'Seeing in the Dark': A Star-Studded Evening on PBS

Timothy Ferris produced, wrote and narrated "Seeing in the Dark." (By Francis Kenny)

People love to imbue their hobbies with sweeping universal significance. In "Seeing in the Dark," a one-hour film that airs tonight at 8 on PBS, Timothy Ferris presents an ode to the craft of stargazing: telling the story of how he fell in love with his telescope as a boy in the 1950s, of teenage summers in the shadow of Cape Canaveral spent mowing lawns to buy a better telescope, and of the continued fulfillment he derives, now at 63, from casting his eyes into the infinity of space.

If he doesn't make the case for universal significance, stargazing certainly has the universe within its scope.

"You'd be better off to travel around the world a little bit than spend your whole life in your one village and never know anyone beyond the valley," says Ferris. It's the same with stargazing. "It makes for a healthy and happy life to have a look at the wider universe."

Ferris, the author of nearly a dozen popular science books, including the 2002 book on which the film is based, also produced, wrote and narrated the show. The film follows his personal experience with the skies, but his interviews with other devotees (including former Minnesota Vikings star running back Robert Smith -- who knew? -- an avid observer of the heavens) drive the narrative. Still, it is the stunning astrophotography that will make viewers wish they'd invested in a high-definition TV.

Ferris insisted from the beginning that his film be shot in a high-resolution format. And while most people are aware that there are fascinating star clusters, nebulae and galaxies floating about up there, the high-definition astrophotography looks like something out of "Star Wars." Who remembered that our real universe could look that way, too?

The images are almost surreal, but except for a few obvious animations, the only special effects are the quality of the cameras. Ferris credits the images to Rob Gendler, a pioneer in astrophotography. "Most of the great still photos are Rob. Until Rob got interested and pioneered the subject, it just wasn't clear that astrophotography like this was possible," Ferris said.

The film unfolds against a plaintive soundtrack from Mark Knopfler and Guy Fletcher of Dire Straits, evoking bluesy cowboys beneath a star-filled Western sky.

Ferris says that while stargazing has grown in absolute numbers, with more people owning a telescope than ever before, it's hard to say whether it's growing in popularity.

And, while most of science gets less and less accessible to the non-PhD -- ever try sequencing the genome of the squirrels in your backyard? -- astronomy remains a field where amateurs can still make important contributions. Some astronomical events, like gamma ray bursts, may last just a few hours -- sometimes faster than the small professional scientific community can react. And millions of stars need constant monitoring for the loss of radiance that indicates a remote and undiscovered planet has passed.

"It's a matter of time before an amateur discovers an extrasolar planet," said Ferris. He said an amateur hasn't discovered a planet since William Herschel spotted Uranus in the 18th century.

In conjunction with the documentary, PBS is hosting a stargazing Web site: http://www.pbs.org/seeinginthedark. The site has detailed walkthroughs, complete with how-to videos about getting involved in different phases of stargazing. While light pollution has grown, for example, the technology of telescopes has grown more quickly. Using detailed coordinate systems, the backyard astronomer atop Mount Pleasant or Capitol Hill can afford a telescope with a computer that will find dim objects that would have been nearly impossible to find back when people used star charts to hop from one star to the next.

The Seeing in the Dark site even features an "Internet telescope," a high-tech instrument in the middle of New Mexico, from which students can request astrophotos of objects of their choosing. For non-students, there's Google, which, not content mapping the Internet, recently added a searchable map of the stars: http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html.

But the point Ferris hopes to make is that computer pictures don't do the universe justice.

"I hope people get out under the night sky and have a look at the grandeur of nature on a cosmic scale," says Ferris. "It's always nighttime somewhere in the world."

Seeing in the Dark (one hour) premieres tonight at 8 on WMPT (Channel 22) and WETA (Channel 26).