Saturday at the Observatory

To whoever has the Saturday shift,

On Saturday only the people on duty are left at the observatory. This letter comes from 1987, from near a space facility in the north of the Soviet Union, in a silver-gray waxed-paper envelope. The headline is set in precise blue monospace, but someone has added a burgundy handwritten flourish that spells out Saturday. There are teal punched-card fields, an engraved telescope, a tiny circus ticket, and a warm ocher orbit diagram.

A poet once found he could not sit through an astronomer's lecture, and slipped out: "Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars." — Walt Whitman, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" (1865)

On weekdays the numbers must come out exactly right; on Saturdays they need not. Welcome. Sit a while at the observatory, measure nothing, just look, and then write a letter.

Off duty, under the same stars

Storm Post Office

1987 · Plesetsk