Our Super Bowl

“The Texas Star Party is run by volunteers from astronomy clubs in Dallas, Houston and Austin with support from the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory 16 miles away. For many amateurs, the event is their Super Bowl.”

—The New York Times

In many ways, the Texas Star Party—at least for our family—is like the Super Bowl. On Saturday, the eve of TSP, Mom spends the afternoon baking cookies in the shape of Omega Centauri, while Uncle Jake and his girlfriend Ginny do nitrous honks under the van and listen to early Jean-Michel Jarre. Jake and Ginny know their constellations, but to me it’s almost an insult to the institution of space when people have to get trashed on gas to enjoy it. Sometimes Uncle Jake will get so emotional that he’ll eat all the seven-layer dip after disputing the apparent magnitude of a mumbled galaxy in the Hercules Cluster.

Once we’ve bought the Newtonian reflector telescope (only to return it to the Space Shack on Monday), secured an equatorial mount, begged the star map out of hock and stolen a beer keg, we’ll all watch NOVA dupes on VHS, eat weenies and drink until we’re overcome with oaf sleep. Most of us wake up early on Sunday morning, when my grandmother will make some noise about going to church. Dad indicates he isn’t bullish on this by stumbling into the living room, urinating in the fish tank and going back to sleep outside in the bushes.

“He is the worst kind of Presbyterian,” Grandma will say. Nana thinks space is immoral. Sometimes it feels like Nana is light years away, like a star that's long since degenerated. A white dwarf indeed, Nana also lives in her underwear, which is one reason we never take her to the Star Party. But the Star Party isn’t for everyone. A lot of people bristle at the violence in space: blinding supernovas, black holes, hot gas explosions, fistfights and butt-chugging are all a part of the experience, and that’s just here on Earth. However, on the unforgiving field of firmament, it’s a ferocious fight to the death. And it’s beautiful.

As night falls and the first inclination of extraterrestrial commotion begins to rattle our lens caps and weaken our knees, the Star Party has the feeling of a cosmic kickoff. Everybody crowds in front of the telescope at once and it tumps over and for the first hour and a half of night, it’s bickering, the tinkling of baffles and counter cells and curses from my sisters, who’d planned to gaze at the Gary Constellation (A new constellation, Gary is a seventeen-year old eighth grader from Laredo, who my sisters plan to disrobe under 100x magnification). Dad will insinuate us all into another family’s Star Party spread and it will feel awkward, especially when Ginny and Kevin are caught making out during a triple conjunction planetary alignment.

Then there’s my brother Dale. He’s always got to be different. He doesn’t even pick a constellation to root for. Dale fancies himself a pre-Copernican and spends most of the Star Party just staring at the ground until he’s seized with vertigo and goes to sleep on some rocks. He’s too cool for something as “commercial” as the Star Party or even flushing the toilet, but he’s not too cool to work for free as a stock boy at All Things Celtic. The hypocrisy is deafening.

Embarrassed that her Omega Centauri cookies have been overshadowed by a passing Cessna that my Uncle Jake has identified as “a rogue meteoroid,” Mom will weep stoically under the shadows of the night sky, as some of the partygoers make their escape toward the observatory’s gift shop, a daunting sixteen miles away. There's often a good sale on moon maps.

But, as calm returns and Jake is locked in a cooler, the game in the sky hits its stride, and all of us on Earth fall into our lawn chairs, or somebody else’s. The endless stream of amateur astronomers all have something to say about the intergalactic game, even arguing over the best of the pulsar commercials emanating from light years away. Dad will bark at the Moon (the interstellar equivalent of coming to a party with a lampshade on your head) inanities almost too much to bear.

“You’re no Io!” he’ll bark, giving our lunar neighbor the finger. It takes a real sense of grandiosity to make threatening gestures at a satellite, but Dad has always dreamed big.

“I could have been the next Johannes Kepler,” he’ll say, resting his head on his lucky gyroscope. Dad’ll pretend he remembers everything, but when Monday comes, it’s “How about that Saturn!” and we all share in a chuckle of shame. Everybody knows Saturn can’t win for shit in the playoffs.