HUGE
My next door neighbor is an astronomer who has an observatory in his back yard. He was given a powerful telescope by a former student who got rich charting cell towers for mobile phone companies. He retired young and now his obsession in life is also astronomy. As with all technology, telescopes become slightly outdated with the newer versions being more powerful. So the student gave Don, his former astronomy teacher, his older telescope.
The telescope is part lens and part computer, as everything seems to be today. The computer can let Don both focus exactly on some star or group of stars and to remain focused on it all night, even as the earth rotates, through some computer program. Meanwhile he can sit inside, warm on winter nights and guide the telescope from home.
But it is not the telescope that interests me and I have probably already mischaracterized it. It is what he is looking at that stuns me, not so much what he looks at, but what I imagine must be happening to him as he looks light years and light years, millions and billions of light years, away.
I just read an article on the James Webb telescope. It can look at blank spots in the sky and see millions of galaxies, it can look at stars so far away that it takes 13 billion years of light traveling 186,000 miles a second to reach us and in seeing that star we can go back in time 13 billion years. Somehow light is bent by huge distant galaxies and is slingshot around then and enhanced so that out of sight galaxies become visible.
This is not an astronomy lesson. I have probably mischaracterized this science as well.
What is being discovered is fascinating, but the effect on me is stupefying. The universe is so immense, like a giant popcorn machine, stars are bursting into life and stars are burning out, billions of them. The numbers doesn’t matter, they are all too huge to comprehend.
But the question I have is how can my friend Don, who does understand the stars and doesn’t mischaracterize, how can he not be struck dumb, not bang his head on the floor, not be reduced to a quivering mass by his awareness of how huge the universe is and how insignificant our speck of a planet is.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 