When my father was a young pediatrician, he took care of a patient named Ira. My father had his favorite patients, and at the dinner table sometimes we used to hear about them. They tended to be either black or Jewish; Ira was the latter. He used to talk to my father about the stars.

“Ira was telling me today about Aldebaran,” my father might say while he carefully smashed each carrot, pea, and cube of chuck roast in his dish of my mother’s beef stew into a grayish paste. He is by nature a vegetarian but would never consider giving up meat. Hence he feels he needs to disguise it. “Apparently, it’s a binary system.”

This Ira kid was six, seven: my exact contemporary. Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Tau Ceti. He knew whether they were blue or red. He understood the Doppler effect as it pertained to starlight. He even knew the Greek myths that underpinned so many of the constellations.

Now, I had strangely possessive feelings about mythology. Once I came upon a copy of D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths lying on a table in the school media center, lying there where any shmo could come along and pick it up and discover for himself the dark and vivid world that lay inside the covers of that book. Quickly, I returned it to the safe anonymity of the 398s.

Mythology was my territory. So I decided to horn in on Ira’s.

I asked for a telescope. At Hannukah, one was duly provided, along with a small, dense, rather dry British volume entitled Astronomy in Colour. I have disappointed memories of that telescope. It was made of blue plastic and heavy gray cardboard, with a rickety metal tripod. It did not, as I had imagined, work by letting you put your eye up against the fiery flank of the universe itself. It had a small, bleary oculus that received a shimmery reflection from a tiny mirror that lived all alone at the bottom of the long cardboard tube. It had a focus knob that knowingly tormented you with seventeen different varieties of blur. It was not so much a telescope as a kind of antikaleidoscope, its interior vista endlessly static and dim. The book had a star chart and some interesting drawings of spacecraft and imaginary Saturnscapes. But its prose and its ideas were way over my head and of no real use, especially at night, in the dark, when I really needed the book. In the end, after some cursory study, I learned to find five or six of the most obvious constellations. Polaris, Betelgeuse. Venus and Mars.

My astronomical knowledge has not advanced very far since then. I get the Doppler effect. I know now what a binary system is. But I never showed the gift for astrophysics that I hoped to discover in myself, any more than I would later turn out to be a genius at chemistry, electric guitar, or the free-throw line. I never presented any threat to Ira. The starry heavens became a lifelong locus of insufficiency, but so is everything you love most, and that bitter memory has never stopped me from taking an interest in the night sky and its behavior.

Several years ago my wife bought me my second telescope. It is incredibly enormous. It is nuclear-powered, made of iron mined from an asteroid, and weighs seven metric tons. Its mirror is broad and brilliant and conveys an image of the moon so magnified that under a quarter of its visible surface more than fills the eyepiece. You can see the shadows of crater rims, the snaggled teeth of giant craters like Pythagoras and Herschel. The thing uses GPS and has a processor to allow it to know where it is and what you’re looking at. When you train it on what appears to the naked eye to be a blank, black patch of sky, you find the oculus aglitter with stars and realize that beyond them could be seen, if you had a more powerful scope, more glittering specks of light and still more beyond them. And you feel a shallow shiver of how deep space really is.

Unfortunately, the thing requires a winch, a derrick, and a team of elephants to transport it. Also, I live in the city, in Berkeley, California, and when there’s no fog to obscure it, our night sky is polluted with light. After my initial burst of enthusiasm for the telescope, I began to question its usefulness. By the time you, Tantor, and Queenie got the thing out to the front yard (where you could see about forty-two degrees of heavenly arc among the housetops and trees), you had dented a wall, stubbed your toe, pulled a muscle in your shoulder, and suffered a heart attack on the front porch. I fantasized about building a little observatory on top of the house where I could use the telescope without having to move it, but soon I realized that even if I could afford to do such a thing, there would be nothing much to see between the fog and the flooded sky once I got up there. So in time, the telescope was returned to its tuba-capable case and humped up to the attic to reproach me with my inadequacy like the heavens themselves.

This summer we shipped it to Maine. We’ve been coming here for the past few summers, and our good landlords let us store things in the basement of their house over the year, even enormous things like this telescope. The weather has been rotten, but tonight, as on four or five other fine nights, the sky just knocks you over. I used to share a house with a graduate student in astronomy who told me that when you first reach the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, where Cal maintains the Keck Observatory, your eyes are so starved for oxygen that they see almost nothing distinctive in the sky, a sparkly gauze. He described bending over to take a few deep breaths and then throwing his head back to take in with new oxygen-rich eyes, the newly blazing archipelago of lights. That is how the Maine sky can look sometimes to a city dweller. It dizzies you.

Jupiter has been working its nightly way across the sky all month. The word is debased, but when I first got Jupiter in the eyepiece, I thrilled at what I saw. Lined up to its left in a tidy row like ducklings swam four of its thirty-nine moons. The moons of Jupiter! Who would not thrill at the sight of them and the sound of their name? They were no bigger in the eyepiece than large stars to the naked eye, but they were there, unmistakably, and as I stood in the chill evening with crickets playing the summer offstage and mosquitoes grazing on my ankles, I felt as if I were there, too: out there, four hundred million miles away, orbiting that disappointed star.

That is a shared promise of telescopes and literature: to create an illusion of interstellar or interhuman travel within the confines of your own skull. Though I have always been aware of the connection between stories and constellations, between the beauty of the stars and the perhaps even greater beauty of their names, I never truly felt it until I looked through a first-rate instrument at an unspoiled sky.

“It kind of freaks me out to think about that, Dad,” my older son said after I had him look through the telescope at one of those endlessly deep and star-packed regions of space that look empty to the naked eye. “I mean, we’re so small.”

“True,” I said.

“We’re, like, nothing.”

“Well, yeah. Except to each other.”

And then I pointed the telescope at Jupiter and its brood of moons and had him take a look, and he did a little thrilling himself. It’s just so shocking somehow to see them there, plain as stars, when you can look at the same spot with no telescope and see a solitary speck of gold. “Think of Galileo,” I told my son. “You and I know those moons are going to be there, but Galileo had no idea when he first saw them that they were going to be there. He just had the weird inspiration to point a newfangled set of lenses at the king of planets and check it out. Think how surprised he must have been!”

“Okay, that’s awesome,” my son agreed, backing away from the eyepiece. “What happens if we point it at the moon?”

Maybe he or one of my other children will turn out like Ira, to have the gift of stars. He or she will be able to look up at the sky and see not myths and legends and a history of failure but information, gases and voids, cold, infernal, luminous and pure. Or maybe my children will just look up and remember the weight of my hand on their shoulders as they stood beside me on a warm summer night, the rasp of my beard against their cheek, my voice soft at their ear, telling them, Look.