Alone On a Hill
Day after day
Alone on a hill
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still
– Lennon-McCartney, The Fool on the Hill, 1967
It was quiet on the hill. Sitting in the afterglow. Waiting for the comet.
"You look like you are here for more than the sunset," she said. A professional photographer, I guessed? She had arrived in the parking area in a large, squarish, custom camping van, painted an Off-Army green. Just "off" enough to be identified as Not-The-Military, but clearly Not-Fooling-Around either. She wore camouflage but, again, not the I-Shoot-Anything-That-Moves camouflage of the guy in Walmart, but rather the I-Shoot-Wildlife-With-Cameras kind of camouflage. And appropriately enough, her camera had a lens the size of a cannon – "cannon" with two "n's." Not Canon. Although it might have been that too. Together we headed up the trail with our respective gear.
"Yeah, I'm here for one last ditch effort to photograph comet Lemmon," I said. "It's fading fast and starting to get really low in the sky these days. The predictions for clear skies are not looking good for the next week."
She expressed a large dose of skepticism regarding my enterprise, wished me luck, and went off to film the sunset. I was left quite alone. On the hill, waiting for the comet.
"C/2025 A6 Lemmon," as it is officially named, was scheduled to become my second comet sighting, following "C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS" last year. There is something undeniably addictive about comets, for those who are susceptible. Just ask Messier.
The "hook", I think, is the transient nature of comets. They come, they're here, and they go; you snooze, you loose. If the skies are cloudy while you're trying to travel to Bode's Galaxy, well, you can try again tomorrow. Or the next month. Or the next year, decade, or century. There's a certain as certain can be chance it will still be there.
On the other hand, it takes action in the here and now to document a comet. Wait too long and it will have waved good-bye, headed back to the Ort Cloud, or interstellar space, and faded away from sight for the next 76 years, or a millennia. Perhaps forever.
"Lemmon" was never going to be visible from my backyard because I share the sky with a forest of hardwoods – they that block the low western horizon. Therefore, Thursday afternoon I packed up the telescope, along with its sundry groupies, and headed up to Big Meadows in the Shenandoah National Park.
It was about a 45 min drive to reach the park entrance and Skyline Drive, the sliver of asphalt tickling up the spine of the mountains. As I got nearer to Big Meadows I passed a flashing road sign that read:
DEER IN THE ROAD
NEXT 30 MILES
"Well, it's about time!" I thought, reasoning that they must be out protesting in favor of sensible gun control. And for "No Kings," of course. "I'll honk in solidarity as I go by."
Then, of course, I dealt with the alternative interpretation of the sign's warning.
There were no deer in the road, I am pleased to report – they were all up in the meadows – although a vision of legions of deer blocking the road, wearing "Background Checks!" and "No Kings" placards will surely stick with me.
The Meadows are spectacular at sunset. I arrived in time to set up the instruments in the receding light, and avoid losing some small bit of a screw, or a lens cap, into the midnight grass. It would be another 30-40 min before Polaris, our essential beacon of axial alignment, became visible, and so I could simply sit, watch, and admire the view over the valley.
There would only be about an hour between the time it became dark enough to image "Lemmon" and the time at which it would dive below the horizon. With the help of Polaris I trimmed up the telescope, keyed "C/2025 A6 Lemmon" into the console, and pulled back on the throttle as the stars rushed into view.
There it was on the laptop screen: comet "Lemmon" in photons, captured in pixels. Although invisible to my aging eyes, 30 seconds of camera exposure did the trick. I watched, mesmerized, as each exposure lit up the display.
Then shocked! A random StarLink satellite left its greasy streak right across one of the frames. In the beauty of the moment, I had completely forgotten about Musk's skyprints. No respect. Then, a couple of minutes later, a parallel railroad track of red and green lines etched its way across the image, accompanied by a beeping red spot right down the middle. United Airlines on it's way to Dulles Airport. Sadly, these random photobombs went on the entire session.
Such is modern ground-based astrophotography. Tricks of image processing can rid us of these meddlesome aberrations. If Muskdom only sullies 1 out of 10 images, we can stack the 10 images and know to remove the outlier Starlink pixels that are present in only one of them. And, voilà! They're made invisible. (Something you can't do, unfortunately, with the well on the way Trillion Dollar Head-In-A-Cloud CEO.) Still, that's immoral data trespass as far as I am concerned.
I consider trying to organize the deer in support of the cause.
It dawned on me: my toes are nearly frozen.
Fortunately, by this time "Lemmon" was approaching the horizon line and the residual light of civilization was becoming its cloak of invisibility. Enough. I landed the ship and disassembled it into a couple of large duffle bags.
The full moon, now filling the landscape with recycled sunlight, spread shadows out from the feet of vestigial apple trees scattered about the meadow. Several pairs of beady fluorescent eyes peered out of the dark, reflecting the light from my headlamp.
"We really need to talk about organizing!" I said.
The eyes went back to grazing the meadow grasses.
"Okay, think about it. Good-night!" I said, and started down the hill, echoes of Paul and John floating in the air.
But the fool on the hill
sees the sun going down,
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning 'round.