Occultation
The following entries are from a spiral-bound observing log found in a roll-off observatory shed on a property outside Antelope Flat, Oregon. The log belonged to Desmond Achterberg, 71, a retired hydrologist. His niece transcribed it and asked us to share it. She has added one note at the end. Times are Pacific; technical shorthand has been lightly expanded.
Aug 3. Clear, steady, no wind. Seeing 4/5. Lunar graze of a 7th-mag star at 23:41:08, timed by video, sent to the occultation group. Lovely clean disappearance. This is what I moved out here for. Forty miles to the nearest streetlight. When the Milky Way rises over the rim it throws a shadow.
Aug 9. Clear. No scheduled events. Spent the night on M31 and the Veil. Note for later: about 01:10 I was sweeping the field just east of Altair with the 10x50s and a star blinked. Clean, like an occultation. Off about two seconds, then back. No Moon in that part of the sky, nothing on the predictions list. Satellite, probably. Something dark and tumbling. Noted it because I note everything.
Aug 10. Same field, same time, out of curiosity. At 01:12 a 6th-mag star I don’t know the name of went out for about three seconds. Then a second star a degree south of it went out, two seconds. Then back. I’ve never seen a satellite do that. Too slow, wrong shape of path. A dark balloon, maybe, very high. Asked on the group list. Someone said “space junk,” someone said “birds.” It’s August, it’s 3 a.m. There are no birds.
Aug 14. I set up the video camera on the 8-inch and let it run on the Altair field from midnight to three. Went to bed. In the morning I went through the footage frame by frame. Fourteen stars blinked out during the run. I plotted them on a chart. They aren’t random. Each one went dark for a few seconds and came back, and the ones that went dark at the same moment form a line, and the line moves. It’s like watching a cutout slide across a lit window.
Aug 15. Couldn’t sleep. Ran the camera again on a wider field. Thirty-one blinks. I plotted all of them and joined the ones that were dark at the same time, and I have the shape of whatever is passing in front of them.
I want to describe it as plainly as I can. It’s tall. Much taller than it is wide. Narrow at the top. Broad in what I’d call the shoulders. I am aware that I am an old man alone in the desert drawing a figure in a field of stars, and I know what the mind does with dots. I’ve drawn it three times from the raw numbers and gotten the same thing.
It is standing up.
Aug 16. Called Hal Mendoza in Bend, the only other person in the occultation group within a hundred miles, and asked him to point at the same field tonight. Didn’t tell him why. Hal is very reliable and very boring and I mean that as a compliment.
Aug 17. Hal saw nothing. His footage is clean. Same field, same time, sixty miles away. Not a single unpredicted blink. He was nice about it.
If it’s something in space it should be visible from Bend. It isn’t. So either I have a fault in my equipment that also affects my binoculars and my own eyes, or the thing is close. Much closer than space. Close enough that sixty miles of parallax puts it in an entirely different part of the sky. Or out of the sky.
Aug 19. Math, done on the kitchen table: if Hal can’t see it at all, and I see it near Altair, it’s within, at most, a few miles of here. And if it’s a few miles away and covers that much sky, it is very large. Hundreds of feet. Standing up.
There’s nothing out there. I’ve driven every road within ten miles. It’s sagebrush and rimrock and one dead windmill.
Aug 22. It’s grown.
I don’t mean it’s growing. I mean the patch of blinking stars is wider than last week by about a third. The simplest explanation is that it is the same size and nearer.
Aug 23. Clouded out. I sat on the porch anyway. Around 1 a.m. the coyotes stopped all at once, mid-yip, the way they do when a truck comes. No truck came.
Aug 25. I’m going to state what I’ve measured so that if I’m wrong it’s on paper and if I’m right it’s also on paper. Angular height of the occulted region tonight: about nineteen degrees. On Aug 15 it was nine. It has roughly doubled in ten days. If its true size hasn’t changed, it is half as far away as it was.
It’s in the east. It’s always in the east, at the same hour. Low over the rim. It doesn’t cross the sky as the stars do. The stars move behind it, and it stays. Which means it’s not up there. It’s down here, standing on the ground, between me and the sky. And it’s coming in.
Aug 26. Dropped by the general store in Antelope. Asked Lorna at the counter whether anybody east of the highway had noticed anything. Lights, livestock trouble. She said the Reyes family lost their dog, but dogs go after coyotes. She asked if I was sleeping. I said yes.
Aug 28. Tonight I tried to see it directly. No telescope, no camera. I went out at 1 a.m. and stood by the shed and let my eyes adjust for forty minutes and looked east.
You can see it. You have to know where. It’s not black, not exactly. It’s an absence. There’s the rim, there are the stars, and there’s a place above the rim where there aren’t any. You’d never notice if you didn’t know what the sky is supposed to look like. I’ve been looking at that sky for six years. The Summer Triangle is missing a corner. The tail of the Swan is gone.
It has a top. I could see the edge of the top because the stars come back above it. It’s rounded. It has no features. I watched it for almost an hour and it didn’t move.
But then while I watched, slowly, one star near its top came back into view. Then another. As if the top was lowering. As if it was bending down. As if it was going to look at something on the ground, closer than it had been.
I went inside.
Aug 30. Moon’s back, waxing. Sky’s too bright to see much now. I’m almost glad. I took the video gear out of the shed and put it in the house. Then I went back and put it in the shed again, because I don’t want to be the man who knows something is coming and stops looking.
Gave the dog to Lorna. Told her I was going to Portland for a few weeks. I’m not going to Portland.
Sep 6. Moon’s down early tonight. Camera on the east rim from 23:00.
Sep 7. Footage. I have it frame by frame. The occulted region now runs from the rim to almost fifty degrees up. The top of it is overhead, practically.
The house lights. That’s the thing I can’t stop looking at. In the last twenty minutes of the run, the camera, pointed east, caught the Reyes place, which is the only other light on that side of the valley. A yellow yard light, four miles out. At 02:46:12 it went out. At 02:46:19 it came back.
Something passed in front of it.
It isn’t in the sky anymore. It’s between me and the Reyes place. It’s within four miles. It covers from the ground to the zenith. It isn’t cutting the stars now so much as cutting the world.
Sep 8. If it’s that close I should be able to hear it. Feel it. A thing that size should shake the ground. I sat on the porch all night with my hand flat on the boards. Nothing. No sound at all. That’s wrong, too. You always hear something out here. A truck on the highway, a cow, the windmill groaning. Last night, nothing.
Before dawn, the stars directly over my house went out. All of them. Every star in a circle around the zenith, maybe ten degrees across, gone, while everything around it shone. It lasted eleven seconds. I counted. Then the circle drew back up and away, and they came on again one by one, like somebody lifting a hand off a lampshade.
It was looking down.
Sep 9. I’m going to keep observing. I owe it that, I think. I’ve spent my life measuring things nobody else bothered to measure. Stream flows, snowpack, the exact second a star goes out. It’s what I’m for. If it’s coming, somebody should get the times right.
Camera on. Clear. Seeing 5/5. Best night of the year.
Note from his niece, Ingrid Achterberg Sole:
Uncle Des was reported missing by the woman at the Antelope store on September 12th, when he didn’t come to collect the dog. The sheriff found his truck at the house, the doors locked, his wallet on the table. The observatory roof was rolled open and the camera was still running on a battery pack, pointed straight up. They never found him. The search covered forty square miles.
I have the camera footage from that last night. I am not an astronomer. I’ve had two people from his group look at it. They both said the same thing: that from 01:03 onward, for the next two hours and fourteen minutes, there are no stars in the frame at all. Not one. The camera was working; there’s sensor noise, there are timestamps. One of them said it looks like the lens cap was on. The lens cap was found on the bench beside the telescope.
At 03:17:40 the stars come back, all at once.
He’d written one more line in the log, the last one. He must have written it during the dark part, because the handwriting is very large and goes off the edge of the page, like a man writing without being able to see. It just says: “It is not looking at me.”
I have read that line a hundred times. I don’t know if it is relief.