Steve Conard, an avid astronomer who spent his forty-year career at Johns Hopkins—half at the Applied Physics Lab building instruments for space research—is definitely a wise man. So, it’s no surprise that he and his wife, Cindy, ended up in Wellsboro in May 2022 because they followed the stars.

“If it wasn’t for Cherry Springs I wouldn’t be here,” Steve says, “I guarantee you that.” He first came to the area in 2007 when his Maryland astronomy club took a trip to Cherry Springs State Park. “Then I heard about the rail trail and ‘conned’ Cindy to come up.” They vacationed here, cycling, hiking, kayaking, and watching wildlife. It seemed like an obvious choice for retirement.

The Pennsylvania Wilds no doubt has just as many stars and other celestial objects as before he relocated. But there are probably more people looking up, with and without telescopes, now that he’s written columns for the Wellsboro Gazette and given presentations on light pollution, the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and measuring asteroids. Along with Gary Citro, also of Wellsboro, he helped start the Pennsylvania Wilds Astronomy Club. No doubt, Steve’s invited many first-time viewers to look through one of his telescopes, asking, “Do you see what I see?”

Steve grew up in New York’s Catskills, where, he says, “the closest village a mile away was like Ansonia [Pennsylvania],” with not much more than a general store. But it had a very dark sky and lots of space to backpack, hunt, and fish. When he was twelve, his older brother handed down his telescope to Steve along with an old astronomy field guide. Trying to follow the field guide, Steve recalls seeing “a star with rings around it.” It was, of course, Saturn—nothing new, but new to him. This first taste of discovery hooked him.

Now he needed a bigger telescope, but the only way he could afford one was to build it. Long before YouTube tutorials, he looked up instructions and spent hundreds of hours in the basement with two glass disks sandwiching a gritty slurry, which he pushed back and forth. Over time, the movement of his hands on the top disk made it concave, eventually to the degree he needed for the telescope mirror’s focal length and focal ratio.

Ultimately Steve found it was even more fun building telescopes than using them. In tenth grade, he told his social studies teacher that his career goal was to move to Australia and work on big telescopes. There weren’t many people Down Under, which meant fewer lights to dim the night sky. It also appealed to Steve since he’s an introvert. He didn’t know anyone growing up who had an interest in astronomy. Everything he learned was from books, so “I still mispronounce names of stars,” he laughs.

A Stellar Career

Steve attended the local community college, SUNY-Ulster, for two years before getting a BS from the University of Arizona in engineering physics, a program Steve describes as training engineers to work with scientists. Afterwards, he moved to Baltimore and started working in the Johns Hopkins physics department at the Homewood campus, simultaneously pursuing his master’s in applied physics. “Getting to work on astronomy instruments in space was something I didn’t even know enough to dream about as a tenth grader,” Steve says. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do, just not in Australia.

Good thing, too, because he wouldn’t have met Cindy there. In 1984, right after she moved to Baltimore, they met during a blind date. Cindy, a computer programmer then and up until her retirement, was not especially interested in astronomy. But she was interested in Steve. As she learned more about what he did, she was able to help him in public settings. “I’m a people person and will talk to anyone about anything,” she says, “so I’d be the B team.” She knew enough about asteroids—which Steve was helping measure—that she could talk to people until the questions got too hard and Steve could take over. They’ve been married thirty-seven years.

For twenty years, Steve worked on Astro and FUSE missions, looking at everything from Mars’ atmosphere to quasars (a rare and extreme class of supermassive black holes, according to NASA). Telescopes he worked on went into space aboard NASA’s Astro-1 (Columbia) and 2 (Endeavor) space shuttles. “Everything looks different when the atmosphere is not in your way,” Steve explains. “We had to get above the atmosphere to ‘see’ far-ultraviolet light. Everything was new. They’re still writing papers on what they found.” He trained astronauts to use the telescopes, and one of the highlights for him was going into the payload bay of the space shuttle Columbia to check the equipment the day before the Astro-1 launch.

Steve was loaned to the Applied Physics Lab to help build an instrument for taking pictures of comets while flying by them. The CONTOUR mission was launched successfully into orbit, but on August 15, 2002, it lost contact after using its third stage to head towards its first comet encounter. Though the mission wasn’t a success, it resulted in Steve working at APL full time as an optical systems engineer.

At this time there was a lot of interest in Pluto, and the APL was competing with the Jet Propulsion Lab in California to get the mission. APL won, and, starting in 2003, Steve became lead engineer of the team that built and tested the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager instrument aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, which launched in 2006. LORRI is just eight inches in diameter and two feet long, and all it does is take pictures—really clear pictures of things really far away. The main target was Pluto. In order to get there, New Horizons flew by Jupiter in 2007 to get a gravitational assist. (It’s like how gravity helps a bicycle go faster downhill. Except different.) This assist saved money, fuel, and got the spacecraft near Pluto two-and-a-half years quicker. Plus, they were able to test the instrument by taking pictures of Jupiter. Scientists got tons of scientifically worthy images during the eight-year trip to Pluto. “And we got there,” Steve smiles. It was 2015 when it made the historic first flyby of the Pluto system. The largest receiving antenna was in Australia, and Steve remembers getting up at 3 a.m. in Maryland to see the new images coming in. “Knowing you’re one of the first persons to see these things was an amazing feeling,” he says.

Turns out that Pluto, long dismissed as the pinky toe of our solar system, is much more geologically complex than we knew. Glaciers of frozen nitrogen and methane move downhill with water ice much harder than Earth’s—like bedrock. “We saw things that looked an awful lot like volcanoes,” he says, “even though it’s so cold out there.”

One of Steve’s hobbies is measuring asteroids, and for over fifteen years he’s been a member of the International Occultation Timing Association, a volunteer organization that predicts, gathers, analyzes, and publishes observations. In an asteroid occultation, a star is covered by an asteroid, and the length of the time the star blinks out is recorded. Recordings of the same event taken by people in different locations can be used to measure the asteroid. Steve participated in two NASA-sponsored citizen science trips to Argentina to collect data on an asteroid, Arrokoth, that was discovered in 2014. At that time, they didn’t know it was two objects conjoined. This data was used to plan the New Horizon flyby in 2019 of the double asteroid which, according to NASA, “is one of the thousands of known small icy worlds in the Kuiper Belt, the vast ‘third zone’ of the solar system beyond the inner terrestrial planets and the outer gas giant planets,” and it “may harbor answers that contribute to our understanding of the origin of life on Earth.”

Now, New Horizons is twice as far as when it went by Pluto, taking photos of objects at the edge of the Kuiper Belt so we can characterize their surfaces. With the high-powered telephoto-like capabilities of LORRI, New Horizons is studying objects from great distances away. So, while the spacecraft is not yet at the edge of the solar system, it can see it from there.

All Is Calm, All Is Bright

Ensconced in Pennsylvania now, Steve enjoys trivia Tuesdays at the Duncan Tavern in Antrim, local craft beer at the Wellsboro House, and volunteering with the Wellsboro Glass Association. Until his official retirement this past April, he was still lead engineer on the New Horizons mission, working part-time from his home on a hilltop just outside of town, and was part of the engineering team for the LORRI Lucy mission launched in October 2021, the first to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids.

He owns six telescopes (“three general purpose and three ‘one trick ponies’”), including his fourteen-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain in his Bobcat Observatory in the backyard. He named it after seeing a wildlife cam photo of a bobcat outside the observatory one night, probably wondering what new nocturnal critter was in its territory. Small enough that more than two people make it a tight squeeze, the top half of the domed structure spins to align the opening with whatever part of the sky he’s interested in. When it’s cold, he can sit at the large desk at the dining room window looking out at the Bobcat’s dome, maneuver the telescope, and look at its images using the computer.

When he and Cindy were looking for property, having a good space for dark sky observations was paramount. The real estate agent for a house they toured heard that and said, “You’re like that other guy I sold a house to.” He was speaking of Gary Citro, a retired music teacher.

“I first met [them] at a Wellsboro First Friday, where we both brought our solar telescopes,” Gary says. “When I learned that Steve worked (and continues to work) on the New Horizons mission that went past Pluto, I was in awe, because I’ve always thought that mission is one of the most incredible things that humankind has achieved.”

Gary was willing to help Steve start an astronomy club. When they found out that Cherry Springs didn’t have its own, they decided to broaden their scope from Wellsboro to the thirteen counties of the Pennsylvania Wilds (pawildsastro.org). Gary says, “We certainly need to do a lot more recruiting in a number of those counties who probably don’t even know about us. Ideally, we’d like to have people in each county doing outreach at the level we’ve been doing it here.”

The club usually does several winter events where they bring telescopes out for the public to view.

“We’ve had some great nights where people have really gotten great views through a telescope for the first time,” Gary says.

The club is also participating in the library telescope program, started in 2008 in New Hampshire. Steve and Cindy gifted a telescope to the Green Free Library in Wellsboro, and it is available for patrons to check out. Now the astronomy club has ordered kits for five more, which they’ll assemble (Steve is making some parts with his 3-D printer) and bestow in January 2025.

Another side project Steve is involved with is measuring the light pollution and making recommendations about how to mitigate it. “Our dark skies bring in a lot of tourists to Wellsboro, too,” Steve says, so managing this natural resource makes sense. He gave a short presentation to the Tioga County Planning Commission in the spring of 2023, using Potter County’s lighting ordinance for new construction as a model. Tioga County’s ordinance is in the last stages of approval.

There’s a lot that people with outdoor lights can do to make them more dark sky friendly. It’s not just important to stargazers. Maybe your neighbor’s flood light shines in your windows. Tim Morey, Natural Resource Program Specialist at Hills Creek State Park, says that while we don’t have the issues cities have, “As our backyards get brighter and brighter, it’s effecting wildlife.” Nighttime artificial light negatively impacts the ability of amphibians to reproduce, and migrating birds using moonlight to navigate can get disoriented. “I’d like to see people think about how we can use light in more effective and wiser ways,” says Tim. After all, we love hearing the spring peepers and watching the fireflies blink at potential mates.

Steve is a member of the Pennsylvania Outdoor Lighting Council, and of DarkSky International and the organization’s state chapter, which advocate for reducing light pollution that “disrupts wildlife, impacts human health, wastes money and energy, contributes to climate change, and blocks our view of the universe.” He also joined the Illuminating Engineering Society, an industry-backed group of professionals who research and promote standards. “I have been in groups that measure light,” Steve says, “so I joined the group that produces recommendations about light.”

He has been developing a device to use locally to measure light pollution. His initial goal was to provide data so short-term rentals could be advertised as astronomy-friendly, but now he’s hoping to establish a baseline of light pollution in Tioga County so it can be monitored annually to see if it’s getting better or worse. He used an old astronomy camera and 3-D printed some parts to adapt it, added a cloud sensor, hooked it up to a cheap laptop he’s protected from the elements, and it all runs off a battery. Emporium is interested in using it to help them establish a space on a hill as an observation site—for elk during the day and stars at night.

It Came Upon a Midnight Unclear

Steve admits he did not know until he and Cindy had relocated how cloudy the winter skies are here. “Tioga is the driest Pennsylvania county but has the most cloud cover,” Steve exclaims. “That’s weird!” Last year the sky was clear only 15 percent of January nights. It’s a good thing the Christmas wise men were not in today’s Tioga County looking up and trying to see something.

Of course, as a story of faith, there doesn’t need to be any explanation. But Steve is more a man of science than faith, and is familiar with the different hypotheses concerning what the star of Bethlehem could have been. Magi, commonly translated as wise men, can also be translated as astronomer or astrologer. In either case, Steve explains that they would have been so familiar with the night sky that any change would have seemed significant. What was called a star might have been a supernova (when a dying star explodes) or a conjunction (when planets pass close to each other, appearing like one bright object).

Steve’s favorite theory is that it was a comet. He remembers the Hyakutake comet in 1996 and “waking up in the middle of the night and going out on the back deck of our house in Maryland—seeing this very long comet tail very high in the sky.” He watched one of the closest cometary approaches of the previous 200 years in awe with his unaided eye. Perhaps that explains one Christmas song’s description of a star “with a tail as big as a kite.” Comets can be seen for days and even weeks. Plenty of time to get to Bethlehem.

Steve and Cindy are happy to have found their way to Wellsboro. Others are, too. Keith Thorne recently moved back to town after working sixteen years at the LIGO facility in Louisiana where he managed the people and computers that control the huge instrument that detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes (our March 2016 cover story). One night he and his wife, Kathy, were eating at the Wellsboro House and, he says, “I heard these words floating around. Someone was speaking astronomy.” They subsequently joined the new astronomy club and met with other members at the local airport.

Gary Citro can hardly believe there are two engineers involved with astrophysics in his small rural town. “The idea that I sat at a table at the Grand Canyon Regional Airport with all of these people blows my mind, because nothing like that happened in New York City!”

Just a Wellsboro miracle.