A STRONOMERS ARE A retiring, night-owl sort of species by nature, but their monastic image is imposed on by outsiders and the everyday world as much as it is created by the astronomers themselves. The scientific community, too, keeps its distance, regarding astronomy as a rather old-fashioned and superstitious discipline. Professionals these days call the field "astrophysics"--a label which may bring them closer to other scientists, but alienates them still more from the average person. The problems astrophysicians deal with often seem, to the common eye, ascetically dry, scholastically obscure, and maybe irreverent.

To the uninitiated, "the Observatory" means the tennis courts which lie below the buildings. Those who work at the place know it as the "Center for Astrophysics." This label, officially created in 1973 includes the programs of the Harvard College Observatory, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Astronomy department, all of which use the complex.

The buildings of the Observatory, a hodgepodge of different eras and styles, might be a metaphor for the research they house.

Impressive and expensive, the Center is wealthy. Money flows in from devotees, the state, and the University; private donations to the cause of specific researchers, federal appropriations to the Smithsonian, NASA contracts, and a Peter's Pence from Harvard tuitions. These riches are an embarrassment. The subject of money puts people on the defensive at the Observatory; each feels called to account for the sums spent on his research. Motivated by this same sense of responsibility verging on guilt, the Smithsonian, HCO and the Department of Astronomy try to explain the returns the public and the University get on their investment. As part of "Smithsonian Year", the institution's annual justification to Congress, the Smithsonian publishes a scoresheet, the "Report of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory." The Public Affairs Office of the Center puts out a series of educational pamphlets: "Comets", "Meteorites", and so forth. The Observatory holds open nights and colloquia, to which anyone interested is invited. And the tennis courts are free to Harvard students.

THESE TOKEN ATTEMPTS at interaction with the world outside the scientific enclave serendipitously serve to bind the members of the Observatory together. The colloquia and tennis are among the few common rituals in this intensely pluralistic society. The Observatory buildings mark the intersection of an almost infinite number of lines of research. But there is little communication between them; each fraternity keeps to itself. Research projects are conceived and funded separately, and teams work as closed units. A group will have more contact with people doing similar work in Arizona, or the USSR, than it will with a group doing a different project down the hall. A piecemeal progress is being made here, with technological inevitability.

But the Observatory housed another astronomy, not so long ago. An astronomy humanistically understood, an observation of a sky full of myth and poetry. Astrophysics is a specialized science, the exclusive province of a professional elite.

Listening to people at the Observatory, the fragments of this transition come together.

Art Goldberg is a junior majoring in Astronomy, one of the 22 undergraduates in the field. With a student/teacher ratio of about ten to one, Astronomy is a close-knit department. "Most of my professors are friends of mine too," Art says.

Art moves comfortably around the part of the Observatory he knows, exhibiting objects, people, and what each does with the enthusiasm of a novice. In his descriptions, the Observatory is glamorous. As he strides through the buildings, he explains things, and theories from the bottom up ("this is really pretty neat"). His excitement is contagious. And he knows all the eccentricities of the place: "There're lots of funny license plates around here. Fred Whipple's--he's the guy that did all that work on comets--says COMETS, and David Layzer's say HAAVAD and ENDURO."

Though he seems thoroughly at ease, Art doesn't quite know his way around the labyrinth of Perkin yet; he keeps looking through offices as he passes them, trying to orient himself with a glimpse of the outside world through the plate glass windows. Momentarily startled from their contemplation or industry, the inhabitants of the cells look up and smile.

In the Wolbach Library, Art pulls out the sky charts. He flips quickly through a brightly-colored one put out by the Czech Academy of Sciences--"This is mainly just a teaching tool"--pointing out the galactic equator, describing the meaning of different colors. The constellations are carefully boxed off, charting a sky far from anthropomorphic. Art lingers a bit more over a photographic atlas. "These are good pictures," he says, nodding approval. He describes problems people have mapping the sky. "Our galaxy is like a record--really thin and flat--so when you look through the record, you get what's known as the 'zone of obscuration'.

Observational astronomers--the field essentially divides into observation and theory--are visual-minded. Maps and photographs are not just tools, but art objects. "The plate stacks," Art says, "they're one of the most impressive things around here." The Plate Stacks are two floors of green metal cabinets full of stars captured in glass. This treasury, containing about half a million pictures which go back to the 1880s, forms the cornerstone of Building C. Martha Liller, guardian of the plates, explains that the expensive collection is one of the long-range investments of the Observatory; only in recent years has it begun to pay off in fashionable fields such as quasars and X-ray sources. She demonstrates the blink comparator, which is used to note changes in the light intensity of a star over time. "You put one plate on this side," she says, "and one over here. Then you look through this eyepiece. The machine flashes the two pictures in front of your eye alternately, fast. Anything whose light intensity is changing will show as blinking. They find optical correspondents for X-ray sources that way, for example."

On top of one cabinet of plates a more conventional photograph is propped. A chain of ladies in turn-of-the-century dress hold hands in front of an Observatory that no longer exists. At the end of the chain stands Edward C. Pickering, appointed Director of the Observatory in 1877. Pickering concentrated on photometry, using the Great Refractor to take thousands of pictures, which the ladies he leads in the picture classified.

IT TOOK THOUSANDS of man-hours," David Layzer says of the classification. "Or rather woman-hours. Those women who produced the Draper system (the plate-stacks classification system) came here maybe at 20 and stayed--some of them 30, 40 years. They weren't paid much of anything. Some had an independent income, but for those who didn't ..." Layzer frowns and shakes his head. A professor of Astronomy, Layzer has been around the Observatory a long time, teaching Nat Sci 90, a large undergraduate course, and doing theoretical work. "That was the old way of doing things here," he goes on. "The Observatory was run like an anthill. They had a slave labor system, in essence. All those non-productive females. Today astronomy is different. Now all the thinking is done by research teams, not one master. And all the rest is done by computer. I guess you could consider a computer programmer a non-reproductive female..."

Layzer's view is wide, inclusive; he pulls the pieces of the Observatory together as he talks. "I teach a Gen Ed course," he smiles. "Astronomy is a science where you can see the past feeding into the present in one generation," he continues. "Sergei Gaposchkin--he's quite a character--was studying binary stars 40 years ago. Now they think binary stars might be connected to x-ray sources. And that's part of a whole computer project."