The dome logs every opening and the telescope logs every pointing, because time on the instrument is booked and paid for. Every night at two the dome opens with nobody booked, in any weather, and the telescope slews to the same coordinates, a patch of sky the catalogues have nothing in, and tracks it until the sky brightens, and the log has an observer name in it that was last on the roster in 1977.
I am the night assistant at a small university observatory on a hill, and the night assistant is the one who is there, which is why the dome at two is mine to explain.
The dome.
A hemisphere on a ring, with a shutter, motorised, that opens for observing and closes for weather, and logs both. The telescope under it logs every slew, every pointing, every track, against the observer booked for the night, because the instrument is shared and the time is argued over.
At two the dome opens. Nobody is booked. And the telescope slews.
The pointing.
The same coordinates every night. I know them by heart now. A right ascension and a declination that put the telescope on a patch of sky in a faint constellation, and I have looked there with our own instrument on a clear night and with every catalogue I have access to, and there is nothing. No star brighter than the limit, no galaxy, no cluster, nothing that anybody has ever catalogued at that position.
The telescope tracks it. From two until the sky brightens, keeping the empty patch in the field as the earth turns, which is what the drive does, and then the dome closes and the log writes the night up, and the observer field says a name.
The name.
The observatory's old rosters are in a cabinet and the name is on them, a research student, in the seventies, with nights booked across three years, and the last night booked against him is in 1977, and after that the roster has a line through his remaining nights and a note that says, reallocated.
The coordinates are in his notebooks, which the cabinet also has. Page after page. The same patch of sky, observed night after night across three years, with drawings and measurements and, towards the end, a sentence underlined twice that says, it is there, I have seen it twice, and then the notebooks stop.
He did not finish. The department's records say he left without his degree and the department's old secretary, who is alive, said that he had had, she would put it, a breakdown, over something he thought he had found and could not show anybody, and had gone home to his parents, and had died not long after, and she had always felt the department could have been kinder.
What has been checked.
The dome controller and the telescope control system, reinstalled from clean media. The dome opens at two and the telescope slews.
The dome, at two, by me, inside it, in the rain. The shutter opened above me and the rain came in onto the instrument, which is a thing I am trained to prevent with my body if I have to, and I did not, because the telescope was slewing and the drive was running and in the eyepiece, which I put my eye to because I am an astronomer and I could not not, there was cloud. Rain on the glass. Nothing. And the drive tracked nothing across the sky, and beside me at the eyepiece there was the sound of a man breathing the way you do when you are holding very still so as not to shake the image, and a pencil, on paper, writing.
What is done about it.
The nightly opening is on the dome log as an unscheduled operation and the instrument time is charged to nobody, and the rain that comes in is on the maintenance log as a seal fault, and the telescope has been re-aluminised once already because of it, and the head of department has asked me to stop it, and I have said I have tried, and she has asked whether I have tried very hard, and I have said, have you seen his notebooks, and she has gone quiet.
What I do.
I assist at night.
He saw something twice and nobody looked. That is the whole of it. A student at an eyepiece for three years who saw a thing at those coordinates on two nights and wrote it down and underlined it and was not believed and went home.
So I look. On clear nights, at two, when the dome opens and the telescope goes to his patch, I go to the eyepiece, and I look at nothing, for as long as I can, the way he did, and I say, out loud, I'm looking, and I keep a notebook, a paper one, on the desk by his, and I write the night up: coordinates, seeing, and what I saw, which is nothing, and I sign it.
I have seen it once.
I am not going to say what. I am not sure enough, and that is the trap, and I know it is. But one clear night in the spring, at the coordinates, tracking, there was something in the field that was not in the catalogue and was not a fault, for about four seconds, and I wrote it down, and I underlined it once, and beside me the breathing stopped for a moment, the way a man's does when somebody else has seen it, and the pencil wrote one word on his page, and in the morning the word was there, in his hand, in a notebook that has been closed since 1977, and the word was, yes.