Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Observatory Night Log
An assistant at a hilltop observatory keeps a nightly log of the telescope's readings, and each time she checks the star charts she finds that a faint star has appeared in the same place, a little brighter, which the astronomers at the university insist does not exist.
- dated: From the first clear night of the winter to the thaw
- narrator: Iris Vane, observatory assistant
- reliability: unreliable
November 3. Clear night. Ran the usual calibration on the twelve-inch refractor and logged the seeing as good, three arcseconds. Star charts all in order. Dr Hale asked me to note any unusual objects in the northern quadrant, which is standard procedure. Nothing to report.
November 9. Found a new point of light in the Cepheus field, faint, about magnitude twelve, sitting between two known stars in the upper corner of the plate. Not on any catalogue. I checked the chart twice. Dr Hale says it is a plate flaw. He says the emulsion has a bubble in it. I agree that it is probably a flaw.
November 15. The point has moved. Not much. Perhaps a fraction of an arcminute to the east, in a line that is almost straight. The chart shows nothing there. I asked Dr Hale whether an asteroid could be that faint. He said it could, but not in that position, and not with that little motion.
November 22. It is brighter. Magnitude eleven now. The light is steady and very white, with a faint blue tinge at the edges, the colour of a gas flame. I sketched it. The sketch looks like a keyhole.
December 1. Dr Hale has stopped joking about the plate. He spent three hours on the telescope last night and came down white-faced, saying he had looked at the point and it had looked back. He said the feeling was like being watched by a very patient student, one who had been taught everything and was waiting to be asked a question.
December 8. Clouds for a week. I spent the afternoons with the old catalogues in the library. In a volume from 1892, a handwritten note in the margin of the northern survey, dated the same month: *Unrecorded star observed by the assistant. Brilliant. Named by the observer: the Listener. Not seen again.*
December 14. Clear night. The point is back. It has moved again and is almost on the edge of the field now, near the meridian. I turned the telescope toward it, very slowly, and the light grew sharp and clean in the eyepiece. And as it did, I heard, through the open dome shutter, a faint sound from the valley below, a voice humming a tune I did not know, very soft and very patient.
December 20. Dr Hale has sent a request to the university for a second instrument. He has also asked me to stop logging the point. I have not stopped. I have started writing it down in a different column, under the heading *Attending*.
January 4. The point has come to the centre of the field. It is very bright now, and it has a faint trail, like a comet's tail, that curls back toward the house where I live. I have seen the trail from my window. Last night, when I went to close the dome, the telescope had been turned by hand to point at my bedroom window, and the eyepiece was warm.
February 9. Thaw. The clouds have come back. Dr Hale has left the observatory and gone to the university to report. I am alone with the instrument. I went up to the dome tonight to see whether the sky had cleared, and found, pinned to the eyepiece by a single brass tack, a small card, in a careful hand. It says: *Thank you for watching. I will be taking the next shift.*