself looking up at Orion—the one truly familiar part of my winter night sky—and I noticed that something didn’t look right. Orion is full of bright stars that make very clear patterns even for the casual sky glancer: three stars for the belt, a dagger beneath, and a quartet of bright stars outlining the rest of the body. They are among the brightest stars in their region of the sky and nearly impossible not to recognize. And yet somehow, overhead, a little to the left, there was a pair of stars every bit as bright as those of Orion that I didn’t recall ever having seen before. I was not a photographic-memory-star-pattern-recognizing kid and just assumed I had somehow overlooked them, much the way I would also overlook my allegedly lost shoes even when they were right in the middle of the floor in my room. As the months went on, however, the two stars did something extraordinary. They moved! You would have never noticed it in a single night or even in a single week. But over the months, they very slowly crawled closer together. As the winter wore on and moved into spring, the two then moved apart and then around each other in an elaborate dance high overhead, while the remainder of the stars remained fixed in their constellations. I found myself eager to go check on the stars night after night. In the winter, I would have to stay up late before they rose in the sky, but as spring came, the dancing stars were directly overhead as soon as the sun went down.

I didn’t ask or talk to anyone about the moving stars; I just silently kept track. At some point that spring, though, I came across a single-paragraph article in the newspaper describing the once-every-twenty-years close conjunction of the two