In 1970, Steve Siok split a $120 tab with two friends to charter a plane from Worcester to Nantucket.
The $40 he spent became Siok's ticket to see something great. Or so he thought.
In a stroke of bad luck, the plane became stuck in a holding pattern over Newark before making its way to Worcester for the pickup and descending late onto the Nantucket runway. Instead of witnessing an eclipse standing along a pristine coastline, Siok saw it through the plane window.
Two years later he got the real deal, watching a total solar eclipse alongside wife Kathy on a beach in Arisaig, Nova Scotia, during their honeymoon.
In their dating days, which on one occasion included a meteor shower viewing, she gave him an ultimatum.
"If you want to take me to an eclipse, you're going to have to marry me," she said.
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Still avid sky watchers today, the Sioks are members of Skyscrapers Inc., an astronomical society that owns and operates Scituate's Seagrave Memorial Observatory, a haven for amateur astronomers.
Though its science is ever-developing, its lens is more than a century old. Perched under the observatory's dome is a telescope ordered in the late 19th century from Alvan Clark & Sons, a now-defunct Massachusetts manufacturer that once made massive instruments that have since become pieces of history.
The observatory's namesake, Frank Seagrave, received it from his wealthy industrialist father as a 16th birthday present after Seagrave took an interest in outer space. The refractor was once housed on Providence's well-to-do East Side on Benefit Street before being relocated to its current location, constructed in 1914.
To this day, it's in pristine condition, able to home in on Saturn's rings.
A constant cosmologist, Seagrave used the scope until his death in 1934.
That was just two years after Brown University Prof. Charles Smiley teamed up with about 18 space enthusiasts in Providence who wanted to establish an astronomical society. Thus Skyscrapers was launched.
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Siok can't put his finger exactly on what sparked his passion for planets. There was no seismic astronomical event around that point. At the time, Halley's Comet was last visible in 1910 and wouldn't appear again until 1986.
But Siok knows Skyscrapers — one of four such organizations that formed during that era — wasn't created without reason.
“They didn’t do that just randomly," he said. "There was a big push in learning about astronomy. … It was a tremendous surge of interest.”
Siok surmises it was driven by a growing fascination with amateur telescope-making and planetariums, which would soon emerge in New York and Boston.
Asked what his reason was for joining, Siok had two words: "Space program."
"We were in high school when Gemini and Mercury were taking place," he said, referring to early spaceflight programs. "And that’s why there’s such a large group of us who, we’re all in our 60s and our 70s, but we were all crazy space shots when we were growing up."
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Matt White, another of the group's members, immediately piped up: "Me, too. I think I was 8 or 9 years old when I got my first telescope."
All these years later, they're still looking to the sky in fascination. So is Kathy, but on one occasion in the 1970s during a bright showing of Pluto, she was a skeptic.
"Another guy and myself had a finder chart and we were absolutely sure we saw Pluto," Siok remembered. "And I took her out. I said, 'C'mon, Kathy, you got to see Pluto.'"
"Eh, you guys are dreamin'," she said. "It's not here."