Twinkling Object

I I’m a quixotic traveler, more drawn to a new place when I’ve been beguiled ahead of time by a story about my destination. That story might come from a novel, or it could be biographical, concerning a singular person who lived in the place or passed through—a widowed queen wandering around the castle, a down-on-his-luck explorer scoping the rapids. Really the more romantic—cliché, even—the better. Why is it, I’ve wondered, that I most enjoy travel when I can tie that kind of tale to it? To me, it seems like a small failing, but a failing all the same, the impulse to lean on a narrative rather than appreciate a place directly.

Last fall this tendency took me to the McDonald Observatory in far West Texas. It was my second visit; the first had come 12 years earlier, when I wrote a magazine article about an experiment there. Back then, I’d come across a sentence in a history of the observatory about an astronomer named Alice Farnsworth. She was a professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts who’d traveled to Fort Davis to visit the observatory in 1941. Farnsworth didn’t have any bearing on my article, but she stuck with me long after I’d forgotten the rest of my research, which is to say certain questions stuck with me. What had it been like to be a female astronomer in 1941 and to travel to such a remote place? What was she working on? How had she been received?

I returned to the McDonald Observatory to look for Farnsworth, though in a sense I knew I wouldn’t find her. When the observatory opened in 1939, it was operated by the University of Chicago, and records from that era—including the telescope log books that might indicate which nights she was observing—are stored at the university. Farnsworth visited the observatory only briefly, on the tail end of a sabbatical