OUTER SPACE
In the morning I joined my old man’s coffee club at the Black Mountain, McDonalds. Old men like to get together, I’m not sure why. It must be because old men like companionship and old men are on the same wavelength. We don’t talk about grandchildren or people’s health problems. We also, these days, rarely talk about politics even though we all agree. Current politics are just too depressing.
We talked about fishing for awhile even though only three of the six fish. We often talk about history because two of our group taught history at Warren Wilson College. And sometimes we talk about mechanical things since we include on engineer and a couple of people who are mechanically inclined. We sometimes talk about how the college is doing in these days of declining enrollments. But it really doesn’t matter what we talk about. What is pleasant is being together for an hour and a half once a week.
Then in the evening Don Collins, one of the group and my next door neighbor invited Todd and Susie and me to his house for dinner because Todd had fixed Don’s chainsaw a couple of months ago. In exchange, after a good quiche dinner, Don took us to his astronomical observatory in his back yard which has a slide back roof to let him peer at the sky through an enormous, computer driven, telescope. It was a very cold, clear night so we would stand in the dark for ten minutes or so, looking at the computer screen, and then when the computer was combining twenty or so photographs of a cloud cluster we would go back inside and warm up in front of a gas fireplace. Then we would go back outside to see the finished result.
I am including the photographs here. But the overwhelming thing was Don’s explanation of what we were seeing. The Crab Nebula was the result of a supernova star exploding in 1054 which was seen by the Chinese during the day it was so bright. But what floored some of us was realizing that the particular star clusters we were looking at could be 12 million light years away, meaning that it took light at 186,000 miles a second 12 million years. all of our human time on earth to get to us, or put another way we were going back in time 12 million years to see the cluster. It was the enormous distances of the universe and that there were billions of galaxies each with 100’s of billions of stars that were so hard to wrap our heads around.
But Don was unfazed by the enormity of what he was describing as he patiently explained these different distant nebulae (s).
Bode’s Galaxy is 12 million light years away.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 