Introduction
I want to write down these thoughts and observations
now, because I have noticed in the past that that the longer I have understood a
thing, the less I can find to say about it.
It is a paradox that I explain to myself as a gradual forgetting of what
it was like to never have known about the beginnings of a subject.
Over time what was once new and intensely interesting becomes obvious.
How could one not know such basic things?
I am now only 3years from that morning in December when I asked my wife
“What do you think if I want to build a telescope?”
“Good idea” she replied, neither one of us imagining that it would
turn into a passion for knowledge about distant places and the instruments for
searching them out. So now, while
the blank space in my consciousness on hearing words like ‘supernova
remnant’ is still fresh in my memory; this is my account.
The machinery, the mathematics, and most of all the images of astronomy
are things of uncommon beauty and unimaginable scale and violence.
Previously,
if I thought about the night sky at all, I imagined that I had a pretty clear
idea about the things that were overhead. I
knew that there were the stars and that there were the planets.
These are interesting things to dream about, but except for the moon and
some of the planets, not much to look at. I
knew that if you aim a telescope up there you would see stars just like those
you see when you look up at the night sky with the naked eye.
I knew that what you would see is further away certainly, but
still things would look the same. I
couldn’t imagine why anyone other than a professional would bother.
Given
the absence of any positive compelling reason, I’m not exactly sure why I
decided to build a telescope. It
was just one of those impulses that got followed up on. The project turned out to be much more complicated than I at
first imagined and it was the better part of two years before it became
operational. I think I kept at it
because it was complex enough - what with the mechanics and optics - to be
interesting, but not so difficult as to be impossible to fabricate in the
garage. That is one explanation.
Another is that there are purposes in life that resonate with something
fundamental inside; some subvocal intimation of things one ought to be
doing. For me, this was one of
those ideas.
The telescope’s design is a fully motorized and computer controlled equatorial horseshoe mount; a 12.5” version of the 200” Hale telescope at Palomar. The tube that carries the mirrors is a version of the one used in the Hale’s predecessor, the Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson. These telescopes were finished in 1949 and 1917 respectively and were for many decades, from the 1920’s through the 1960’s, the premiere telescopes in the world and the ones that hosted most of the fundamental discoveries in cosmology. So my little telescope has an aristocratic pedigree.
Along the way of building this telescope I learned that I might be able to see a spiral galaxy, but beyond that didn’t have much of an idea of what to do with it. But I was by this time having so much fun building it that I didn’t give too much thought as to what I would actually do when it was completed.
When it was finished though, what sublime things I found! The stuff in the universe is far more spectacular, far more stunning, than I had any idea. The universe is all at once violent, breathtakingly beautiful and unimaginable in its scale. Almost as astonishing is that it is there to be seen by anyone who will go to the trouble to look. And the looking does not require so much effort or expensive equipment as you might expect. Some of the more enjoyable evenings I have spent with the night sky were lying in the back of a pickup truck sharing a pair of binoculars with a friend. Just looking, though, is not enough to engage the attention more for than a brief period.
As John Ruskin put it:
“The
greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something.....To
see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one.” And I
agree with that, but it only states half of the case. The other half is implied, but I state it explicitly:
To see ‘clearly’ entails an understanding of what we see and it
is the understanding of the things and processes that we are looking at which
enables our visual fascination. If
the sky were only a beautiful picture and not also a partially understood
enigma, we (amateur astronomers) wouldn’t make any more visits there than we
do to the art gallery. And here we must point the telescope inward rather than at
the stars. When I see what is in
the heavens I am extraordinarily pleased. When
I see and also understand what I am seeing, however incompletely, it takes my
breath away.
There
are images here of Nebulae with names like Ring, Owl, Dumbbell, and Horsehead.
There are images ranging from forbidding black clouds to fragile
transparent bubbles. There is the
remnant of a supernova which exploded over 1,000 years ago and whose expanding
cloud of gas is still accelerating outward.
There are face-on spiral galaxies, edge on galaxies, barred spiral
galaxies. There are globular
clusters of stars orbiting the center of our own galaxy that are nearly as old
as the universe. The binary star
Epsilon Lyrae is 160 light years away, and the Quasar PSS J1433+2724
is 12,600
million light years away. (A light year is the distance light travels in 1 year
– 5,865,696,000,000 miles.) This
light truly is from the edge of the universe.
The distances are so large in terms of a trip to the grocery store, or
even a trip to Tokyo, as to be meaningless.
They can be made sense of in a relative way, but not in the context of
the stuff of everyday life.
Words
implying high drama are so commonly used to describe what are in reality rather
ordinary things, that they become trivialized. So it is not as easy as it should
be to find the words to express the awe I have felt these past years.
If I had a sense of beauty and wonder looking up at the starry nights
before, now I am stunned. And I was
delighted, like a child who gets to see the world for the first time.
Here then are images and notes on what I have found.
Ben
Davies
San Francisco, California 2005-2006