He asked what any youngster would. “What's that?”
“Falling stars,” his mother answered. “Every time somebody dies, a star falls.”
“I wondered which star was mine,” Lahaye says. “I wanted to find it. I wanted to outrun it.”
Fifty-four years later, Lahaye - there's a “Sr.” behind his name now - is still outrunning his star, and still, in a way, looking for it.
He searches through large telescopes he builds himself, in the shop next to his home hidden behind brush and assorted other buildings here in downtown Ravalli.
Largely on the interest sparked by his mother's answer, Lahaye built his first telescope half a century ago, when he was 10, using a couple of lenses, a two-by-four and nails.
“It wasn't great,” he says, “but it worked. You could see the moon pretty good with it.”
Today, his telescopes are sophisticated machines capable of looking far beyond the moon, and taking stargazers on a tour of the universe. Half a dozen schools on the Flathead Indian Reservation have telescopes manufactured by Lahaye, as do many amateur astronomers in the area.
Lahaye's motives for building telescopes are simple. He wants people to share his passion for astronomy, and knows they won't if it's a pain to locate anything through your typical store-bought telescope.
“I hate to see kids get out those rickety things where they can't see anything,” says Lahaye, president of the Mission Valley Astronomy Club.
“People are seduced by the power on a telescope, but you don't want power, you want aperture,” says the club's vice president, Mike Hawkaluk of Ronan. “Most things worth looking at, you can see at 30 to 40 power.”
In other words, telescopes are more about how much light you can capture than how much you can magnify it once it's caught.
So Lahaye's line of telescopes goes by the size of the objective mirror. He can make a 4 1/2-incher for about $200, a 6-inch for $290, an 8-inch for $310, a 10-inch for $410 and a 12-inch for $800.
Most of the cost is for the optics he must buy. The bigger they are, the more light-gathering power they have.
He built a 16-inch telescope for himself and the astronomy club that is over 5 1/2 feet long.
“When I first started, it took me about a week to make one. I had to hand-make just about everything,” Lahaye says. “Now I could put out three a day. But they're not toys. They're designed to outlast the owner.”
He manufactures everything but the optics himself.
“I can buy the optics cheaper than I can make them,” Lahaye says, “but I'm going to get a mirror-grinding machine. Right now I'd have to do it by hand, and it'd take forever.”
He uses lasers to fine-tune the Newtonian reflector telescopes, named after their inventor, Sir Isaac Newton.
“It's a precision alignment,” Lahaye says. “It's what makes it an instrument and not a toy.”
A few years ago, after a rain, the sky cleared and Leonard Lahaye knew he was in for a long night.
“It was crystal clear,” he says. “The stars were not even twinkling. I hadn't seen anything like it in decades. It was almost like the nebulas were pulsating. It was amazing. Very seldom do you get a night like that, and when you do, you use it all night.”
Southern skies, where you'll find the constellation Sagittarius, are his favorite.
“There are so many nebulas and star clusters,” says Lahaye, a maintenance technician for Arlee Schools. “It's a beautiful area of the sky - just fantastic.”
Of course, you can't look into a night sky for too long without the brain starting to pose some pretty big questions.
“It's mind-boggling,” Lahaye says. “Beyond the imagination, once you start to understand the vast distances out there. The closest star to us is 25 trillion miles away.”
Drop a quarter on the ground, he says. Then imagine the size of the quarter compared to the rest of the North American Continent. The quarter would represent the size of our solar system. The North American Continent would represent the size of our galaxy.
“That's where the difficulty comes in finding things out there,” he says.
To Lahaye, the human race should be focusing on space more than it is.
“We're going to have to leave the nest one day,” he says. “Some day the star we call the sun is going to start having problems.”
OK, that could be a few million years away, but there are other things that could make the planet we take for granted uninhabitable.
“Look at the extinction of the dinosaurs,” Lahaye says. “Who knows when the next asteroid is going to come in, or solar flares are going to mess things up? We'll have to get out one day.”
The Mission Valley Astronomy Club has about a dozen core members who have remained active in it for years, Lahaye says, and total membership has ranged from 20 to 50.
Membership is just $5 a year.
“What do they get for that? Lahaye says. “Nothing - except people lined up to look through their telescopes.”
In addition to its own star parties, the club puts on programs. Members will train their scopes on different objects, then let folks go from telescope to telescope to view different objects in space.
“We were doing a program in Seeley Lake and I had telescope on a double star called Albireo,” he says.
For Lahaye, the contrasting blue-and-gold stars are a sight to behold.
“People were taking turns looking, and then this little old lady, had to be in her 80s, stepped up,” he says. “I helped her up on the stand, got her anchored, and watched her look.”
She stood there in silence for the longest time. Lahaye may have wondered if she had the wrong eye shut as she looked through the eyepiece.
“She didn't say anything,” he says. “She got down, walked away, then grabbed this guy by his lapels and said, “You have got to see this! I can't believe it! It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen!”
That's what Lahaye loves - showing people the wonders that exist beyond their world. And building the telescopes that can do it.
“I gave my mom a lot of grief later on” about that story she once told him about “falling stars,” otherwise known as meteors, Lahaye says. “She scared the daylights out of me. But it got me interested, and I've just kept going.”
Lahaye is reflected in the mirror of his 16-inch telescope.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.
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