Deerlick Astronomy Village: Dark Sky Life in Sharon, Georgia

Matador Network quoted Erik Benner: "This isn't a place for college students to come drink and see some stars."

As a part-time resident and co-founder of Deerlick Astronomy Village, he is describing the unwritten code that governs a gated stretch of land off Aaron Grier Road outside Sharon. The written code is stricter. No white light of any kind is allowed on the observing field after sunset. Not headlights, not cell phone screens, not the glow of a car's interior dome light when someone opens a door. Visitors navigate the property using parking lights only, guided by a scatter of small red bulbs along the lanes. It sounds like an inconvenience. In Sharon, it's the whole point, and it's the reason a town of roughly a hundred people has built one of the more active small-town calendars in this stretch of the county.

A Village Built Around What It Doesn't Have

Deerlick Astronomy Village was founded in the mid-2000s by members of the Atlanta Astronomy Club who went looking for the darkest patch of sky within reach of the metro area and found it in Taliaferro County, about 90 miles out. The name comes from the Deer Lick group of galaxies visible in Pegasus, not the local wildlife, though deer are common enough on the property after dark.

The site sits at roughly 33.56 north, 82.76 west, at an elevation between 550 and 600 feet, and it's rated at magnitude 6 to 6.5, the upper range of what a human eye can pick out from anywhere on the planet. Getting there means driving through downtown Sharon itself: south on Highway 269 to the four-way stop, east onto Main Street (also called Raytown Road, also called County Road 79), then a turn onto Double Wells Road before the final stretch onto Aaron Grier Road, an unpaved cut that ends at a gate members call Star Gate 1. The directions warn drivers to watch for an unmarked railroad crossing about two miles in. There's no signal there, in either sense of the word.

Grier's Field, the ten-acre main viewing area, has concrete pads for telescope setups, bathrooms, a picnic pavilion with a gas grill, and a small warming hut with blackout curtains for cold nights. None of it is free, exactly, but none of it is priced like a business either.

That fee sheet is the clearest evidence of what Deerlick actually is. Five dollars a head doesn't cover insurance on a piece of land like this, let alone maintenance on a bathroom and a warming hut. It covers upkeep and nothing more, which means the village runs the way most small nonprofits run: dues, volunteer hours, and a shared interest strong enough to keep people showing up on cold nights in a gravel parking lot with the headlights off.

One Saturday a Year, the Dark Gets a Daytime Shift

The rest of the year, Deerlick keeps its rules and its quiet. Then, on the last Saturday in April, some of that same equipment shows up in the middle of town.

Sharon Shenanigans is the annual community fair, now well past its first decade. Organizers call themselves Shenanigators, and Jane Kuehn has held the title of Shenanigator in charge. The fair runs from roughly 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Sharon Community Center on Raytown Road, with a potluck kickoff the evening before, drinks and dessert provided by the organizers, everyone else asked to bring a covered dish.

The daytime program reads like a town deciding to use everything it has at once: live entertainment, bounce houses, a scavenger hunt for kids, local artisans selling crochet, woodwork, and jewelry, jars of honey and jam and fresh-ground grits at the food tables, and live tree giveaways handled jointly by 4-H, UGA horticulture extension staff, and Healthier Together Taliaferro. Members of Deerlick Astronomy Village bring solar telescopes to the same field, offering safe daytime sun viewing to a crowd the club has estimated at 200 or more. That's a number worth sitting with for a second. The 2020 census counted 104 people living in Sharon. Even generous local counts put the year-round population closer to 150. A single Saturday afternoon fair draws more outside visitors than the town has residents, which only works because the thing drawing them isn't really about Sharon's size. It's about what the dark around Sharon has made possible.

The Institutions That Keep Showing Up

The fair's list of stops beyond the community center tells you where the rest of the town's civic life actually lives. The Sharon-Raytown Garden Club, the second oldest in Georgia, operates out of a one-room schoolhouse and sponsors the community garden that supplies some of the produce at the fair. The Purification Heritage Center, home to the historic Church of the Purification and Locust Grove Cemetery, the oldest Catholic cemetery in the state, sits close enough to town that it's listed as a walking stop during Shenanigans weekend rather than a separate day trip.

None of these are large institutions. A one-room schoolhouse and a rural cemetery aren't built for scale. What they are is durable, the kind of civic infrastructure that keeps functioning in a town too small to support much else, because the people running it treat continuity as the job rather than growth.

Why the Rules Are the Feature

Most towns this size lose their public calendar to distance and thin population. There's nobody left to organize the potluck, and even if there were, there's nowhere close enough to draw a crowd. Sharon inverted that math by turning its biggest apparent liability, no ambient light for miles, into the one resource nobody else nearby can offer. The red-lights-only rule at Deerlick isn't a quirky restriction bolted onto a hobbyist club. It's the reason there's a functioning calendar in Sharon at all, one that pulls outside visitors in on a schedule as reliable as the Atlanta Astronomy Club's own observing nights and the last Saturday in April.

Deerlick's public observing nights, weather permitting, follow the club's posted schedule on its own site, and Sharon Shenanigans returns every spring on its usual last-Saturday-in-April date, potluck the Friday night before. Both run on rules built to keep the sky and the town exactly as dark, and exactly as small, as the thing that makes them worth the drive.

If a night at Deerlick or an afternoon at the fairgrounds has you curious about what the land around Sharon actually looks like on a plat map, from parcel lines to road frontage, GA.LAND can pull the property packet for any tract in Taliaferro County and walk you through what's on it.