The drive is not the price of the hobby. The drive is the hobby. You know the junction where the glow finally leaves the mirror, you know it is about an hour, and you have never once thought of it as far. DARK SKY CHASER, arched in engraved capitals across a star-atlas plate, and along the ruled footline beneath, the arrangement stated as flatly as a chart caption: ONE HOUR TO DARK SKY.
Inside the plate's graticule ring, with two meridians sweeping through it, stands Ursa Major, a solid heraldic charge, engraved the way a 17th-century atlas would have drawn it. Printed over the bear's body: the seven stars of the Plough, joined star to star. The figure the ancients drew and the asterism you actually navigate by, in one image. Nothing cute, nothing mystical. A chart, for someone who uses one.
The layer you pull on when you get out of the car and the temperature has already dropped: thick, warm, and cut for standing still in a field for four hours, offered in a range of deep, dark shades led by a near-midnight ground that is, quite literally, the sky this design is about.
For the person who drives out. And for whoever is buying for him and only knows that he disappears for a night with the telescope: that is exactly the right fact to have, and this is the warm thing he will actually wear while he is gone.
Clear skies, and a short drive.
