Northforker: The night sky is one of the North Fork’s most beautiful – and endangered – natural resources

Southold was not much more than dark, rolling farmland when the Custer Institute and Observatory’s first building went up in 1938. The group’s founder, Charles Elmer, was an amateur astronomer so enamored with the night sky that he had built a telescope into the side of his Cedar Beach home and began hosting astronomy-loving friends there. (The men named their group not for the notorious general, but after Elmer’s wife’s maiden name, to thank her for the hospitality.)