Consider the Stars

There is something truly other-worldly about looking through a telescope. I scrunch one eye, press the other to the eye piece, and through the distance of a few well focussed lenses, I am transported across time and space, suddenly face to face with Saturn, a binary star, a distant galaxy. When I pull my eyes away, the bewitching night sky beckons from afar once more, both tantalizing and humbling in its vast scope, its distance. I can suddenly relate to the moth that fell in love with a star.

This past weekend I traded the vast unknown of the ocean for its cosmic equivalent at a community astronomy night at the Fremont Peak Observatory with two friends. The blissfully warm evening was hosted by Allen, a researcher at our lab who studies both marine science and astronomy. It's truly inspiring to know that people can balance two such different and difficult fields.

He pushes around the massive 30" telescope, which moves with surprising ease for something the weight of a small car. He trains it on various sparkling specks, and we wait our turns to climb the ladder and peer at the artistically named Sombrero Galaxy, the Whirlpool Galaxy. True, they are a little blurry, just a smudge, really, in the corner of the view finder. But add one drop imagination and another of curiosity, and I can begin to understand how science fiction was born. What is it like out there, in all that space?

The real show stoppers are the globular clusters, flowerbursts of hundreds of little stars. And being the neophyte astronomers that we are, we also clamor to see Saturn and Mars - even the moon! Saturn through the telescope looks like a picture pulled from my third grade report - a perfect ringed orb, with tiny moons visible. Having seen its image so many times before, I can can hardly fathom that I'm looking at the real thing.

And the moon - its brightness wreaks a little havoc on the visibility of everything else that night, and something about its attention-hogging glow makes it hard to look away. It is so blinding white through the powerful telescope that I have its image seared into my closed eyelids for a few minutes after I finally pull myself away. But oh, its curving surface stretching away from view, its mysterious shadowed edge creeping over a craggy mountain range. I planned my trip across its frontiers, through the hills and valleys of its pockmarked surface.

My own scientific passion having lead me down a completely different road, I feel refreshed and awed by students of a visitng astronomy class who rattle off about the Orion nebula, about various and sundry stars that are indistinguishable to my eyes. I feel the same excitement as I did while reading a recent Smithsonian cover story written by Rob Irion, director of the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication program. Every piece of knowledge is new and slightly exhilarating, as I momentarily dip a toe into a field so foreign to me.

Indeed, I am more than happy to simply flesh out my paltry knowledge of constellations. Gemini, Corvus, and Leo now join the Big Dipper and Orion in my mental sky map. Allen points them out with an incredible laser pointers that can beam up into the heavens, outlining patterns in the sky (if you missed my birthday, there's a hint for you...). I am transported back to my summer camp days at the community college planetarium, sitting back in my plush seat inside a giant volleyball of a dome, listening to stories of Pegasus and Medusa, of swans and scorpions trapped in the sky.

How comforting the stars must have been to the seafaring explorer, reappearing each night like old friends, passing through in their seasonal trek across the sky. The timeworn tale holds a little more weight, as my personal night sky becomes that much more familiar, expanding my mental horizons with it.