When Astronomy Is In Your Blood

There’s an old saying, to paraphrase Plato (and a number of others), that every king has a slave in his line of ancestry — and every slave, a king. I’d imagine the same holds true for doctors, teachers, and supervillains.

So maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I have an astronomer way back in my lineage.

Early in March, I was engaged in another astronomy-via-FaceTime session with Dad. With each new star cluster he imaged with his smart telescope, he asked me to look up some information about the deep-sky object resolving on his tablet screen: How far away is it? When was it discovered, and by whom? Again and again, we marveled at another one of William Herschel’s discoveries, to the point that it was a novelty when someone else’s name came up.

Then he directed his Dwarf 3 to Messier 35, the Shoe Buckle Cluster, and I went to Wikipedia.

“Jean-Philippe Loys de Cheseaux!” I exclaimed with an astonished laugh. I recognized the surname from my mother’s family, who Americanized the spelling a few centuries ago. “Wouldn’t it be funny if we’re related?”

Reader, we are.

After a few hours of digging into online databases, I made the connection. The 18th-century Swiss astronomer is my 3rd cousin, seven times removed* — also known as “strangers on the bus.” (*The relation is a little more convoluted, due to intermarriage between two families way back when, so we’re related through both his father and mother. I think his parents were second cousins.)

Cheseaux discovered two comets, six Messier objects, and two additional NGC objects. His discoveries include the Eagle and Omega Nebulae, and he’s credited with the “modern” formulation of Olber’s paradox.

“The Eagle Nebula!” I declared to my partner, M, in the kitchen that night. “You know the one with the cosmic fingers?” I contorted my hand to resemble the Pillars of Creation. He seemed to understand what I meant. “My cousin found that!”

When I told Mom about our family connection, she asked, “Stargazing as an ancestral trait?” I’d say it goes deeper than that. We all share a legacy of looking into the night sky with curiosity and wonder, passed down through legends and science. Deeper still, everything we can smell, see, touch, hear, or taste, from pulsars to potholes, is made of “star stuff” — including us. We literally have the cosmos in our DNA.

But if there is a genetic encoding for exploration, and for yearning and awe — a stargazing gene? — maybe it does run in the family: My cousin’s four-year-old grandchild asked for a telescope for Christmas.

Though my father doesn’t share this ancestry, he made a point to have a “serious conversation” with me about it.

“Since you seem to have the stars in your blood,” he began, with light mischief in his voice, “perhaps you should dedicate the remainder of your life to continuing your cousin’s work. You should add your own discoveries to the astronomical catalogs.”

I laughed and told him I’d need more dedicated study and more advanced equipment. Dad mused that with fewer astronomers in the 1700s, individual discoveries were more likely for those with the time and the tools. And it’s not like I have my own personal JWST scanning the skies for new and interesting deep-sky objects.

Although I’m destined for more anonymous astronomical pursuits, I’m also incredibly lucky. I have access to 21st-century technology and learning. Could Cheseaux have imagined my little smart telescope offering astonishing views from a suburban backyard, much less what I can see online thanks to our space telescopes?

Other than scant profiles, I know next to nothing about Jean Philippe. He was a member of multiple science academies. He died young and seemed not to have married or had children. Was he a prankster who could carry a tune and was kind to dogs? Did he love pickles, like I do? Maybe he was a great astronomer, but a terrible human being. I’ll never know.

But he was on my mind when I sat in a state park over the weekend of the vernal equinox. My smart telescope was imaging the Shoe Buckle Cluster, Cheseaux’s discovery, as the temperature plummeted. Under darker, Bortle 4 skies, I watched satellites make their slow way across my view, and I wondered what my distant cousin would have made of so many artificial lights crowding the stars.

Yet I’d argue that, even with mounting light pollution, today is the best day to study astronomy. We know more and can see farther than ever before. Tomorrow will be even better. And when M16, the Eagle Nebula, rises in the night sky this summer, I will whisper, “My cousin found that,” while imagining the discoveries of generations to come.