I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear In Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

I remember walking into an observatory dome in an afternoon before I was going to observe

and thinking that it reminded me of a theater on the afternoon before a play.

And there's a whole crew working on a telescope during the day and they're checking instruments

and making sure everything's working properly for when the stars arrive.

It's a very, it was a very literal comparison.

I loved that when astronomers, when we describe our observing, we'll say, oh, I have a

three-night run.

So we even use the same terminology as theater.

But I loved that sort of wonderful waiting feeling of we're getting everything ready.

We have our plan.

We have our script.

We knew what we're going to do and then watching the sun go down and watching the planet

spin and getting ready to go inside and say, all right, now we're starting.

So that's just, that's the moment I think when I and when many of my colleagues just really

stand there and go, boy, this is a good job.

That's Emily LeVick, an astronomer who's written a charming and illuminating book about

what it's like to be an astronomer today.

At a time when astronomy is no longer gazing at the stars through the eyepiece of a telescope

or a telescope, her book is titled The Last Star Gazers.

And in it, she describes how new telescopes and new ways of interpreting what they reveal

of the heavens is giving astronomers and the rest of us a new sense of wonderment about

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