I look up with not quite dark-adapted eyes and the stars start coming into view. The first hint of dawn is just starting to show in the east on this early, crystal clear January morning. A slight patch of fog lies out in the pasture over by the woods, but that just gives the scene a little character. The night would still rate straight 10s for darkness, transparency, and seeing. (After a few years of living here you just know what the seeing is going to be before you ever uncover the mirror on the scope.) What a beautiful way to begin the new day! What is it about a dark sky that soothes the soul, puts your mind at ease, and makes life more relaxing? Perhaps it just helps to put our universe into a better perspective… Casper, our little poodle who thinks he is a great white hunter, is running around sniffing the paths of all the creatures that passed through our yard in the middle of the night, and finally finds just the right spot to do his thing. I don't think any human will ever truly understand what goes through a dog's mind… While waiting for my small friend to take care of business, my eyes drift upwards again. Looking south Omega Centauri is riding just at the meridian, super bright and easy naked eye. To the north M51 isn't naked eye, but the eye traces to the place where we know it to be lying in wait for our optical glass, almost at the zenith. Just a little to the west the Realm of Galaxies has just passed the zenith and is coming back into a more convenient place for observing. Just a few feet away my new dome looks beautiful in the starlight. It won't be long and the new 42" telescope will be available at a moment's notice for short, spur-of-the-moment observing sessions and I am particularly looking forward to that time. It's almost full moon and moonset wasn't until an hour or so before dawn. The scope was rolled back into the workshop last week, to impatiently wait for the next new moon's observing run. I am a lazy visual observer. I keep no log book. I have never logged the Messiers, let alone the Herschels. I don't plan observing sessions weeks ahead of time. My only goal is to find solace for the mind, and savor whatever sights present themselves. That relaxes me. Whatever the reason, I try not to analyze it too hard. It is just something I enjoy. My astrophotography is limited to an occasional tripod 30 second time exposure to try to capture images to show to non-observing friends. We all have those friends who have never been dark adapted, and have never seen the night sky from a country location free of lights. For years Jeannie and I were just like most other observers: Locked into city life and settling for occasional glimpses of a dark sky from a star party, or those occasional rare nights when the club observing session and a clear night happened to merge together on the same night. Now whenever we feel like it we can just walk outside, and if that mother of all light pollution (the moon) is not in the sky, we can enjoy the night sky the way nature intended us to. Many observing sessions are only a few minutes long, with nothing other than the naked eye from a comfortable seat on the front porch. Sometimes I take the moment to put a recliner out in the yard and grab a pair of binoculars. Once in a while I get out the 6" f/8 Dob that stands ever ready at the shop door for an instant set-up, five minute observing session. During the new-moon periods when the weather looks good, the 36" is rolled out of the shop for a few days. On these occasions we enjoy observing with friends and we always invite a few guests over to share the views with. How we came to our present circumstance of living in the country is still something of a mystery to us. We certainly never planned to move out of our dream home that we had built in Sarasota, 180 miles south of our present location. We had been members of the Chiefland club for 14 years before moving here, and visited this site about four times a year for star parties and long weekend observing sessions. We certainly never dreamt that someday we would be living here, right on the edge of the club observing field. The Beginning. I remember well a homework assignment from somewhere in my long-ago youth. It was a science class–perhaps fourth grade–and we had to go outside that night to see the Milky Way, because the class was going to learn about it the next day. That night I stood under a tree to shade my eyes from the street lights in our surburban neighborhood on the southeast side of Dayton, Ohio. With my mother standing guard, I escaped the bonds of Earth for the first time. Often it seems like I have remained a space cadet ever since. It's strange that a person can remember a teacher's voice, almost word for word, telling us how to see it and what to look for, and that was about 45 years ago. Very few of today's children will ever receive a homework assignment like that one. The Milky Way is no longer visible from the cities in today's light-polluted world. I hear the same story nearly every new moon observing session when newcomers look at our Chiefland sky and marvel at how much of the universe they can see with their naked eye. A common statement is, "Gee, I never noticed the sky like this from home!" No kidding… The Past. The story is the pretty standard astronomer's tale from one's first realization that there was more to the universe than life on Earth. You've heard it many times. The little refractor came first. Then a slightly bigger scope. Then life got in the way and it was on to getting married, earning a living, and growing up. Then eventually the universe's strange enchanted call starts to be heard again. First another scope, then a bigger one, then our paths spread out in a galaxy of different directions. I believe that once the seriousness of life's needs have been met, we all revert to childhood a little as we age. You've read my story, and a few hundred others, in these pages, not only in our Star People column, but in many other articles in the last ten years of AA. These stories are the same–but with different twists. I never wanted to live at a dark sky site while still working for a living. I just couldn't imagine spending an hour in the morning and another hour at night commuting to work. Add up all those wasted hours sitting in a car while cussing at the traffic, and it would be the equivalent of one month per year of your life gone. I liked my six minute drive to work and was willing to put up with the tortured astronomers life of trying to cram all observing into a few precious moments– an evening here, a weekend there, and once in a while a big week-long star party. We had built our dream home 14 years earlier in Sarasota, and had no intentions of ever moving again. Well, just remember the title to one James Bond movie, Never Say Never Again. As we progress with living our life, over time what used to be so important sometimes becomes less important. Dreams change. Reality has a way of evolving as we age. The Present. I hear all the time from both readers and visitors to our place what a nice lifestyle we live. We have now wintered in Chiefland for over four years and spend much of the other half of the year traveling around this great country of ours in an RV. I usually joke around that we are just Chiefland trailer trash and star party bums. Still, inquiries regularly come in from those who would like to do something similar themselves. Many of our readers are near our age and contemplating their soon-to-come retirement, and thinking about moving to a dark-sky site and building an observatory. The facts are that we did not spend any time planning it, it just happened. I mentioned in the last issue (#38 page 42) that we lay all the blame on the Newtons. The truth is we were just out looking at mobile homes with Jack and Alice when we walked into one model home that had a living room that was about 20x30'. Wow! Things had changed in the last twenty or so years since I last looked at modular homes. Today they are built to the same specifications as site-built houses. My in-laws live in a retirement community of mobile homes, and it fits their life style very nicely. We had occasionally thought that someday we would downsize our house as we became older and wanted a place that was easier to take care of. It wasn't long before the calculator came out and started producing figures on just how much it cost to live in our dream home–the home we were only in six months of the year. Between taxes, insurance, and the cost of the principal tied up in the place, the numbers said that our retirement income would go up by over $20,000 a year! That translates to $3,333 per month when you consider that we were only there for half the year. Then think of all the work that was required to maintain the house. The six months that we were there seemed to be spent mostly working on the house and grounds. Hey, everyone has the dream of living in a big beautiful house. I wonder how many stop to figure out the cost, and to consider if it is really worth devoting so much of your life to? Our blueprint for the near future started changing. We now live as maintenance free a lifestyle as possible. The time we spend here is spent resting and relaxing, doing what we want to do, and not working on chores any more than necessary! As in everything in life, what was important at one time sometimes transforms into new ideas. Let's cover some of the pros and cons of what we have learned since moving out to the "boonies". Pro's of country living. I think that the biggest surprise came from the peace and quiet of being out of the city. Now a lot of time is time sitting on the front porch and just relaxing. Who ever heard of a front porch in the city–at least in any house built in the last fifty years? It's quiet out here. Except for the occasional barking dogs and howling coyotes at night, it is a much more peaceful existence than what city folk are used to. We have a lot of visitors come to Chiefland for observing runs, and the one thing that we always hear is how "quiet it is here." County living is far less expensive than city living. We didn't know it at the time, but were delighted to find many expenses are cut in half. Auto insurance rates were cut in half. I guess there's not as many other cars to run into. Phone service rates were also half price. I can't figure that one out as it seems that since the houses are so much farther apart one would think it should cost more. The style of home you desire is a very personal choice. We have downsized to what is for us a very comfortable house, a dream workshop, and of course the observatory, all on a five acre lot. The whole package cost less than half of what our city house did, and we have room for all the toys a person could want. Everything is designed to be as maintenance-free as possible, so we can spend our time enjoying life instead of working on the house and yard. Time we used to spend on yard work is now spent playing with the telescopes, or fine tuning my golf swing, riding a motorcycle, and puttering around in the workshop, building this or that. Every time we drive into cities while on our trips, or drive the 40 miles into Gainesville for some serious shopping, I am reminded how bad city traffic is, and we wonder how we ever put up with it. I can't believe how all those people are trying to do 80 mph in a 55 mph zone, and do it while tailgating everyone else. Don't they realize what will happen when something goes wrong? We hear enough about them on the news, "There was an eighty car pileup in…" For us in Chiefland, a traffic jam is when you see another car at the four-way-stop while driving into town. I've been involved in five traffic accidents in my lifetime, and will be quite satisfied to not have any more. Of course your observing style changes. Before, an astronomer had to hope and pray to have an occasional clear night during new moon club observing sessions. Now there are more clear nights than you can shake a scope at. It's amazing how many clear nights there are that you never noticed before because you weren't in a place where you could take advantage of them. Today our observing sessions are not mad-dash all night marathons–but more like a few hours at a time when it's convenient and only when the sky is really clear. Con's of country living. I remember vividly a phone conversation with Jim Riffle of Astroworks years ago. I was fantasizing about living on a mountain top at 10,000' building telescopes all day and observing every night, just like Jim did in Cloudcroft, NM. He was complaining about the fact that there wasn't a decent restaurant within miles. You just can't have it all. In Chiefland we have a couple of small restaurants that aren't too bad, but for a really good dinner it takes a one-hour trip into Gainesville. We just combine such trips to include shopping at the Mall, Home Depot, and all the other big places you don't have in a small town, and usually make an afternoon of it. If you are still a working person, unless you are self-employed you can just about forget finding a good job in the country. You will be stuck commuting into town for gainful employment. I remember asking my father when I was 13 years old why people lived in cities. He said, "Because that's where all the jobs are." My next question was to ask why they didn't put the jobs someplace nice. The answer to that one was just a dirty look. That's still a great mystery in my book. If you want the darkest skies, you are going to be far from civilization and probably have miles of dirt roads to contend with. Dirt roads were the biggest bugaboo about living in Chiefland when we first moved here. The cars were always filthy and it seemed as if I had to be constantly washing them–and our dirt road was only a half-mile long. And the dust didn't confine itself to the cars, it floated across the telescope field and into our telescopes and homes. Today our road is paved, thanks to the combined effort of the village neighbors, and our world has been cleaned up. That was important to us, but I'm sure to many who have lived their whole lives in such places, would wonder why I would even mention such a thing. Another disadvantage of living far out in the country is that no matter what, we all have to eat. If not at a restaurant, at least there has to be a decent, affordable grocery store within easy reach. In Chiefland we have the Super Wal Mart eight miles away, but in many other places where we spent time in our motorhome, we weren't so fortunate. Check that out before you fall in love with a country place you are considering retiring to. Also, find out where the appliance repairmen come from. It's a real pain when you find out they don't service your area, except for "a week from next Thursday." Do you spend a lot of time on the internet? Unless you are willing to pay three times the price for a satellite internet feed, be prepared for a horribly slow and frustrating phone connection. Mine is 26K–virtually unusable except for the very basics. There are no cable or DSL lines available. There is no perfect place anywhere in the world. There is dew in the East, and dust in the West, and light pollution almost everywhere. Transparent mountain skies usually suffer bad seeing, while in the more humid East we have lower transparency but marvelous seeing. Both kinds of observing have their advantages. I've had great views from mountain tops in the west, and from the empty semi-desert center of Australia. I have also had some of my finest, most memorial views, right here in my yard. If you want to live far enough out from the masses to have perfect skies, you are going to have to be willing to live without some of life's necessities–like decent shopping within a reasonable commute, and the other services we have come to expect from living in the city. Astronomy Villages are something new. For years there have been astronomy vacations for the working people. These include all the week-long star parties, as well as astronomy orientated resorts such as the Star Hill Inn, New Mexico Skies, Vega-Bray Observatory, just to name a few. Many astronomy clubs have purchased land for their observing needs and to have a common place where their members could build observatories and observing pads. Now the newest thing is astronomy villages– places where astronomers can actually live. Chiefland started in 1985 as a dark sky observing site where all the property was purchased by astronomers to help control nighttime lighting, and now 20 families have purchased property for retirement homes. We are all different people, with different wants, desires, and different opinions of what the perfect place should be. However, when all your neighbors have moved from other places to where we are for a specific reason, we all have something very basic in common, and that makes for good neighbors. Most people in the cities and suburbs don't even know their neighbors' names. Imagine knowing all of them for several blocks around–and they are all your best friends! Another 100 club members don't own property here, but come for weekends and the occasional one or two week-long observing trips as often as they can get away. We also welcome guests who call ahead who want to experience Chiefland before joining. We have covered several of the Chiefland star parties in past issues. The skies are not perfect, as can easily be seen on partly cloudy nights. Light piping from major population centers can easily be seen from 100 miles away, and we are only seven miles south of the town of Chiefland. Although it only has a population of 2000, it is slowly growing, as everyplace is. Chiefland's light dome wipes out everything in the north under Polaris. Our south and west skies are excellent, but in the east distant light domes reach 15˚ high from Gainesville (40 miles), Ocala (60 miles) and even Orlando at over 100 miles. On clear nights they are near invisible and on the best nights we would swear we were the only people on the planet. Those are the nights when memories are made. Of course it goes without saying that there are no lights visible during new moon observing periods in the CAV. The neighbors all have dim red porch lights, on their homes and observatories, and house windows are darked out. Even the neighbors who are not observers co-operate with our dark-out efforts. The one fellow who does have a security light that is visible from a couple of places in the village will turn it off when asked. The Observatories of Ft. Davis, in AA #32, told about an astronomy community near Ft. Davis, TX. Many astronomers have retired and moved to this area that is similar to an astronomy village. There is no club that I know of, and no community observing field, but you can learn about the area when attending the Texas Star Party every May. Another new place that is just getting started is the Arizona Sky Village, formed by former Chieflanders Jack and Alice Newton. There will be 80 lots in the new subdivision, and many have already had deposits placed on them. I have often wondered why there has never been a major star party in Arizona. They have some of the clearest skies in the US. Hopefully in the future they will build a facility for such an event at the ASV. Amateur Astronomy will write an article on the ASV as soon as construction has gotten under way and there are homes and observatories to take photos of. (For a first look, see the cover and the Gallery on page 62.) We feel that living in an astronomy village has greatly enhanced our retirement years. If the number of inquiries we get about Chiefland provides us with an insight into a future trend, there should be more of these astronomy meccas and retirement places opening up in the coming years. Living on the edge of the club observing field fits somewhere in between the pro and con fields above. Most of the time it is a joy, like continually living at a star party. There are astronomers to chat with during the day, and observers to share the night sky with. We have also made many friends from visitors who come to Chiefland. The down side is from visitors who drop in unannounced at an inconvenient time. We love having visitors, but please phone ahead so we can plan to visit with you. Conclusion. What astronomer hasn't dreamed of being able to live where the skies are dark right in his own yard. Who hasn't imagined a beautiful observatory right outside your door, awaiting your presence with just a moments notice, every clear night of the year. By the time you read this, hopefully the new 42" should be up and running, and it will just take a couple of minutes to get ready for an observing session that may last for a few minutes or for hours. There are clocks in the dome, but on the good nights no one ever looks at them. Happiness is what you make of it. Success is when you can wake up in the morning, have a leisurely breakfast, check the weather, check the email, and then decide what you would like to do that day. Occasionally but not often, I turn on the news to see what is happening in the world. Most of the time I just quickly turn it back off and head for the front porch. Life is just too short to listen to much of what the newscasters pass off as news. From that quiet place the morning sun warms the body and the soul, while later on the warmer part of the day is spent in cool shade. The birds are especially active in the morning, and the bird feeders and the bird bath are busy places. Hummingbirds seem to come by just for your entertainment, and to share with you their joy of life. Neighbors drop in for a friendly chat about observing, telescopes, observatories, or nothing in particular–just to enjoy each other's company. Trading the fast paced city life for the slower paced country life has worked for us. At first we wondered if boredom would eventually set in. No way! We try not to think about world problems too much. The biggest problem we like to concern ourselves with is to where to head during the next travel season, and which star parties to go to this year. We look forward to meeting you at one place or the other. Tom Clark 2002