LOS ANGELES — The summer sunset has painted a vivid watercolor of orange, coral and violet over the Pacific, just past the pier in Seal Beach. But Michael Beckage already has his telescope trained on the moon.
Even in this light, the moon is bright and crystalline, like a salt mine with dimples and ridges. Yet Beckage hardly has a moment to take a peek. Instead, a little girl perches on a stepladder to squint into the eyepiece, a line forming behind her.
“Do you see the holes in the moon?" Beckage says, pointing out the craters. “Do you know what they’re called?"
He tells the little girl to put her eye as close as she can. She cups her hand around the eyepiece and smiles as she takes it all in.
Beckage knows what she’s experiencing. It’s the moment he had as a 10-year-old, when his neighbor called him over to look through a telescope for the first time. He saw the moon, marveling at its contours in such detail — and that ignited a lifelong fascination with all there is to behold in the universe.
“This winds up being the most fulfilling thing I do in life: sharing a telescope," Beckage says. “It’s exciting to see people’s sense of wonder sparked by a telescope. This kid might do something with this."
Beckage comes monthly to this patch of grass between the water and Seal Beach’s Main Street, with its restaurants and bars. He picks a night when conditions are right — the sky clear, the moon visible — and sends out an email blast to local amateur astronomers.
At his “star parties," Beckage and the other amateur astronomers set up their scopes at dusk and stay late into the night. Like Beckage, the others don’t come just to see for themselves but to give anyone who happens by a chance to take a look.
“Very few people have looked through a high-quality telescope," Beckage says. “The feeling of looking through a high-quality telescope is contagious."
So he brings his telescopes to them. With a partner he met at a seminar in Cerritos, Calif., about 10 years ago, he goes to classrooms, nature walks and Girl Scout meetings. During the transit of Venus, he set up in a parking lot at Leisure World, where seniors watched intently for hours as the dot of a planet trudged across the sun’s surface like a snail on a sidewalk.
On this evening, a handful of people have gathered in the Seal Beach park, and Beckage waits for each to have a chance to see the moon. Then, he eases his massive orange telescope a few clicks to the right.
He zooms deeper into the solar system and focuses on the gas giant Saturn three planets away.
“Saturn is a planet that thrills everyone who looks at it!" he says.
It doesn’t take long for the sun to sink below the surf. The moonlight reflects off the ocean and the night sky fills with stars.
It’s unusually chilly for a summer night, but the crowd isn’t deterred. There are families with children, teenagers with their friends, retirees strolling. They notice the telescopes as they pass by, and that’s how Beckage pulls them in.
Throughout the evening, they amble up to his scope, a few at a time.
Many take a peek and move on, but some hang around and ask questions. Some even promise to come back.
Steve Liivoja, 50, is one of those who keep coming back. The Cypress, Calif., resident grew up thinking astronomy was boring. But one day Beckage invited him to look through his telescope, and he was amazed. That was three years ago, and he’s been coming almost every month since.
“I got transformed in one night," Liivoja says.
A cluster of stargazers have made the parties part of their routine, some coming since they started in 2007. Every month they’ll plop down on a single spot for hours on a Saturday night. They know what to look for and even help Beckage explain the images in the scope to the newcomers passing by.
The regulars say they are drawn by the vastness of the universe. It’s humbling, they say. Spiritual, even. Nothing puts things in perspective like seeing Saturn — a planet that could fit 763 Earths inside of it — rendered like a thumbnail-size slide in a View-Master.
“Your ego vanishes here," Liivoja says, “because you’re just a tiny speck in this gargantuan mass."
