Later it was our practice, especially on warm evenings, to take the last of the dinner wine and two glasses outside where we sat in Adirondack chairs that overlooked the valley and he would explain to me the stars, planets, comets, meteor showers, and other celestial objects that appeared in the nighttime sky at that time of year. Then he would set up his telescope and point out everything to me, until I grew to look forward to our nocturnal stargazing sessions as much as he did.

“I’ll come with you,” I said. “What are we looking for tonight?”

“Jupiter,” he said. “Did I read you that article in Sky & Telescope a few months ago about the twelve new moons they just found?”

I nodded. “What about it?”

“Come on,” he said, “let’s get our coats and I’ll tell you.”

We brought flashlights with red filters over the lights so we wouldn’t ruin our night vision. The Adirondack chairs were cold—it would feel like sitting on a large block of ice—so I got two heavy quilts out of the summerhouse and bundled up in mine while he set up the telescope and smoked his cigar, its tip glowing like an orange mini-moon in the quiet darkness.

“I found Jupiter,” he said. “Come on over and take a look. Tonight you can really see the Galilean moons so clearly.”

Quinn had told me long ago that Jupiter’s four biggest moons, which collectively were named after their discoverer Galileo Galilei, were eventually named Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, after the lovers of the Greek god Zeus—a small irony since the ancient Romans worshipped Jupiter as their equivalent of Zeus.

I got up and dragged my quilt over to the telescope like it was a royal robe. “What about the twelve new moons? Can you see them?”

“They’re tiny,” he said. “Maybe as small as a mile or two wide. More like ‘moonlets.’ They’re probably the result of collisions and what was left over after the giant planets formed.”

“You mean like space debris?” I bent down and looked through the eyepiece and there it was. Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, a dazzling, non-twinkling silvery star. “How many moons are there in all now?”

“Seventy-nine, counting the new ones,” he said. “They’re thinking of naming one them Valetudo. It’s sort of an odd duck, an outlier because it’s orbiting an outer belt of moons that are traveling retrograde around Jupiter.”