Posts Tagged ‘Galaxy’

Dawn on Indian Creek Lake

I fell in love with astronomy when I was only a kid, about ten or eleven I think, and I saved my money from odd jobs until I had enough to buy a five-inch reflector telescope. It wasn’t much by modern standards, with a brittle bakelite body and a small starfinder scope that never really worked, but I loved it…and the hours of enjoyment it provided. Because I never had enough money to buy a sidereal mount, I had to search for stellar objects in an enlarging spiral then try to track them while they tried equally hard to glide away from my telescope’s little mirror.
I remember so many nights up there on an unused outdoor stairway, the highest place I could find, breathlessly discovering, endlessly asking myself questions I’ve carried with me ever since. I remember the first time I saw the Andromeda Galaxy…billions of stars, and not all that far away, but when I turned the telescope to a field of galaxies, I was stunned. There were billions of those, too! That’s heavy stuff for an eleven-year-old.
One night, a friend joined me at the top of the stairs. He seemed really interested, and while I was trying to find something to show him, the sky suddenly glowed brilliant bluish-white. I even heard a sizzling sound coming from above. “It’s a nuclear attack!” he yelled. “No! It’s a meteor…a HUGE METEOR!” I answered. We watched it streak across the sky, finally breaking up and tumbling as glowing orange embers into the gulf far to the south.
Living in town, constantly fighting unwanted light, I tried hard to get into the darkest corners I could find, but there was always a sort of fuzzy haze in the air. It made the soft glow of the Milky Way majestic and friendly, but once when I was visiting in rural Texas, it showed a very different side. On an exceptionally clear, moonless night, I went outside to see my old friend and was startled by what I saw. The Milky Way seemed closer there, almost threatening.
I could see brilliant stars, but instead of soft, bright clouds, hard-edged masses…millions of small points of light. It seemed as if my hand would be burned by nuclear furnaces if I reached up even a few feet, poised as the sky was that night, ready to crash down and envelop me. It was too immediate, too detailed…too immense. I was seeing it the way the ancients had, and it was a little scary…small wonder they found gods clothed in those masses of dust, gas, and unchanging light.
In that moment of epiphany I learned our real address, not on Earth but in the company of stars…near the edge of a gigantic galaxy. A lovely place to be, it allows us to see almost the entire sweep we’re part of, even if it is a little lonely. Closer in, say where the stars are tightly clustered together, we’d have a better chance of discovering we’re not alone, but we’d lose a lot, like the beauty of the Milky Way as we see it and our black nights…not to mention the fact that we’d be a lot closer to an immense black hole.
The one celestial phenomenon I could never spot was a comet. I poured over pictures and drawings of them, with their fuzzy, bright tails, some visible across the entire night sky, but I wanted to see the real thing. Sometimes, comets were described on the news, but I could never find them. I went to the darkest places I knew, but they were never far enough from security lighting and street lamps. It turned out comets were kind of hard to see in the modern world…but then Hale-Bopp came along.
I went camping just to see it…and took my canoe. For a week, every night I slid into Indian Creek Lake and paddled out to the middle to see the marvel in the western sky, photographing it, contemplating, trying to imagine myself in space only a few thousand miles from it. I thought it was pretty, but I wasn’t as impressed as I expected…I guess that humongus meteor had jaded me a little. A fuzzy glowing object in almost the same place night after night was no match for the sizzling, massively glowing, beastly thing my friend thought was a Russian attack.
These days I don’t do as much stargazing. I’ve seen just about everything any telescope I could afford would show, and now we have the West Nile Virus to worry about. I tried once, smothered in repellent, but mosquitoes joyfully attacked me in droves. I kept waiting for the headache and blurred vision, but they never came. Now, I only pop out on clear, moonless winter nights. If I’m lucky, I see the Milky Way almost like I did that night in Texas, and once again its power, extent, and immediacy comes flooding to me in an uneasy tingle.
It’s almost pointless to argue where it all came from. Either way, you come up with an imponderable. If God made it, He is eternal, without beginning or end, as described in the Bible, but we can’t understand that. If He didn’t, it has always been, maybe contracting periodically and Big Banging out again, but eternal. We can’t understand that either. Of course, there’s always the possibility that everything we see and know came into existence out of nothing…with no causal event. Some people actually say that, but to me at least, that one is too silly to try and understand.
As regular readers probably know…or anyone who’s read my book, I vote for God, but I realize every person has to work it out for himself…and in the end, I’ve come to think understanding isn’t really important. Maybe our confusion should only bring us closer to our ancient brothers who studied the night sky…a little fearfully, I suspect, and tried their best to make sense of it just like us, and I hope the gods they saw up there gave them comfort.
Maybe we’re only supposed to look in awe, feel wonder and a little discomfort about how tiny and insignificant we really are. Flying around on a watery rock tethered to a dim yellow star, the middle-aged son of an ancient supernova, and out almost at the end of one arm of a massive, starry spiral, we gain perspective only when we look into the night sky…and if you do it right, it’s astonishing. I’m not eleven any more and not nearly as innocent, but it doesn’t matter. I still feel the tingle…I think I always will.