Once Upon a New Moon

Before there was Llano & Rye, there was New Moon Seacoast Barbecue – my first foray into cooking barbecue at larger scale. Launching New Moon brought the addition of some bigger equipment to my cooker arsenal (enter Pepe the 100-gallon offset smoker), caused me to cut and store up more Seacoast hardwood, had me enlisting the support of family and friends to give the resulting barbecue a try, and kept me up on many a long night out by the cookers tending fires and briskets into the wee hours. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun along the way!

While most “normal” people don’t go out of their way to be outside after dark cooking, it was a natural draw for me as it involved a second lifelong love of mine:  stargazing. I have loved viewing the stars since I was very young (remember Comet Kohoutek in 1973?!), and the famous stanza is true:  “the stars at night are big and bright deep in the heart of Texas.”

Back in Texas, I was a member of the Texas Astronomical Society and attended some of the most famous dark-sky “star parties” in the world there in my old neck of the woods:  The Texas Star Party in the mountains of West Texas at Fort Davis, and the Okie-Tex Star Party in the Western Panhandle of Oklahoma. I have also spent many a night out in the countryside around Llano, Texas, soaking up starlight with my binoculars and a star chart. Here in Rye, I’m a proud member of the New Hampshire Astronomical Society and even built a roll-off-roof observatory in our backyard to house the world-famous Clarkson Davis 10” reflector telescope.

Looking to the East from our backyard at night, the skies get noticeably darker out over the North Atlantic, and you can see The Milky Way up overhead. You can even hear the ocean when the waves are up and the wind is right. Back in the day, Robert Frost saw Orion throwing a leg over a fence of New Hampshire mountains, rising up on his hands, and looking down. For the past several years now, Orion has thrown a leg over the old 1850 barn next door at various times of the year and has had a look at me while I’m out cooking. I imagine he has looked in on quite a few other souls out there as well…

My telescopes notwithstanding, with just a pair of binoculars from the backyard I have seen about two-thirds of the Messier deep-sky catalog:  (galaxies, open star clusters, globular clusters, nebulae), innumerable Milky Way star fields, double stars, the Moon, and most of the planets. It’s all up there to see if you’re out there to see it, and barbecuing has kept me out there for many happy years now here in Rye.

So, when the days get shorter this time of year and the nights get cooler, it’s all the better to be out on New Moon nights cooking barbecue and taking in the stars:  two loves at the same time. They are both the taste of time well spent.