Peering through the telescope, heat waves radiating off the Stawamus Chief wiggled the shadows outlining the moon's craters.
"This is actually the worst night," Peter Legere said, looking up toward the sky. "It's good if you want to be moon gazing."
For a month and a half, the Squamish resident has been tracking 2009_P1-GARRADD, a comet discovered in August 2009 by G.J. Garradd. But although the sky was clear the Friday night on Sept. 9, the moon was almost full, determined to choke the stars into a sea of greyness.
Most clear Saturday nights, Legere can be found on the bank beside the Cattermole Slough with a couple of telescopes. He welcomes late-night walkers and astronomy enthusiasts to take in the view through the lens.
Ever since Legere was a boy, he wanted a telescope. His excitement for peering at celestial objects was sparked by his aunt Marion in Nova Scotia. There, Legere would spend his summers at his grandfather's house in a tiny village that didn't have streetlights. His aunt would take him on night walks and point out the constellations Hercules, Ophiuchus, Scorpius.
Later in life, when Legere worked in the high Arctic as a surveyor, he continued to venture out into the darkness and peer at the stars. Legere would lie on the snow in his Ski-Doo suit and let his vision be sucked out into the galaxy.
"It was so silent you could hear them," Legere recalled.
Now retired, Legere has 14 telescopes. Collecting and repairing telescopes has become a hobby. Some are built with databases, which include as many as 40,000 object locations. A few of Legere's salvages have equatorial mounts, an instrument that follows a point in the sky by having an axis parallel to the Earth's rotational axis. That allows those viewing a celestial object to continue looking at it despite the spinning Earth. Legere's largest telescopes take two people to set up.
This Friday night, Legere had brought out two 90-millimetre telescopes.
"You don't have to spend a lot of money on a telescope," Legere said. "All my telescopes give me essentially the same view."
His biggest hindrance is light pollution. The Stawamus Chief blocks much of the illumination from Vancouver, but Legere's viewing spot, beside his house, is adjacent to 14 streetlights. They're old lights, he pointed out, which are not directional like the new ones used today.
"Why do we need to be lighting the sky?" he questioned.
The sky offers a limitless amount of wonder, from asteroids to galaxies to super novas, Legere said, while he darted his laser-pointer from one object to the next. Saturn and its rings are always mind-blowing to see, he added. Then there's the manmade stuff, like space shuttles and satellites. During August, the International Space Station was visible twice every night, Legere noted.
But this night it was the Northern Lights that stole the show.
"I've never seen them in Squamish before," Legere said.
A faint ebbing glow appeared and disappeared above Mount Garibaldi, dancing beams that would have been more visible if it weren't for the competing moon, Legere said.
But still he watched. So did his neighbours, who came into the alleyway after hearing Legere point out the lights to a group of onlookers clustered around the telescopes. There was some "oohing" and "ahhing." And for a while, everybody stood still in the dusk, staring at the night's sky.
For more information or to join Legere email [email protected].
