On Urban Astronomy
creative nonfiction by Jonathan Corcoran
The best thing I ever borrowed from the Brooklyn Public Library was a telescope. It was a StarSense Explorer DX 102AZ refractor—words and numbers that meant absolutely nothing to me at the time. I checked it out, hauled the heavy black bag back to my second-floor apartment, hastily assembled the contents, and then spent the bulk of my three-week loan period trying to figure out how to see anything more than the foggy smudge of my fingerprint on the lens.
It was late fall and too cold for my temperature-sensitive body to venture to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where I would have access to the wide-open sky. Instead, I pointed the scope out my living room window toward this little sliver of a spot between the denuded branches of backyard trees and my neighbors’ brownstone roofs. I hoped I’d catch a glimpse of anything—a single star, the moon, the body of a passing airplane. And what fortunate timing–just two days before that telescope was due back to the science desk, by the time I’d finally figured out how to point and focus, Jupiter popped directly into my field of view. I fiddled with the scope and the tripod and then I saw the banded vision of our solar system’s largest gas planet. Jupiter, from my unwashed living room window in Brooklyn!
I grew up in rural West Virginia, where there was so little light pollution that one of my big activities as a teenager was driving down country roads with friends to find a secluded spot to take in the Milky Way. We’d park our cars at the edge of somebody’s farm and lay on the hoods of our clunkers, the metal wet with the night’s dew. We’d name the constellations, and then we’d hallucinate ghosts and aliens until we’d make ourselves so scared that we’d drive giddy and laughing all the way back to town.
I’ve spent more time now living outside of West Virginia than in it, including the last sixteen years in New York (let’s not talk about that layover in New Jersey). During these years of city living, I’ve sometimes noticed the stars and planets or the moon when walking down the street. It’s almost shocking to look up in the middle of Manhattan and realize that any heavenly body can burn bright enough to be visible in our glaring, metropolitan sky. Did you know Venus can compete with the billboards of Times Square? Despite these rare glimpses, I had always assumed that my life in New York meant that my stargazing days were long behind me.
A year before I checked out the telescope, my husband bought me a pair of binoculars for my birthday. It was during the first year of the pandemic when we, like so many others, had turned our eyes to the birds. I needed a big distraction then. It was a scary time, and a lonely one too. My mom passed away just days after the pandemic forced most of New York to shut down, and—an unfortunate coincidence—a few days into my husband and I battling Covid for the first time. We were sick and I couldn’t go back home. I became one of those people that you read about in the news–another body trying to mourn someone they’d loved without the help of a funeral.
Using those binoculars to track all the warblers and ducks and stray hawks proved a great summer and fall activity, an almost spiritual vacation from the woes of the world and the loss of my mother; but as winter approached, when I looked through my binoculars and saw the last of the migrating birds flying to greener pastures, I began to feel the weight of the early, dark night bearing down upon me.
I like to sit at a stool in my kitchen window for a few minutes before bed and think over the day’s events. It was probably November or early December when the last of the migrating birds had gone. I was sitting and looking out across the backyards of my neighbors and then up to their pulled-blind windows and then up further when I saw it. It was Orion. I was certain. Wasn’t that his belt? I grabbed the binoculars and focused. Yes–that was definitely Orion’s belt, and that bright orange blob in his body was certainly Betelgeuse. I downloaded one of those free smartphone apps that uses your GPS and augmented reality to turn your screen into a map. The birds had mostly flown to warmer climes, but I’d become hooked on some new vision.
All my apartment windows face south and even with the leaves on the backyard trees gone, I don’t have much more than a 45 degree slice of the sky. Because of this limited view, I mostly just see Orion on his westward march. But there’s been something wonderful about studying him–about aiming my birding binoculars at the blue and white and orange stars night after night. Sometimes I think I see something new, and sometimes I feel comforted knowing that across the world, in cities and in the countryside, countless others are simultaneously looking up at exactly the same spot in the universe.
It turns out that with the aid of even a fairly cheap pair of binoculars, what you thought was just the blank, Brooklyn sky has a few surprises. There are these little dots, these tiny, gentle stars that come into focus. Some of the dots aren’t even stars. They’re star-forming nebulae or whole galaxies. A secret world reveals itself, but only if you turn all the lights in your apartment off and let your eyes adjust to the darkness.
When I look at the night sky from my apartment window, I am confronted with a few truths. I must have patience. Even though my view of the sky is limited, the stars will come. They appear faithfully, by the seasons, in nearly the exact same spot almost to the day. I know that I must enjoy what I see while I can, because each night, the position of the stars shifts just a little in time and space. There comes a point at which, yes, even Orion, leaves my field of view. When this happens, I know that spring and its promise of renewal are on the way.
In the summer I have verdant nature. In the fall, I have the birds and the flames of changing leaves. It’s only when those leaves drop to the ground that I can once again look out my window and appreciate the night sky, where Betelgeuse and Orion and the faint impressions of entire galaxies await my company.
I put my name back on the waitlist for a telescope at the Brooklyn Public Library. The telescopes, I now know, are popular. According to the library’s website, I am number 91 waiting for one of 9 “copies.” I’m waiting patiently for my turn–for Jupiter, for Saturn, or whatever else the universe plans to put outside my window.
Jonathan Corcoran is the author of the memoir, No Son of Mine (University Press of Kentucky, 2024), and the story collection, The Rope Swing (WVU Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and long-listed for The Story Prize. His essays and stories have been published and anthologized widely, including in Belt Magazine, Salvation South, Still: The Journal, Best Gay Stories, and the Oxford University Press textbook, How Writing Works. Jonathan teaches writing at New York University and in the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College. He was born and raised in a small town in West Virginia and currently resides in Brooklyn.