Charlie Stetz came of age at the height of the Space Race. Like so many other kids of his generation, the possibilities of the Apollo missions of the 1960s transfixed him.
Often, at night, he would lie in the yard of his home in the Heights section of Wilkes-Barre, staring at the craters of the moon through the lens of his 40-milimeter sporting goods-store telescope.
It made him wonder about our place in the universe, the infinite possibilities.
All these years later, he still wonders, still searches. Only now, Stetz’s toys are a bit more advanced.
Last year, the 69-year-old fulfilled a longtime goal of building an enclosed observatory on his Waverly Township, Lackawanna County, property, replacing an open-air deck Stetz constantly schlepped his equipment to and from.
“It was a dream to have this. It’s nice to finely get it,” Stetz said as he gave a tour of the observatory on a recent day. “My wife is the one who gave me the kick in the pants to do it. She was like, ‘What are you waiting for?’ ”
Built for about $8,000, the 12-by-12-foot wood and siding structure has a metal roof that manually slides on wheels until it reveals the heavens above. The walls are high enough to keep out nearby light.
A 19-year-old Astro-Physics 6-inch refractor telescope takes up permanent space in the observatory — there’s no heat, but there is electricity — and allows Stetz to see countless amazing things, from the red spot on Jupiter to the rings of Saturn to the Andromeda Galaxy millions of light years away. The telescope, which also cost about $8,000, connects to a computer that helps Stetz with coordinates and positioning, and to a Canon T2i camera that allows him to indulge his love of astrophotography.
Childhood fascination
Stetz was in his mid-teens when he bought his first telescope from a sporting goods store in Wilkes-Barre. It was still a few years from Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, but the vast potential of space travel lit up his young mind.
“I was always thinking in the back of my mind about all the wonders that are really out there in the universe,” said Stetz, who retired from PG Energy and now works part-time at B-Dry System. “How did everything come about? Is there life out there? What’s our role in the whole scheme of things?”
His fascination with astronomy carried into adulthood, and he kept graduating to bigger and better telescopes. At one point, he got the nerve to make his own, even grinding the mirror.
A little more than a decade ago, he joined Lackawanna Astronomical Society, which meets regularly at the Thomas G. Cupillari Observatory in Benton Township.
“They’re a great group of people,” Stetz said. “They helped me a lot through the years, getting tips. There’s so much to learn. I learn something every day. There’s so much I don’t know.”
Stetz stargazes year-round, since some objects only become visible at specific times. A few weeks back, he viewed and took a spiffy photograph of Comet Lovejoy.
“When I took that picture of Lovejoy, when I started it was 10 degrees. When I finished, it was 3,” said Stetz, noting his computer program did a lot of the work that night, allowing him to stay out of the cold.
The moon, Mars and more
He continues to learn and evolve in the realm of astrophotography. While powerful, his telescope can only pick up so much detail, and relatively little color other than gray. But, he said, “What you can’t see with your eye, you can through a photograph and get a lot more detail and color.”
The proof rests in some of the remarkably vivid photos that hang on the walls of his home — among them Comet Hale-Bopp, last seen in 1997 — and take up vast storage on his computer. They include nearly everything from the aurora borealis to sun spot AR-2192 to globular star clusters in the constellation Sagitarius to a shot of Mars from last year, which left Stetz particularly happy even though “it wasn’t very close to Earth.”
The farthest planet he has viewed is Neptune. Among his favorite things to see in the sky are a total eclipse of the moon, and meteor showers.
“What you do is pick one or two objects to observe and photograph, if the conditions are right,” Stetz said. “You observe, and then you put the camera to it, and process it, and then you see the things you couldn’t with your eye. That’s the exciting part.
“It’s never boring. There’s always something new to find.”
Stetz knows his astronomy hobby is an expensive one. But it’s worth it “as long as you enjoy it,” he said.
And, now that Stetz finally has his observatory, he can enjoy it that much more.
“That’s my pride and joy,” he said.