The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers

The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers by Emily Levesque

In the very beginning of The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers (2020), Emily Levesque notes that “of the 7.5 billion people on our planet, fewer than fifty thousand are professional astronomers.” As the title implies, and as Levesque explains toward the end of her book, the number is perhaps more likely to shrink rather than rise. Luckily for us, Levesque is one of that select group, and so is able to fill the pages in between beginning and end with a number of entertaining stories about her own experiences, as well as those of her colleagues, along with giving readers tours of some of the best known and most effective telescopes used by today’s (and yesterday’s) astronomers.

I’ll be honest. Early on, while I was enjoying The Last Stargazers enough, it felt a little flat and light on the science. It opened up engagingly and wittily enough, with Levesque fearing she would be known as the “grad student who killed Subaru,” a massive scope boasting the world’s largest single pane of glass and which costs 47, 000 dollars a night to operate. That sort of self-deprecating wit runs throughout the book, adding some welcome levity and creating a personal, conversational tone throughout. Levesque’s prose also remains consistently straightforward, smooth, and clear, all a must for popular science writers. While I wouldn’t have minded a bit more lyricism (she does a nice job when she aims for it) and maybe more frequent dips into the metaphor pool, her prose style is more than up to the task. That aforementioned tone though, at least for about the first third or so, was for me perhaps a little too conversational, more like a chat around a table rather than worthy on its own of a book. It wasn’t on its own, of course, but the balance between the science and the lighter stories of male astronomers peeing into bottles or tarantulas on doorknobs was just a little off.

Emily Levesque

But Levesque found that balance after a while, bringing in more detailed science (including her own research on red giants) as she moves back and forth in time from her early undergraduate and graduate days as a student and current time. She ranges across geography as well as time, detailing her time on various telescopes in Hawaii (Mauna Kea), Chile (Campanas Observatory), Arizona (Kitt Peak), New Mexico (The Very Large Array) and even up in the atmosphere aboard a flying observatory (unfortunately, she notes, her time “on” the Hubble Space Telescope didn’t mean putting on a space suit and rocketing into outer space). Levesque’s growth in years is paralleled with chapters on advances in astronomical observation, from optical telescope of ever-increasing mirror size to radio telescopes to the very recent use of gravitational waves as yet another way of peering into the universe. The book get meatier with the scientific detail but also in the way it casts a sharp observational eye (would one expect any less?) on the intersection of society and astronomy via the rampant sexism of early years, the low numbers of non-white astronomers, and the issue of lands sacred to their original inhabitants being coopted for scientific research with little involvement of the original people’s descendants.

With the advances in astronomical observation, though, comes a concomitant loss of the personal, human touch. Whether it’s the disappearance of eye pieces (no more bending over a scope, the camera does the observing) to remote viewing (using your laptop to “observe” via a telescope thousands of miles away) to the newest advances in robotic telescopes, where humans are taken out of the observing (but not the analyzing) loop altogether. Each new advance allows for sharper insights into the universe, but as Levesque notes, “we’re also losing the experiences … the hands-on era of observing — this funny little slice of the human endeavor of science — represents a type of scientific adventure that is starting to dwindle.” As bittersweet as that sounds, Levesque is clear-eyed about the benefits outweighing the cost; The Last Stargazers, as she says, is “not meant to be a paean for the ‘good old days,’” and she “looks forward to reading the successor to this book, written thirty years in the future … sharing wild tales about the challenges of wrangling unfathomable quantities of data,” as opposed to stories of falling off observing platforms or of swarms of ladybugs obscuring a lens. I wouldn’t mind if Levesque herself gave us that book.