Nobody planned to stay up. By eleven the road to the observatory was full of station wagons, and by one the diner had run out of pie. Somebody brought a radio. Somebody else brought a telescope that had never left its box.

How it started

Every cover story story in this magazine starts the same way: somebody says “you have to see this”, and we go. This one began on a hot evening in July, with a full tank and no plan.

By the second day we had a notebook full of names, three rolls of film and the strong feeling that the real story was a little further down the road.

What we found

The people we met were generous with their time and suspicious of our questions, in that order. They told us where to stand, when to look and which coffee to avoid.

“The night everyone looked up” is what we brought back. Read it slowly. It was written that way.