Carolyn Pendleton has similar interests to many active 80-year-olds. The Rockland resident works as a volunteer, belongs to several community groups and likes to take walks, play bridge, do crossword puzzles and read.

She also has the stars.

For the past 50 years, Pendleton has been a self-taught, backyard astronomer. For much of the year, when conditions are right, she takes her Celestron 8-inch telescope into the yard of her Pen Bay Acres home, and looks skyward.

“The sky changes every night,” she explained recently at her home. “There are different things rising. You can see five planets this week.”

The past year was a banner time for astronomers.

“The things nature handed to us [last] year was so much fun – the lunar eclipse, the northern lights, Mars the closest it’s been in years,” she said.

A little house cleaning 50 years ago led to Pendleton’s longtime hobby. Her mother was moving and asked her if there was anything that she wanted from the attic. She rescued her brother’s introduction to astronomy textbook.

“Once I learned where north was, I didn’t have any problems reading those star charts,” she recalled.

Pendleton’s husband, Leland, borrowed a pair of binoculars so she could get started.

“I was stunned by how much I could see with regular binoculars,” she said. “It was just a waterfall of stars.”

When she began, such phenomena as quarks and quasars hadn’t even been discovered yet.

“My purpose was to find constellations,” she said. “Sometimes I’m surprised by how much science I’ve learned, just by chance.”

She got her first telescope, a 60 mm model, in 1973, just in time for a visit by the comet Kohoutek.

“It was the first comet to appear in decades,” she said. “You needed optical aid to see it. I found it, but I just about froze to death to see it. I had people dropping in to view it.”

Pendleton bought her current telescope 23 years ago, at her son James’ urging. The instrument, which weighs 24 pounds, gives her 250 times the magnification of what can be seen with the naked eye.

“My son, when he was in high school, said, ‘Let’s get a decent telescope,’ ” she remembered. “He said he’d put in his lawn-mowing and paper [route] money if I’d throw in the rest. I told him to pick it out, but that it needed to be small enough to lift, so we wouldn’t need a pickup truck to drag it around.”

When the telescope arrived, James set it up on a lamp table in the front yard.

“He found a robin sitting on a wire down the street, and you could see the angleworm in its mouth,” Pendleton said.

James went on to earn a degree in astronomy from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and now works as a software designer. He is engaged to Dawn Lenz, a solar physicist.

Pendleton, who worked as a bookkeeper at the Senter-Crane department store for 18 years, seriously started studying the stars at that point. Astronomy magazine has been her bible (Leland had a bookcase specially built to house her collection of that publication). She’s adapted to the computer age, and regularly visits spaceweather.com.

Although stargazing has been largely a solitary pursuit, Pendleton has started sharing the knowledge she has gained in recent years, speaking at a number of meetings. What’s her advice for beginners?

“First you need to learn where north is, because you can’t read a star chart if you don’t know what direction to look,” she said. “Then just go out and look. You can stargaze with the naked eye or binoculars.”

Pendleton is a fan of space, but feels no compulsion to go there.

“I like to look, but I don’t want to touch,” she said. “It takes so long to travel in non-gravity, and they don’t know how humans would work in non-gravity. I can’t imagine the logistics of getting to Mars, and surviving there.”

She’s sorry that the Hubble Space Telescope will be allowed to expire, and was saddened to see the Mir space station brought down and two space shuttles explode.

“I guess they’ve decided that it isn’t as easy as it looked in the early years,” she mused.

Still, Pendleton will keep looking up, and wishes that others would do the same.

“We crawl into our caves when the sun sets, pull the bearskin down over us and put our feet up in front of the warm TV set,” she said disapprovingly.

Carolyn Pendleton will give a talk about astronomy at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, May 6, at the Rockland Public Library at 80 Union St. Dale McGarrigle can be reached at 990-9028 and dmcgarrigle@bangordailynews.net.