Inside, they made a beeline to the observatory deck -- up the stairs, through the exhibit areas and out the doors. Which telescope to look through first? Mercury was setting so we cued up at the telescope focused on the mercurial planet.

The crowd and excitement were generated by an unusual planetary occurrence. Beginning in March, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter have been lined up across the sky. You can see them with the naked eye, but the chance of spying them through Chabot's telescopes on a clear night was too good to pass up.

I was behind my husband in the Mercury line. As luck would have it, he was the last person to see Mercury through the telescope before it was obscured by the observatory dome of another telescope. The Chabot volunteer began refocusing on another planet.

Venus, the brightest of the planets, was next. Standing in line, people chatted, their faces dimly lit by the floor lights of the observatory.

"Stars twinkle, planets give off a steady light," was a frequently heard directive.

The sky darkened and the Pleiades star cluster looked like a lacy background to Venus.

"I love space," a young girl said passionately.

Through the telescope, Venus was almost too bright to look at. It appeared as half a planet. It was almost impossible not to "ooh" or "aah."

Mars, last year's planetary celebrity when it was the closest to Earth in recorded history, was so dim, it was not included in the telescopic planetary tour.

We headed over to the large telescope focused on Saturn. It felt like we were in some kind of space Disneyland.

Later, I would read that Saturn was tilted at such an angle that the rings were visible in their most open position; it wouldn't be like that for another 30 years. The line wound around.

I asked a young girl if she had a favorite planet. "Neptune," she said, because that was the one she was assigned when they studied the planets in school.

Looking through the eye piece, Saturn was so brilliant, the rings so clearly visible, it almost looked fake, like a computer-generated image. It wasn't. More "oohs" and "aahs." The first time I'd seen the rings of Saturn, at the old Chabot observatory, maybe 15 years ago, I'd had the same reaction. "Did you see the rings of Saturn?" another planet gazer had asked, as if I had entered an exclusive club.

A week ago Friday, amateur astronomers were setting up their own telescopes on the observation deck. "This won't be ready for another 20 minutes," offered one as he adjusted knobs and lenses.

Last stop, Jupiter. Earlier in the evening, we had seen it through a smaller telescope that had a green screen in the lens. We stood in line to see it through the big telescope, chatting with the woman in front of us. Her 8- or 9-year-old son checked in periodically to find his mother's place in line, then ran off to explore the exhibits in the center.

We climbed up the steps and looked into the eye piece. There was Jupiter and three of its four brightest moons, two above and one in the lower right quadrant, almost out of the telescope's field of vision. If you looked carefully, you could see the clouds of Jupiter. I didn't spot them.

We had completed the telescope tour of the sky. My gaze lowered and the Bay Area stretched and twinkled in every direction. "Ooh, look," I said. The human attempt to mirror the sky, impressive but pale in comparison to the magnificence of the heavens.

Brenda Payton writes for ANG newspapers.

The Oakland Tribune: Cityside
Leanne McLaughlin, Managing Editor
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