Pemberton aligns her telescope as the festivities of the BPL’s annual “Night in the Library” begin.

By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com

Giselle Pemberton furrowed her brow as she set up her telescope outside the Central Library on Grand Army Plaza.

Pemberton, a member of the local Amateur Astronomers Association, was here to help host a stargazing station as part of the “Night in the Library,” the closest thing the Brooklyn Public Library has to the Met Gala. 

But it had been a busy day — half an hour before, she had been at another event at the nearby Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a similarly all-out annual bonanza of workshops, tours, and talks called “Make It Bloom.” Pemberton had been particularly inspired by the keynote speaker, Zoë Schlanger, author of the “The Light Eaters,” which examines the case for treating plants as conscious beings. “It doesn’t look like [plants] are doing anything,” she reflected. “They’re just sitting there. But they move a lot.”

When asked how she first got into astronomy, Pemberton’s eyes gazed through the evening traffic and the long line snaking up to the library’s golden doors, and alighted somewhere else. “One night, probably 15 years ago,” she recounted, “I was home in Trinidad, going on a turtle watching trip. We were on the beach. It was a new moon night. There was no moon in the sky, and as we’re on the beach looking at a leatherback turtle and a hawksbill turtle — which was a treat — I looked up. And the Milky Way was just splashed across the beach. It was such a sight to see. Since then, I’ve wanted to look at it more; we won’t see it here in New York City, but we can see stars and planets and nebulae.”

For Pemberton, her dual passions of botany and astronomy are inextricably linked. “Light, lack of light — all of it works together to get us from one day to the next,” she said, still tinkering with the telescope. Her interest wasn’t purely academic. “I think you care more when you understand what happens in nature around you,” she said, “than somebody who has no idea what’s happening.”