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Keep Looking Up: Cape May Astro Founder Kevin Beare Shares the Beauty in the Darkness

Issue #799

September 07, 2026

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In This Cape May Local Scoop Issue…

 📆 Cape May Events

☀️ Cape May Local Weather 

🔭Keep Looking Up: Cape May Astro Founder Kevin Beare Shares the Beauty in the Darkness

🦋Cape May Point Invites Public to Help Track Migrating Monarch Butterflies 

🎭Cape May Porch Reading Series Continues at The Dormer House

Cape May Local Scoop’s Events Are Sponsored By: Survivors of Cancer

👇 Here’s what’s going on in the Cape May Local Area👇

 September 7

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 Keep Looking Up: Cape May Astro Founder Kevin Beare Shares the Beauty in the Darkness

On clear nights around Cape May, Kevin Beare can often be found surrounded by a crowd. The attraction isn't a concert, street performer or Boardwalk entertainer. It's the universe.

Beare, the founder of Cape May Astro, has transformed his Honda Ridgeline into a mobile observatory that allows residents and visitors to see everything from Saturn's rings and the craters of the moon to nebulae and distant galaxies.

What started with a single telescope during the COVID-19 pandemic has grown into an unusual form of public outreach combining astronomy, technology, education and Beare's deeply personal connection to Cape May.

His goal is remarkably simple: get people to look up.

Beare describes himself as a fourth-generation Cape May local whose family's connection to the resort stretches back to the early 20th century. His great-grandfather came to the United States after working as a tailor for the Vienna Opera. After initially settling in Philadelphia, his tailoring work eventually brought him to Cape May. He later established a tailor shop at the location now occupied by the Ugly Mug.

Astronomy entered Beare's life through another family member — his grandmother Hannah. When Beare was 8, Hannah took him outside during the Perseid meteor shower. He remembers watching meteor after meteor cross the summer sky and repeatedly asking to stay long enough to see just one more.

The experience stayed with him.

Years later, when Beare purchased the telescope that would ultimately launch Cape May Astro, he named it Hannah.

Cape May Astro Is Born During COVID

 Beare's professional life took him in an entirely different direction. He became a funeral director, a career he continues today.

Then came 2020. Frustrated by the isolation of the COVID-19 lockdown, Beare began researching telescopes and invested in his first smart telescope.

The technology was different from the telescope many people remember from childhood. Instead of requiring each person to peer individually through an eyepiece, Beare could connect the telescope to a tablet or smartphone and allow an entire group to see the same image.

He immediately recognized its potential for public astronomy. After spending about a month learning the equipment, Beare loaded the telescope into his Ridgeline on Oct. 31, 2020, and headed toward downtown Cape May without a firm plan for where he would set up.

He found parking at the Victorian Motel on Congress Place and received permission to put up his telescope. Within roughly 30 to 45 minutes, Beare recalled, around 40 people had gathered. Cape May Astro was born.

The Victorian Motel continued supporting Beare's efforts, providing a place where his increasingly recognizable astronomy operation could return.

Six years later, what started with one telescope has grown into a collection of seven.

Sharing 'The Beauty in the Darkness'

Beare describes his mission with a phrase that has become central to Cape May Astro: sharing the beauty in the darkness.

Sometimes that beauty is relatively close to home. He can show visitors the rings of Saturn, planets visible in the night sky, details on the moon or the International Space Station passing overhead.

Other nights, his telescopes reach considerably deeper into space. One of Beare's favorite objects is the Eagle Nebula, or M16, about 7,000 light-years from Earth and home to the famous Pillars of Creation.

The formations have become iconic through images produced by space telescopes, but Beare can give people an opportunity to observe that region of space while standing on a Cape May street.

During one encounter, a woman approached his telescope and learned he was observing the Eagle Nebula. She immediately recognized the Pillars of Creation and became emotional. She then showed Beare her phone. The Pillars of Creation were already her background image.

Pillars of Creation

Now she was seeing that part of the universe through a telescope in Cape May. Those moments have become the real purpose of Cape May Astro.

As Beare's outreach expanded, so did his equipment.

His Honda Ridgeline has evolved into a highly customized mobile astronomy station equipped with large 27-inch displays, Starlink connectivity, portable power, solar capability and red lighting designed to preserve night vision.

The large screens allow groups to experience observations together rather than lining up one at a time behind a telescope.

Starlink gives Beare internet access in the field, allowing him to pull up information and live tracking data while speaking with visitors. That is especially useful when the International Space Station passes over the region.

During one observation in 2022, Beare was tracking the ISS when a woman approached and asked where it was. He showed her that the station was passing over New Zealand. She then surprised him by explaining that her cousin was astronaut Bob Hines currently on the ISS on a mission for NASA.

Moments like that have reinforced Beare's belief that the telescopes are only the beginning of the experience. The conversations are what matter. Some visitors stay five minutes. Others remain for an hour. Beare said he has heard from families who continued discussing what they learned long after leaving Cape May.

Making Astronomy Affordable

Although Beare estimates he has personally invested tens of thousands of dollars into Cape May Astro over six years, he doesn't believe someone needs an elaborate mobile observatory to follow his example.

Smart telescopes have become increasingly affordable, with some models selling for hundreds rather than thousands of dollars. The technology can automatically locate and track celestial objects and connect to smartphones and tablets.

For Beare, that presents parents with an intriguing alternative to the usual battle over children's screen time. A child can still hold a smartphone or tablet, but instead of playing a game or scrolling through social media, that device can become a window into the universe.

Beare wants more people to try it. In fact, one of his ambitions is to inspire other amateur astronomers to set up telescopes in their own communities and become what he calls street-corner astronomers.

Planting a Seed in Children

Children have become particularly important to Cape May Astro's mission.

One of Beare's favorite stories involves a girl named Ava. She was 6 when she first encountered Beare and his telescope during a family trip to Cape May. A year passed without her parents mentioning him. When the family prepared to return to Cape May, however, Ava had a question: Would the guy with the telescope be there?

For Beare, the fact that a child remembered the experience a year later was powerful. It reminded him of being 8 years old and standing beneath the Perseid meteor shower with his grandmother. He wants to plant the same seed.

Beare also encounters children whose questions challenge him. One young visitor asked him the distance to the closest black hole. Another boy quickly worked through a question about how many Earths could fit inside the sun. Beare doesn't pretend to know every answer. When he doesn't know, he looks it up. That curiosity — from both teacher and student — is part of the experience he wants Cape May Astro to encourage.

Going Viral From Cape May

Some of Beare's astronomical and weather observations have traveled far beyond Cape May.

He captured the International Space Station crossing the moon, an event lasting less than a second. Video of the observation attracted significant attention online. On another occasion, he captured an aircraft crossing the moon.

But one of his biggest social-media moments came from looking toward the atmosphere rather than deep space. Beare recorded a dramatic shelf cloud approaching the area, and the video accumulated millions of views. Those posts have introduced Cape May Astro to audiences far beyond South Jersey and led to unexpected social-media connections.

Beare views the attention less as celebrity than as another way to get people interested in science and the natural world.

A Chance Encounter With a NASA Scientist

Astronomy has also produced some remarkable personal connections for Beare.

During his travels surrounding the April 2024 total solar eclipse, he met Dr. Eric Smith, whom Beare described as having held major scientific roles connected to the Hubble and James Webb space telescope programs. The introduction grew out of an earlier encounter with a family Beare met while conducting public astronomy outreach.

For Beare, the episode reinforced a theme that has followed Cape May Astro from the beginning: one conversation unexpectedly leads to another. He has since pursued another opportunity to take his mobile observatory to an event associated with women in the space community, where he hopes to share his telescopes with people working in science and aerospace.

When the Sky Produces a Mystery

After years of watching satellites, airplanes, planets and stars, Beare says he recently encountered lights near Cape May Point that he could not identify.

According to Beare, he was contacted after unusual lights were observed low on the horizon. He went to investigate and later returned for additional observations. Beare said some of the lights appeared steady rather than blinking like conventional aircraft. During another observation, he saw several lights appear, move apart and disappear.

He checked a flight-tracking service but said he couldn't match what he observed with aircraft shown in the area.

Beare subsequently contacted Chris Bledsoe, an author known for accounts of alleged unexplained phenomena, and shared images with him.

The nature of the lights remains undetermined, and Beare acknowledges that he does not have enough information to identify what he saw. Rather than declaring an explanation, he hopes to return with better equipment and gather additional data.

For a man accustomed to helping others identify objects in the night sky, having something he cannot explain has created a new mystery to investigate.

'Wonderfully Insignificant'

Astronomy has also shaped Beare's philosophy about life.

When he shows visitors objects millions of light-years away, the enormous distances and timescales inevitably put an individual human lifespan into perspective. Beare describes that feeling not simply as insignificant, but as "wonderfully insignificant."

It's an outlook connected to his other profession.

As a funeral director at Spilker Funeral Home, Beare regularly encounters people experiencing grief, mortality and some of life's most difficult moments. Astronomy gives him another perspective on those experiences.

Looking into the universe reminds him how brief human life is on a cosmic scale — but also how extraordinary it is to be here at all.

He considers astronomy therapeutic for himself and believes looking upward can provide other people with perspective as well.

What's Next for Cape May Astro?

At 63, Beare continues working full time as a funeral director, but he can envision a future in which Cape May Astro becomes his primary pursuit.

He wants to launch longer-form video content, travel to astronomy gatherings around the country and eventually spend time in Florida sharing rocket launches.

A Cape May Astro website is another major part of the plan.

One practical feature would allow Beare to post his location whenever he sets up, solving a problem created by his growing following: people frequently want to know where to find him, but once a crowd gathers, he has little time to answer messages.

His ambitions extend considerably farther than Cape May.

Beare is exploring remotely operated telescopes in places with consistently clear skies, including West Texas and eventually the Southern Hemisphere. Those instruments could allow Cape May Astro followers to observe parts of the universe unavailable from South Jersey.

But no matter how sophisticated the technology becomes, the heart of Cape May Astro remains surprisingly simple. It's still about a person standing beneath the night sky and showing someone else something they've never seen before.

Beare was 8 when his grandmother Hannah gave him that experience. More than five decades later, he is trying to give it to the next generation.

His message to them is equally simple:

Keep looking up. There's beauty in the darkness.

Cape May Point Invites Public to Help Track Migrating Monarch Butterflies

Visitors to Cape May Point will have an opportunity to see how cutting-edge tracking technology is helping scientists follow one of nature’s most remarkable migrations when monarch butterfly transmitter tagging demonstrations begin Sept. 10.

The Cape May Point Arts and Science Center is hosting the public demonstrations in partnership with Cellular Tracking Technologies as part of Project Monarch, a community-science initiative designed to learn more about the butterflies’ migration.

Cape May is an important stopover for migrating monarchs as they make their way south toward overwintering areas in Mexico each fall.

During the demonstrations, visitors can watch researchers place extremely small radio transmitters on monarch butterflies before releasing them to continue their migration.

The technology allows researchers to gather information about the movements of individual butterflies, providing another tool for studying migration routes and stopover behavior.

The transmitters used for the project are designed to be exceptionally lightweight so they can travel with the butterflies. Researchers carefully attach the devices before releasing the tagged monarchs back into the wild.

The project also gives members of the public an opportunity to participate in the research.

Visitors can use the Project Monarch mobile app to help detect tagged butterflies and upload observations. Information collected through participating devices can contribute to a broader picture of where the monarchs travel after leaving Cape May Point.

The approach combines wildlife research with community participation, potentially expanding the geographic area over which individual butterflies can be detected.

For Cape May Point, the project brings together two things for which the area has become particularly well known: migratory wildlife and opportunities for the public to experience nature firsthand.

The demonstrations offer visitors a close-up look at monarch research while showing how increasingly small tracking devices are giving scientists new ways to investigate the movements of animals that were once extremely difficult to follow individually.

Public transmitter tagging demonstrations begin Sept. 10 at the Cape May Point Arts and Science Center. Additional dates and program information are available through the center.

Cape May Porch Reading Series Continues at The Dormer House

Classic American Tales will continue its weekly porch reading series in Cape May on Thursday, Sept. 10, with a firsthand account of one of the most devastating fires in American history.

Phil Pizzi will read Personal Experiences During the Chicago Fire, Frank J. Loesch’s 1871 account of the Great Chicago Fire.

The reading will be held from 4 to 5 p.m. on the porch of The Dormer House, 800 Columbia Ave. in Cape May.

Loesch’s account provides a personal perspective on the catastrophic fire that swept through Chicago in October 1871. The historic narrative also addresses one of the enduring legends surrounding the disaster — despite the famous story, there is no evidence that a cow belonging to Catherine O’Leary started the fire.

The program is part of Classic American Tales’ 2026 season of live readings featuring works from American literature and history.

Admission is $12 and is free for children ages 12 and younger as well as guests staying at The Dormer House. Lemonade and homemade treats are also served as part of the afternoon gathering.

Reservations are appreciated and may be made by emailing [email protected] or calling 609-884-5898.

Additional information about Classic American Tales and its 2026 season is available at ClassicAmericanTales.org.

What is the name of the Victorian-era architectural style that became prominent in Cape May after the devastating fire of 1878?

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 Answer to the September 6th Trivia Question 

What significant role did Cape May play during World War II?

A) It was a major shipbuilding center.
B) It hosted numerous naval facilities to protect American coastal shipping.
C) It was the site of a secret military training base.
D) It served as a key location for the Manhattan Project.

Answer: B) It hosted numerous naval facilities to protect American coastal shipping.

During World War II, Cape May was home to several U.S. Navy facilities, including a naval air station and a naval base, which played a crucial role in protecting American coastal shipping from the threat of German submarines​.

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