Joe Stefaniak Lives For His STARRY NIGHTS
By Laura Dolce
"One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this.”
Cervantes, The Impossible Dream
Most people move to Orange County for a brighter future: bigger house, better schools, sense of community. And some people come for the darkness.
That was one of the reasons Joe Stefaniak came to Warwick 10 years ago, one of the reasons he built his home on 11 wooded acres far off the main road. Here, he thought, we’ll raise our family. Here, he thought, I’ll see the stars.
When he was a boy growing up in Hohokus, N.J., Joe would lie out on his lawn at night, the cool grass tickling the backs of his legs, and look up at the night sky.
He didn’t know then what he was looking for. He just liked looking at the lights he saw up there. They were so different from the ones he’d see shining into the night sky from the nearby malls in Paramus.
Someday, he thought, I’ll know their names. When Joe was 9, his mother saved S&H greenstamps to buy him a telescope for his birthday. For the first time, he could see those lights up close. And for the first time, he could put names to them: Orion’s Belt, the Milky Way, Pleiades. “I was amazed,” he says. His fascination would grow. While Joe was discovering the night sky in Jersey, other boys were chasing the stars as well. Ray Clyne was in the Bronx, Matt Adams was over in Brooklyn. Both of them were going about the business of growing up. But in between games of stickball and trading baseball cards, when darkness crept over the city and the noise from the streets receded, they would look toward the sky.
Even then, there wasn’t much to see up there. Tall buildings and bright lights dulled much of the view. But still, they kept looking up. Someday, each boy thought, I’ll know what’s up there.
Back in New Jersey, Joe’s exploration of the stars was growing and getting more sophisticated. When he was a teenager, his father bought an 8-inch Schmidt Cassegrain telescope so the family could view Haley’s Comet. That telescope would move with Joe, first to his own home in New Jersey, and then to Orange County, where he and wife Lisa would come in search of a brighter future and darker nights.
* * *
In the beginning, it was good.
“The skies are so much better up here,” Joe says.
In a growing county, work was good, too. Joe was a contractor now, had his own business. He’d build houses by day, put in kitchens, additions. He’d work until he could feel each long working hour in his bones, and then he’d head home. His family was growing. He and his wife had a daughter, then another. His obligations were greater. But still, he tried to find time for the stars. So did Ray and Matt. Both had moved to Orange County as well, Ray to Circleville and Matt to Florida. And both had brought their love of the stars with them.
Then one day, Matt stumbled onto something that would bring all the men together. “I was driving down a road between Chester and Florida and I saw an observatory,” he says. “So I pulled over and knocked on the door.” Matt had found Brian Deis, a fellow star seeker who had built his own observatory on his Chester property. “He said, ‘Come on in!’ and I did,” Matt says.
It turns out Joe would drive by Brian’s house, too. And he, too, would stop. Later, the group would grow to include Ray and a couple dozen other Orange County people who all shared the same love of the stars. They would come to call themselves the Orange County Astronomical Association.
That was 2003, and since then the size of the group has waxed and waned between a dozen and three dozen members. Only about 10 of the members are die-hards, Joe says. Deis himself left a couple of years ago to move to California and become the owner of Vixen North America, a telescope company. Joe is president of the Orange County astronomers now.
The group tries to meet at least once a month, on the Saturday closest to the new moon. They hold what they call star parties, too, inviting groups like the Scouts or anyone who’s interested to get a closer look at the stars.
Along the way, they’ve picked up new members, like Bob Moore, also of Warwick. Bob bought his daughter, Caroline, a telescope for Christmas three years back and from the moment he looked heavenward he was hooked.
Bob grew up in Brooklyn, like Matt, so he knows from big buildings and bright lights. He says Orange County has been the best of both worlds for him - close enough to the city to catch the bright lights of Broadway, but far enough away that you can still find the dark.
And friends who share your passion.
For Bob didn’t just find dark nights and a cool group to learn from in Orange County. He found Joe, Matt and Ray. They had followed the stars and found each other. “It’s a brotherhood,” Bob says.
They speak a language all their own, using words like nebulas and globular clusters without hesitation. They talk of other galaxies with a nonchalance that does nothing to hide their fascination with them.
They are husbands and fathers with a passion for chasing the stars - and the wherewithal to indulge that passion. For while all of them will tell you that you can star-gaze pretty nicely through the lens of an under-$100 telescope, rest assured none of them are using a cheapie.
Bob admits to spending more than $10,000 on equipment last year alone, though he’ll quickly point out that the bulk of that was on the specialized camera he uses for astro-photography, or photographing the stars.
Joe, of course, has gone Bob one better: He’s built his own observatory down the drive from his house, complete with roll-off roof, two mounted telescopes and computer inside. No dome, though. They interfere with the photos he takes, so he purposely left one off his observatory. “Domes look cool, though,” Bob says. Joe pauses. “Yeah, they do,” he says. For Joe, simply looking at the stars isn’t enough any more - he wants to photograph them, too. And to do that you need sophisticated equipment, permanent mounts and computer programs. The camera takes photos with an 8-minute exposure and can sometimes need an hour or more to capture one constellation. But the results are spectacular. “You can’t see colors with the naked eye,” Joe explains. But with the camera, all of the colors explode from the stars. In Joe’s photos, the Horse Head rears up from a fiery red cloud and stars swirl in green and purple clouds. Even simple stars, like M13, inspire poetry. “In the dark skies, it looks like diamonds on black velvet,” Bob says. The men have searched for the best way they can find to see the stars. For some of them, that means braving the cold and the neighbors’ curiosity to set up their scopes in their driveways at night.
Winter, it seems, is a good time to see the stars. “The air is crispest then,” Bob says.
It’s also coldest, and can cause the telescope’s optics to frost up. The amateur astronomers, too. “Some of us die-hards will be out there four or five hours,” Bob says.
And the cold isn’t the only thing Bob has to watch out for. “I use my daughter’s treehouse,” he says, “and I worry about bears creeping up behind me.”
To get the best views, Bob’s worked something out with his neighbors. If they’ll leave their outside lights off, he’ll share his stars with them. “I tell them, ‘When you see the red lights on, come down,’” he says. His neighbors are wonderful, he says, and keep their lights low. And when a new couple moved in and installed new spotlights facing his house, that worked out OK, too. “I invited them over and had them look through the telescope, facing west,” he says. “It was all washed out. Then I pointed it east and it was beautiful.” He pauses, smiling, ready for the punch line. “They asked why it was so different and I said, ‘Those are your lights.’ They fixed the lights.”
As far as astronomy goes, Bob, like Joe, is one of the technology guys - using whatever high-tech gadget he can find to see - and capture - the stars. Matt and Ray, though, are “optics guys,” meaning they use simple telescopes to see the stars with the naked eye. Naturally, there’s a lot of good-natured ribbing that goes on between the men as each asserts that their way is better. “It’s a joy just to find what you can,” says Ray. And sometimes what you see is just as spectacular as the swirls of color in Joe’s photos. “You can pan with binoviewers across the moon and it’s like you were flying,” Matt says. “It’s just incredible.” Does that make the optic guys star purists? “Purists?” Matt laughs. “Purists - yeah, I like that. We’re purists.” Purely missing out, Bob says. “That’s what they see,” he says, pointing to a smudge on the table. “Joe and I see the whole galaxy.”
Ray isn’t impressed with their colors or their galaxies, though. There’s something so simple, so true about seeing the stars with the naked eye that it makes him feel connected to the universe in a way all the technology can’t. And while Joe and Bob might be forward-thinking with all the razzle-dazzle of their equipment, Ray would rather look back. “When I’m out there, I like to think of the old astronomers, like Galileo,” he says. “What they saw ... and their optics were so bad.” “At least they had darkness,” Joe says. The men nod solemnly.
Lights are to astronomers what Kryptonite was to Superman. “You can’t even see the Milky Way from New Jersey,” Joe says.That’s because the lights from all the stores and homes simply outshine the stars. Even looking through a telescope, the lights get in the way. “It’s light pollution from the malls and New York City,” he says. “It blinds the stars.” But more and more people from the city and from Jersey are moving to Orange County - and they’ve brought their lights with them. New stores, new developments all mean more lights. In Orange County, the darkness is slowly slipping away. Already, Joe is feeling the light creep into his nights, his vision of the stars. “I can see the light dome over the hotels toward Chester,” he says. “And I can see the lights from Middletown.” The city is another glow on the horizon, Matt says. And Jersey is, too. But it isn’t only the big population centers that throw too much light. Sometimes, it’s something as simple as the lights from a nearby building being pointed up, toward the sky, instead of down.
One of Joe’s pet peeves is the glow from the spotlights on the town soccer field just a few hundred feet down the road. “Did you see the lights?” he asks the guys as they arrive at his house. “Did you see any soccer players out there?”
Joe says he’s asked the town to douse the lights when the fields aren’t in use. They agreed, he says, but still the lights are shining. “I’m gonna have to call again . . .” he says, shaking his head. Now, the men talk about vacation in the Adirondacks, of driving up to the Catskills, all to find the one thing they thought they had here: the darkness. “There’s a town in Pennsylvania, Cherry Springs,” Bob says. “It’s a dark sky area.” There’s a state park there where astronomers gather to see the stars, and local towns have laws that require lights to be shielded or red, which allow astronomers to see at night.
Joe wishes Orange County could be the same way. He’s tried giving advice to the town, he says, and to different businesses on the right way to install lights and the right kinds of lights to use.
He’s not sure anyone is hearing – or seeing – his point. And he worries about what his girls will see, when they lay back on the grass and look up at the night sky over Orange County. “Ten years ago, there was less development,” he says. “It wasn’t so built up.” He pauses, then quietly finishes his thought. “We’re starting to lose the stars.”