ArchivedLogs:The Star that Shines Therein

The Star that Shines Therein
Dramatis Personae Shane, Isra, Sebastian
In Absentia	2013-01-07 An impromptu skywatching session by the lake
Location <XS> Lake
Bright, bright, bright; the lake glitters wide and expansive here, stretching off into the distance. Sunlight, moonlight, starlight, it catches them all. Lapping at the rocky shore, its deep waters are frigid in winter and cool even in summer. A stone pier stretches out a ways into the water, wide and smooth, though often icy in winter. The water teems with life nevertheless, home to myriad species of fish that provide for ample fishing or just lazy watching on a slow summer day, for those who want to take a boat from the boathouse out to the center of the lake, or perhaps lounge on the pier and try their luck. Inside the school it is warm and bright-lit, classes through for the day, extracurriculars through for the day, dinner even finishing by now and students and teachers alike gradually dispersing to wherever they elect to spend their free time. Outside, though, the evening is chill and dark, frigid though the clear winter night means the crescent moon above is brightly visible. In the cold the grounds are not well-populated; the basketball court holds a pair of students braving the cold for one last face-off; the front yard has one boy walking his dog. Down by the lake the shore is quietly abandoned -- or was, until now. A small dark shape is pulling himself out of the water, clawed hands gripping the stone of the pier to drag himself up. Shane's face has been a constant presence in school, today -- if only by dint of the fact that his more studious twin wears it as /he/ diligently attends classes and Shane plays hooky. But classes are over, now! Which means school is safe to return to, and Shane is tugging on clothing from a small heap of things left by the lakeside, not bothering to dry off first before he starts re-layering himself. The high-pressure system lingering in the area guarantees a clear night, and Isra stalks out onto the school grounds, striding easily under the weight of a bulky pack. She walks along the lakeshore, glancing up at the deepening blue of the sky every once in a while. A high point would be ideal, but she would take what she could get. After a bit of deliberating, she settles on a relatively flat stretch of pebbly beach and unslings the pack. As she unstraps the tripod and expands it, her eyes catch movement along the shoreline some distance from her. She stops and straightens up, her eyes discerning the shape in the darkness. "Is that you, Sebastian?" she calls. There is quiet from down the shore, as Shane tugs a baggy Xavier's hoodie over his head and then squints down towards Isra. "Yes," comes the cheerful answer, after a pause to scoop up his shoes and jacket. He tugs the shoes on and scrambles down off the pier and onto the rocky shore, pebbles skittering under his sneakers as he heads towards Isra. "Did you need some help? What's in the bag?" He eyes her bulky pack curiously once he is close enough to make it out. Isra finishes unfolding the tripod and taps on it a few times to seat the spiked feet into the gravel. "Good evening, Sebastian," she says, smiling. She wears a heavy black chador against the chill, pinned at the left shoulder with a silver pin shaped like a stylized bird. "This is my telescope--one of my telescopes, I should say. Until I can get permission to set up the bigger one on the rooftop, I will be using this smaller, portable one." By way of demonstration, she unzips the pack and lifts out a black metal tube about the length of her arm. It is thick, its diameter about a third of its length, and has several mounting brackets on the outside. It looks heavy, but she turns it over in her hands with little effort. "If you could hold the tripod still while I secure this, I would appreciate it." "G'Evening, miss." Shane's smile is quick and bright, a small flash of teeth glinting in the moonlight before he turns his attention to the telescope. "That's the small one?" He sounds amused as he looks at the tube. "How big is the /big/ one?" He crouches as he speaks, examining the tripod and then curling webbed fingers around its legs. His eyes turn upwards, towards the sky. "Is tonight good for -- uh. Telescoping? What are you going to look at?" "My big scope is almost as long as I am tall! Not /quite/, though," Isra replies as she attaches the scope to its mount atop the tripod. "Still, it is not particularly impressive, after you have worked with giant radio telescope arrays. Now, /this/ one is an eight-inch Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope, which is a good compromise between magnification, image clarity, and portability." She gives the knob a final turn, checks the swivel mount, then locks it. "All right, you can let go now." She turns back to the pack and fishes out what looks like a camera bag from the front pocket, unzipping it to reveal eyepieces and a few other less easily-identified accessories. "We have a clear sky tonight, and I was going to look at some nebulae and galaxies, mostly. Is there anything in particular you wanted to see, since you helped me set it up?" "That's -- pretty long," Shane says, after a moment's consideration of both the telescope in front of him and of Isra's height. "Radio telescope arrays?" The hairless ridge of his brow raises in questioning. "How big are -- or, uh, how /strong/ are those?" He is now finally shrugging back into his coat, buttoning it up and rubbing his hands together briskly. His head tips back, looking up again. "Me? I'd like --" he starts. Then stops, frowning slightly. "I don't. Actually know what's up there," he admits, kicking a toe at a pebble to send it skittering away into the water. "What did you come out to see?" Isra considers for a moment, turning an arcane piece of equipment over between her long fingers. "Well, radio telescopes come in all different sizes, from dishes only a few feet wide to ones the size of football fields. Arrays, though, are made up of many individual dishes. They are much more powerful than any single telescope, and the best of them can see things millions of light years away." She attaches the module to the swivel mount and presses a power button on its side, causing a red LED to light up. Retrieving a smartphone from her pocket, she fires up the app that goes with the control module. "There, now we are ready to look at something." She tilts her head and looks at the little blue boy standing before her. "I was just hoping to test out the scope away from all the light and air pollution of the City." Isra enters a set of coordinates into the app and the telescope realigns itself toward the zenith. She bends to look through the eyepiece and makes a few manual adjustments. "There, take a look. That's Jupiter." "What's the farthest thing this can see?" Shane is creeping closer, tipping up onto his toes to peek at the phone as Isra enters coordinates. "You control it with your phone? That's. I mean. Cool." For a moment he just looks skyward with his own two eyes, only leaning down a moment later to peer into the eyepiece. At first he is quiet, looking down, then lifting his head to look back up again without the telescope. Then down again. "What's um --" His fingers flick out vaguely. "Next to it?" "It is a lot more convenient than training the scope by hand," Isra says, indicating the phone. "I can also interface with astrophotography equipment like this, but I didn't bring that tonight. Too much set-up!" She looks through to eyepiece to make sure he was not referring to detritus on the lens or other such artifacts. "Ah, those little dots are Jupiter's largest satellites. It has over sixty others, but most are tiny, much to small for us to pick up with a scope like this one." She refocuses the image slightly and invites the boy to look again. "They're called the Galilean moons, because Galileo Galilei discovered them. The biggest one, Ganymede, is almost twice the size of Earth's moon!" Sebastian is not particularly stealthy in his approach to the lake, jogging down towards the others with a steady thump-squelch of sneakers against slushy ground. "Hey! Shane. /Shane/, you skipped dinner. I saved you some." He has a warm hat tucked down over his ears and his hands tucked into the pockets of his coat, and he pulls one out to wave cheerfully at Isra. "Good evening, Professor! What're you looking at?" He is clapping a hand on his twin's shoulder, resting a chin on the opposite shoulder to peer over it as if that would somehow help him see into the telescope. "/Sixty/ moons? Man. C'mon. Jupiter's just showing /off/. What does --" Shane cuts off, twitch-jerking upright at the sound of Sebastian's voice, ducking his head after a quick glance darted to Isra. His shoulders sink under the clap of hand, a little tenser even as he leans slightly into Sebastian's touch. "I ate," he says, a little irritably. "There's fish." His hand flicks towards the lake. A little less cranky-sullen, he adds, with another glance at the teacher, "-- We're looking at Jupiter. You can see the moons." Isra looks from one brother to the other, then back. "You ought to have told me I got it wrong, Shane," she says, her tone only mildly admonishing. "Did you really suppose I was going to drag you back in by the ear, having set all this up?" She smiles despite herself. "We can count this as your detention for the evening, provided you don't run off again." She addresses Sebastian now, "But yes, we are looking at Jupiter and its moons. The bigger ones are like little planets, very interesting in their own right. I might show slides of them in class tomorrow." Sebastian claps hands over the flat ridges of Shane's ears, sharp chin digging a little harder into the other boy's shoulder. "His ears are hard to get a hold of," he says, his smile a little brighter. "D'you like this?" This time it is addressed to Shane, as his hands drop and he straightens to look towards the night sky. "Cuz you should come to class." Shane's shoulders tense up more once Sebastian has let them go than they did under his digging chin. "I --" he starts, frowning. "-- Some people do. Not, uh, by the ears. But some teachers are assholes." Slowly he is relaxing again, though he looks a little skeptical, not looking back into the telescope yet. He stands aside, instead, to gesture Sebastian forward. He doesn't answer Sebastian's question, though his reluctantly curious, "-- What's the difference between planets and moons?" might answer it for him. "I'm not in her class," sounds a little disgruntled about this fact; it is followed with a quietly hopeful: "Can I be?" "Planets orbit stars, moons orbit planets," Isra explains. "However, modern astronomy only counts an object as a proper 'planet' if it is massive enough to clear away other objects in its orbit and make itself round, like Earth or Jupiter. Objects that orbit stars but are not round and share their orbits, like Pluto or Ceres, are called 'dwarf planets'. There are other, even smaller and less regular objects, like planetoids and comets. There is a lot of stuff out there!" She considers Shane again. "I would have to clear it with the administration to ensure it does not conflict with the rest of your schedule, but I see no reason why you cannot be in my class. I might even be able to get the class some time on one of the /really/ big telescopes." She winks conspiratorially. "I have some friends who work in observatories." Sebastian is watching Shane rather than the telescope until his brother answers; at the curious question he smiles, finally looking down to peer through the eyepiece. "Who has the most moons? Who would /win/ the moon competition? Can you see Mars in this, I've been reading the rover's tweets, /I'm/ going to move there." This last he says with an easy smile. "/Moon/ competition, what is this, which planet's got the biggest --" Shane cuts himself off with a frown, considering, "-- Who /would/ win? I'm voting for Saturn." The last threads of tension are easing away from his posture as his brother speaks, and by the end he grins again, bright and toothy. "Really? Um. Would they. Uh. Let me in? Lots of places -- don't. How did you get into astronomy? Would /you/ move to Mars?" Isra chuckles and replies, "Well, we /would/ be able to see Mars, except the Earth is in the way right now! Unfortunately, Mars is only going to be up during the day for a while. However, there are telescopes all over the world, and we can always get images from places where they /can/ see Mars right now. We don't even have to go there, with the Internet at our disposal! Field trips might be a bit more complicated for a school like this one, but I am sure Professor Xavier could help me work something out. As for moons..." She inclines her head and thinks, adjusting her chador absently. "That is a close call! At last count, Jupiter has 67, beating Saturn by only five. Saturn /does/ have those rings, though. At the moment, we would have a pretty hard time on Mars, or any planet other than Earth, but anything could happen in the future!" "-- Can you see it ever during the day? Sometimes in the day you can see stars. Do you have a favorite --" Sebastian straightens, waving up towards the sky with a mittened hand. "Thing. Up there. To look at. We had a field trip once," he adds, more thoughtful. "Professor Xavier came with us. I think he just makes people -- not notice. Anyway, I'm going to Mars /after/ they start colonizing it. Or. Maybe. Just after they can change /people/ to survive. I bet there's already mutants who could manage!" "Who could manage getting there, or manage living there?" Shane sidles over beside Sebastian, in order to -- slip his hands into the other boy's pockets. Tuck. Maybe they're warmer than his own. "What makes the rings? You can't go live on Mars, anyway, fuck that. /I/ wouldn't go." And clearly Sebastian isn't allowed to leave him on Earth. "Well. Maybe I'd go. If the field trip was to Mars." "Well, yes, you can see Mars around sunset and sunrise even now. Those are not ideal optical conditions, but it is pretty. Please do mind your language, Shane," Isra reminds him evenly. "Remember, this is detention! If we /do/ ever have a field trip to Mars, I will be first to volunteer for chaperone duty! As for my favorite object...wow, there are so many!" Isra pauses and tilts her head back to stare at the night sky, her keen eyes tracking to the tip one of Taurus's horns. "I guess it's probably still the first object I saw through a telescope, which was the Crab Nebula." She fishes the smartphone out of her pocket and enters the coordinates. The scope moves only slightly, since the nebula is only a few degrees away from Jupiter's current position. Looking through the eyepiece, she fine-tunes the view and steps back again. "It's that hazy little cloud in the middle--not much to see through a small scope like this, but that is what's left of a star that /exploded/ almost a thousand years ago!" Sebastian steps back -- slightly -- when Isra finishes adjusting the telescope, nudging Shane towards it instead. He seems unconcerned with the commandeering of his pockets, his own hands curling down to grab one of Shane's, absently rub it before just taking his mittens /off/ and giving them to his brother. "Why's it the Crab Nebula? And when did you -- start. Astronom -- ing. Hey, that's pretty cool. I guess more accurate than trying to just find stuff manually. Do you know where everything is just by heart?" "Oh, right, shi -- uhhh. Sorry," Shane says with a grimace. He eschews mittens, though he seems glad enough for the brief friction-heat until he pulls away to look again. "Guess you never forget your first time," he mutters, half under his breath. His smile grows as he looks through the telescope. "What makes a star /explode/?" "I got my first telescope when I was about your age," Isra replies. "I had found some pictures of nebulae in a book and wanted to see for myself! If I recall correctly, the Earl of Rosse, an astronomer in the 19th century, thought it looked like a crab." She shrugs. "Who knows, maybe it /did/ at the time. That nebula is still getting bigger, like a drop of ink in water. Stars can explode for several reasons, but that one blew up because it was really big, and as it burned it...sort of ran out of energy sustain its own weight. So it collapsed, which heats it up so hot that it exploded--" Isra gestures with her hands, miming a starburst. "--almost like an atomic bomb. Now all that's left is the nebula and the core of the star, which spins /really/ fast...30 times in one second! Oh, and I can calculate the location of some objects, like the Crab Nebula, by heart. Mostly I just look up the coordinates in a database." She holds up the phone with a sheepish smile, then lowers her voice conspiratorially. "Don't tell the other students, though." "What do you think it looks like, now?" Sebastian is quietly nudging Shane out of the way to peek, deciding, "I think it's a jellybean. Jellybean nebula. I'd eat it. Thaaaat sounds dramatic. Stars are pretty epic." He smiles as he stands, touching a finger (or, really, multiple fingers; the webbing makes it hard to fold the rest over individually) to his lips. "I'll keep it on the downlow. Though man if you /could/ remember every star coordinates by heart that'd probably be a superpower all on its own." "Nah, it looks kinda like a disembodied heart. Shit, is this some kind of f-- Er." Shane clamps his teeth shut, wincing and glancing to Isra with a duck of his head. "Sorry. Uh. -- Some kind of Rorschach test? Is our star going to explode?" Isra does her best not to snicker. "I /wish/ I knew them all by heart. Or had a computer in my head to keep track of them. Maybe when I move to Mars..." She does not scold Shane again, since he corrected himself this time. "Don't worry, though, our sun isn't going to explode. It's just not big enough, and doesn't have a companion star to dump more material on it. Even if it could explode, it wouldn't happen for millions and millions of years." She glances at the time on her phone. "It is growing late, though. I should get you two back inside before curfew." "Yeah. And I know /you've/ got homework," Sebastian is saying with an absent poke to Shane's side. "C'mon, I'll help you study. Thanks, Professor!" he chirrups, brightly. "I mean this is interesting. You should join the class, Shane." This seems a little more cajoling than cheery, this time. "Do you need help packing anything in, Professor?" Shane bares his teeth at the mention of homework, looking out towards the lake rather than in towards the school. "Yeah," is all he says, twitching away from the poke with a good deal more irritable tension than he's had while watching the stars. "I guess. Um. Thanks," he offers, abruptly gruffer with his arms tightening in a slow fold over his chest. "Be cool if it exploded. How many people get to see /that/ so close. We'd be the only ones." "I would appreciate some help, if you do not mind," Isra replies as she starts disassembling the scope and handing the boys components to put in the camera bag. "If the sun ever did explode, it would be pretty spectacular...but we wouldn't be around to see it for long, not even if we were living on Mars!" She replaced the lens caps on the scope. "If you could hold that tripod still, please?" She detaches the heavy tube from its mount and eases it back into its carrying case inside the backpack. "I am glad you were able to join me, boys. Once I get the big scope set up, maybe we can make it a regular event? I can show you some other cool things--colliding galaxies, vampire stars, and gigantic black holes!" Sebastian doesn't answer this. He looks to Shane instead to see how the other boy responds. He takes the components in quiet to pack them away as Isra disassembles them. "-- /Vampire/ stars?" is all he asks, curiously. "Yeah, they're never invited to the other stars' dinner parties." Shane holds the tripod still while Sebastian packs parts away, looking upwards as he does. His teeth scrape against his lower lip, not quite chewing but absently fidgeting. "That'd be cool," he decides eventually, with a nonchalant shrug. "You know lots of cool sh-- stuff." "Oh, it's just a silly nickname for stars that pull material away from their companion stars," Isra explains. "They can appear much younger than they actually are, and if they get big enough, they might eventually explode, like the star that formed the Crab Nebula." She collapses the tripod and straps it to the outside of her pack. "Learning cool things is one of the benefits of going to school, you know, and I've been going to school for a pretty long time. If you ever have any questions about science, feel free to ask me. I might not know the answer," she adds, winking, "but I'll probably know how to find out." "Don't say that to me," Sebastian warns with a bright smile, an easy laugh, "I'll totally pester you all the time. C'mon." He tugs at Shane's hand after the tripod has been tucked away, nodding towards the school. "You've got a history test tomorrow. We'll study." He says this like it's a /bribe/. "He will, you know. He wants to be a /doctor/, he eats science like it's candy." Shane frowns at Sebastian's /terrible bribe/, but allows the tugging, starting to follow his twin with a brief glance back at Isra. "-- Yeah. School is good for." But he doesn't finish this thought. His frown remains, and he speeds his steps, crunching over pebbles as he follows after Sebastian. Isra slings the pack over her shoulder and glides up the sloping beach in the children's wake. She makes a not to push her plans for setting up the big scope higher up on the list of priorities. The stars winked and glimmered overhead still, and she cast one last glance at them before the lights from the manor blinded her to them.