03/19/00

Stare at the above picture which I "borrowed" from the fantastic Space Telescope Science Institute. What a small photo for such an immense perspective! Each glob of yellow is a galaxy with billions of suns. Our self absorbed mundane lives hide the scope of reality from our minds. Science fiction will never be imaginative enough to convey the diversity of possible worlds that exist in this photo, but it is one of the best ways to try. Another way is to study Astronomy, the most philosophical of sciences. Most philosophers ask, what is man? Astronomy asks, where is man?

Late October, 1967, a month before I turned sixteen, my mother ordered me to find a job within two weeks of my birthday. Meeting that goal early, I found employment as a bag boy at the Kwik Chek in Coconut Grove, Florida. My first week's earnings was used to order hardback copies of the twelve Heinlein juveniles from Charles Scribner's Sons. My second check got me a small 60mm telescope from Sears. My mundane world was providing two methods of transportation into a larger reality.

Following in Galileo's footsteps, I aimed my scope at Jupiter. Seeing those four moons of Jupiter Galileo had discovered less than 400 years earlier was tremendously exciting. Eventually, I also observed Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn, as well as the moon. I saw little else in the Miami skies and quickly tired of gazing through the telescope. 60mm could only take me so far. Heinlein took me further.

Years before buying my telescope, my father had taken me camping in the Florida Keys and I had slept on a blanket on the beach. During the night I woke to see a vast celestial ceiling covered with stars and a great grayish cloud of the Milky Way slicing across the sky. That was one of the standout moments of my life. Our ancestors got to live with the immensity of the heavens. Us city folk are like the people in Asimov's "Nightfall," we never really see the true dark.

Maybe that dark night inspired my soul and created the desire to know more about the stars. Or did I want to know about astronomy because I loved science fiction? After buying the telescope I didn't have the discipline to really work at using it. The night sky of Miami lacked the wonder of that dark beach. If only I had been able to hook up with the local astronomy club, that would have made quite a difference. Instead I started pursuing astronomy without a telescope.

Jim Connell, a friend also into science fiction and astronomy, and I, signed up for a series of weekly courses at the Miami Planetarium. I remember our teacher's name was Mr. Sullivan, and he was one of those few teachers that make an impact. Connell and I would read and talk about astronomy and dreamed of buying a big telescope. We even went in with our friend George Kirshner to buy a kit for grinding an eight inch mirror. Connell and I stole an old rusty 55 gallon drum from a construction site to make a grinding stand. The three of us took turns grinding the blank, but eventually gave up on the project. Again, we didn't have the discipline. Walking around and around a barrel was not as fun as reading SF and daydreaming about orbiting another star.

Except for taking an astronomy course in college, and reading an issue of Sky & Telescope every once in awhile, or watching a special on TV, I pretty much forgot about astronomy for almost thirty years. If only Connell, Kirshner and I, had had the guidance of some experienced telescope makers. Anyone interested in amateur astronomy should seek out their local astronomy club. With the support of a club, we might would have stuck with the hobby.

And now, thirty plus years later, and couple months before I write this, I woke up in the middle of the night from an intense dream. I had dreamt that I was standing under the stars like I had when I was a boy. The dream had a powerful sense of wonder. I woke up wanting to see the stars again. A few weeks after that, I heard about the lunar eclipse and thought, yeah, why not take the time and go outside and look. What a strange mental subroutine to suddenly kick in.

I didn't expect much because I rarely see more than five stars in the Memphis skies. Grabbing my wife's cheap birding binoculars I ducked outside to have a look. The eclipse did not impress me as much as how many stars I could see on that cold and clear night. I gazed over to Orion and saw a little fuzzy patch of light and a few stars in Orion's belt. Looking through the binoculars I saw even more stars.

Damn, I thought, and wondered what a real telescope would see? So I went inside and got on the Internet and found my way to Orion Telescope and Binoculars and ordered a catalog. The next day I went and bought the latest Sky & Telescope and Astronomy magazine. I was hooked.

I had to have a telescope. I started visiting places on the net like Scope Reviews by Ed Ting or driving over to the bookstore to buy Star Ware by Phil Harrington.

I was on a mission. I had recently come into $620, so I also had a budget. I spent weeks pouring over telescope catalogs and reading reviews online and talking with people on the usenet news group sci.astro.amateur. And I went to a meeting of the local Memphis Astronomical Society and attended one of their observing nights way out in the country.

Visiting the dark country skies was like my dream. I could see zillions of stars. Constellations stood out. After years of looking up and only seeing a handful of stars I was seeing hundreds, maybe thousands. I'm not an excitable or emotional person, but I was impressed and moved by the sight. It was almost as good as being on that beach 35 years ago. The night in the Keys had been much darker and warm, and the Milky Way was thick and three dimensional. Standing in Tennessee in another century and millennium, the sky was clear and very cold, but sadly the Milky Way was much less obvious.

It's one thing to read about astronomy and look at the beautiful Hubble photographs, but it's another thing all together to stand out under the sky and look up at the stars. I'm an indoor person. I spend hours and hours every day looking at a computer screen or a TV screen or pages of a book or magazine. I monitor the universe remotely. So to stand in the dark bitter cold and stare at the stars was an experience for me. It fulfilled the desire created by my dream to see the stars. Funny how fate leads us around.

Looking through the various telescopes was a different kind of experience. It did not have the same impact as just looking up at the sky. The scope views of Jupiter, M42 and M31 were of a different nature. I still felt the direct connection to me standing in a field while they floated in the sky. I thought of all those dudes back in the sixteen hundreds with their telescopes trying to figure everything out. I've got years of book learning on those old guys, so I could not recreate what they felt, but I felt a kinship.

Academically I have a mental picture of the solar system, and I know a fair amount about astronomy in general, but I have absolutely no understanding of where everything outside of the solar system is positioned. I'm totally lost in the cosmos. So in a sense I'm still learning what so many people have tried to learn in the last four hundred years.

For as far back as we can remember, mankind has mapped the heavens by using a memory trick of drawing constellations onto the sky. The night time view of the heavens appears to change over time with the seasons, but it's really the earth moving around the sun. The sky doesn't change that much, only the stuff moving around in the solar system. The positions of stars change so slightly that its easy to think of them as unchanging. If we weren't standing on this whirling planet and if the earth wasn't rushing about the sun the stars would appear frozen in the sky.

As school kids we learn geography by memorizing the demarcations on a globe. Our ancient ancestors learned stellar geography by marking up the heavenly sphere with imaginary figures--a kind of visual mnemonics. Except for a handful of the most brightest and obvious, I don't know my constellations. And I will probably never see the southern sky below the equator.

Standing out in the field in LaGrange, Tennessee I felt the need to learn my way around in this local universe and develop a 3D mental map of where I am. Not from where I stand on this earth, but if I could walk the path the sun is taking. Imagine the plane of the ecliptic as a vast field, with north being the direction the sun is moving towards and south being what we would see if we were walking backwards. Polaris would be over head, but would it be in the zenith position? Under these imaginary conditions, the hemisphere of the sky would stop moving and I could develop a sense of where we are in this local arm of the galaxy.

Thinking about this model I have so many questions? Is the plane of the ecliptic similar to the plane of the galaxy? Looking at the photo at the top of this essay shows that the universe is a hodgepodge of orientations and directions. Do even the smartest astronomers and computers have a map of the universe that is understandable?

I'm so lost, I haven't the faintest clue in which direction our nearest neighboring star lies, much less the ten closest, or the one hundred closest. In 1968, Robert Sheckley published a hilariously funny book called Dimension of Miracles. I can't remember the exact details of the story, but it begins with a hapless protagonist, who I think was called Carmody, discovering an alien in his home. The strange creature informs Carmody that he has just won the grand galactic sweepstakes. The alien asks the hero of this crazy tale to come with him to the galactic center to pick up his prize. So in a flick of an eye they are elsewhere in the galaxy. The gist of the story is the poor sap is given his prize, but a return trip is not part of the deal. No one he asks seems to know in which direction the Sun and Earth lies.

I'm just as lost as poor Carmody. And I don't want to be so ignorant. As a guy approaching the half century mark it feels good to be learning something new. It is satisfying that my poor old brain cells can still retain any information at all. My current goal to learn enough astronomy to get some kind of sense of where I am in my local neighborhood of reality. Its a modest task I've set aside for myself that will be a good challenge. I'm not much different from my sixteen year old self. I'm still not disciplined and I still don't stick with hobbies, and I have trouble applying myself.

It's funny because I've read a number of posts by guys on sci.astro.amateur who have also come back to astronomy after thirty years and are buying telescopes. The Internet is quite sobering in illustrating how lacking in uniqueness our lives really are. I'm all the time finding people with likes and dislikes just like mine. So, it is easy to imagine, somewhere out in the universe is a creature sitting at his computer writing an essay with a picture of galaxies at the top and wondering what life is like in those distant worlds. And one of those galaxies is ours, and I am one of those creatures he's trying to imagine.

Can we see more with a telescope or with our imaginations?

Some fun references:

• Double Vision: How we learned the distance to the stars
• Celestial Coordinates
• Coordinate Systems
• AS 2001 Positional Astronomy
• Astronomical Coordinate Systems and Time Systems
• Astronomical Coordinate Systems - SEDS
• Time
• Astronomy Overview at ThinkQuest
• NCSA Astronomy Digital Image Library