Source A: The telescope on the hill

The observatory stood above the town, where the last houses gave way to heather and loose stone. From the road it looked abandoned: one square building, one metal dome and a notice whose letters had faded almost white. Yet at half past four on a winter afternoon, a light appeared behind the narrow upper windows.

I climbed the hill with Ilya Petrov, who had looked after the telescope for thirty-one years. He carried no bag of equipment. In one hand he held a small cloth; in the other, a notebook softened at the corners. He stopped twice on the path, not because he was tired, but to listen. Below us, traffic moved along the valley. Above us, the wind pressed against the grass.

Inside the dome, the telescope was smaller than I had expected and older than it first appeared. Its brass tube had been polished, but the joints were dark with age. Ilya touched the frame with two fingers. 'It remembers every careless hand,' he said.

Before he opened the roof, he checked the room: the temperature, the focus, the balance of the mount. He wrote each reading in the notebook. Nothing happened quickly. A screw turned a quarter of a circle. A cloth passed across a lens. He waited, looked again and adjusted the screw back. The work seemed less like preparing a machine than persuading a stubborn animal to stand still.

The first page of the notebook was dated 1989. Between columns of figures, someone had drawn a small crescent moon. Ilya told me it had been made by his predecessor, who had taught him that a telescope was not a shortcut to the sky. 'You have to earn the view,' he said.

At six o'clock, the roof opened. The noise of its motor broke the quiet, and cold air entered the dome. Ilya pointed the telescope towards a gap between the clouds. For a moment there was only darkness. Then the clouds closed, and the instrument showed nothing but a pale blur.

He did not swear or blame the weather. He closed the roof and began again. The second attempt failed too. On the third, a child who had come with her father put her eye to the eyepiece. She stepped back without speaking.

What had she seen? I asked.

She looked at the telescope, then at the black opening above us. 'It was there before we came,' she said.

Ilya wrote nothing down. He smiled and returned to the controls. Outside, the hill was dark, the town was scattering its lights, and the dome turned by degrees towards another piece of sky.