I’ve only actually been inside the Leitner Family Observatory and Planetarium one time, during a public telescope viewing event on a night when Jupiter and Saturn were especially close. That night, even without a telescope, I could just barely see Jupiter’s moon Ganymede if I made a pinhole by pinching my thumbs and index fingers together and looking through it (I am nearsighted). Two white specks in the sky, one large and one small.
The Leitner Observatory sits on Prospect Hill next to a small park called the Farnam Memorial Gardens. It’s just past the chemistry buildings where I spent much of my time as an undergraduate student, and I referred to the entire ensemble–the hill, the memorial gardens, and the observatory–as “Leitner.” That’s how my friend BN, an astrophysicist who showed me the place for the first time, referred to it, and I never thought to look up its full name until years later. I don’t know which of us proposed this nighttime walk, but I seem to recall that it was a spring night, probably during a bout of exams, and we needed some fresh air. The gardens are almost completely unlit at night, and I remember this as the first time I wasn’t scared of the dark. It is this “Leitner,” not the observatory itself, that I fell in love with.
All of this naming of locations and buildings makes the place seem flatter than it really is. When you’re sitting on the singular wooden bench at the end of the grass lawn, you’re facing eastward where everything is downhill from you. You can see all the way across East Haven into the horizon of hills just before Branford. At night, the city lights form a twinkling lake in the lower center of your field of vision, surrounded in the back by dark hills and bordered to the right by the Long Island Sound. And the hills are truly dark, save for maybe two trails of yellow stars–the lampposts along the highways. This central view remains constant throughout the season; it’s only the borders that change. In the summer, mugworts and goldenrods grow high in the foreground and obscure your vision of the houses that are within a few blocks in front of you. In the winter, the absence of leaves on the trees to the left reveals a view of the cliff at East Rock Park.
I grew up in Manhattan, where manmade structures extend to each horizon (except the southern one, and even then, across the water past the tip of Manhattan there is more city). So, my first reason for obsession with Leitner was the feeling it gave me that there is more to life than all this. I used to imagine what it would be like to glide through the air from where I was sitting and feel the lift of hot air from the smokestacks near the highway. I tried to write a poem about the birds I saw on a summer evening just after sunset and how they looked like swirls of black ink against the deep purple sky. The poem never quite connected, but these three lines stuck around in my mind: “Eagles clasp each other’s talons // Careening together // A carousel, in freefall”
My second reason for obsession was the simple fact that I could regularly see constellations for the first time in my life. I saw across many short visits on different days at different times how they rotated through the night and through the seasons. I bought a necklace of Orion–a circular pendant with holes in the locations of the stars–to commemorate the first constellation I saw after moving into the dorms. It’s not that I had never seen a starry sky, just that these things have a different significance when you see them as a process rather than a beautiful snapshot.
My third and final reason was that I didn’t need an excuse to be close to someone when sitting on that bench. I think that’s part of why BN took me there, possibly the only place within walking distance where we could sit shoulder to shoulder unromantically and talk like people should, outside of the odd scripts of daily life. That’s certainly why I took AZ there: both to watch the Geminids meteor shower and to ask her about growing up in Alaska. We saw many shooting stars that night, the first I had ever seen. The view from Leitner already made me feel powerful. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be at the summit of the type of mountain AZ used to climb.
I don’t really know why so many of us fell out of touch, but we did. BN moved home to the mountains, and AZ got busy. JC, who said that Leitner was the only place he’d ever been where his mind could truly be quiet, quietly dropped off the face of the earth. RW transferred to another college, and maybe I should’ve kept in touch with her but I didn’t. That lake of lights surrounded by hills is the only place where our shared existence is stored. Everything else changed.
The class of 2025 had a party at Leitner a few weeks before graduation, where I realized that I barely knew anyone at all. I walked down to the Yale farm to talk to the cooing hens instead. That party was the second of the two times I joined a crowd at Leitner. The first time was when everyone including the TAs left our physics lab class early to see the solar eclipse of April 8, 2024. I felt like some sort of squirrel weaving through the crowd that day–my acquaintances would pay attention to me for a moment, then turn back to their human friends. The cracks between us had already begun to widen.
I stopped going to Leitner regularly after that. It was too far of a walk from my apartment and there wasn’t anything in particular I wanted to remember. Eventually, it just felt wrong to be near the campus at all. I see it now from the outside looking in, a capsule of the last time all the world seemed to be right there in front of me.
(2026-04-21)
