An Homage to Space

I would love to become an amateur astronomer.  I've never had a telescope, never lived in an area of the country where the night sky looks anything like this and have only seen a lunar eclipse (that I can remember with any vividness) once but I think I could do it.  Granted, I know nothing about telescopes, or where to point the thing to actually see something but I figure I could find something on the internet about it.  Which brings me to this little list of things in space that I love.  Starting with, perhaps, the most obvious of things in our sky:

The Moon - Our closest celestial neighbor (most of the time) in more ways than one.  I guess the moon is just kind of...well...the moon.  We've all grown up with it, lived with it, seen a gagillion pictures of it but it's also the only place not on this Earth that human beings have ever been.  It's our first step out into a whole new era in human history.  Without this little gem in the night sky, it's possible that life would have never been.  After all, the moon is us, most likely created from a large impact that sent this piece of the Earth sailing billions of years ago.  

Andromeda - Our nearest spiral galaxy neighbor in the cosmos at a mere 2.5 million light years and closing.  Andromeda has always featured in our night sky because it's so bright, but what makes Andromeda so interesting to me is the rate at which it is approaching the Milky Way and our little solar system.  In about 4.5 billion years, the two galaxies are expected to collide.  I have no idea what will happen when the collision occurs, but many scientists expect the galaxies to merge and became a gargantuan eliptical galaxy.  

  Colliding Galaxies - A glimpse into the future, here is a snapshot of a couple of galaxies in the process of collision.  We're actually looking at a couple of things here.  The colliding galaxies are at the top of the picture which, admittedly, looks like a mess of gas and stars and is difficult to distinguish one from the other (which makes sense if they're colliding).  The separate galaxy at the bottom is actually no where near the colliding galaxies and the trail of gas and dust in between the two pictures is somewhere over 100 light years long.

Exoplanets - An artist's rendition of the nearest exoplanet we know of that orbits nearby (about 10.5 light years) Epsilon Eridani.  I'm always overly thrilled by the discovery of new exoplanets, probably because I'm still waiting for that one definite sign of life (flashlight in hand) outside of our own terra firma.  A man can dream...

Horsehead Nebula - Properly known as Barnard 33, the Horsehead Nebula represents a curious and very human tendency to imagine things where they aren't.  I'm not sure if that's because we have a need to find the familiar in the stunningly alien or if it's just some odd sense of vanity left over from thinking that the Earth was the center of the universe, either way, it strikes me that we tend to do the same things with nebulae that we do with clouds on Earth.

Binary Stars - Perhaps because we live and exist in a single star system, I've always been fascinated by the existence of binary star systems.  In this picture we see two white dwarfs orbiting each other at the astonishingly shrinking speed of 321 seconds.  Eventually, they'll merge together and create a new stellar body.  Not all binary systems are doing this, some are in stable orbits and their planetary systems can orbit the gravitational center of the primary star and its companion star or just one of the binary stars.  It's all quite the dance.

Hubble Space Telescope - There's no better way to end this list than by paying homage to the thing that has given humanity its eye into the universe.  Most of the images in this post and most of the images of space we've seen comes from this single object.  Hubble has lifted the veil on nearly 15 billion light years worth of space and time.  It is, in a very real sense, our very own time machine and human knowledge will forever be indebted to it's magical mirrors.  

Yeah, space makes me want to be a poet.

Space

If it is at all possible for us to grasp the actual distances that make up the universe and the mind boggling numbers of celestial bodies and galaxies that exist within it, then there are two conclusions I feel are especially poignant.  First, there are other worlds out there, somewhere, in which intelligent life evolved, exists and thrives.  Second, we will most likely never meet them.

The journey to realization of others in the universe was profound for me.  As a child I would take flashlights outside at night and beam little messages into the sky hoping that someone might see them.  Those messages usually consisted of an S.O.S. as that was the only actual signal I knew (come to think of it, it's still the only signal I know that could be used over distance).  It could lose myself for hours attempting to "contact" something beyond our little world always with a deep yearning of wonder and possibility.  My childhood mind was given to imaginations of different people (who sometimes looked just like us but usually didn't) one day visiting Earth or perhaps welcoming us to their own Earth.  And yet,the more I learned about the universe the more I came to realize that, for all my hopes and dreams of others that might be out there, we exist in a cold emptiness of scientific limitation that all but guarantees we'll only ever know this one planet.  It's a thought I've never really been able to shake; that slow, inexorable rise to understanding of the immense size of space and the limitations of our knowledge of the universe laid waste to my childhood wonder of who else might be out there.

It's also a thought that spurred me to begin looking at my own place on this planet differently and more critically.  If this is the only place we'll ever be (or at least the only place we'll be for a very long time) then it would probably be a good idea to be a little more honest and prudent about what we do here.  I guess it's a bit odd really, space tends to make me wonder more and more about what it means to be human.  I feel like, if nothing else, we should be able to look at the sky at night and admit that there is at least one thing we all hold in common.  Against a backdrop of war, xenophobic attitudes towards immigrants, divisive rhetoric in politics and so much more that tends to make us think about our differences as bad things, I want to believe that a backdrop of stars, comets, and nebulae can remind us that our differences are what makes us human.  We all call the same place home.  

The day my dad bought a Mag-Lite and I got my hands on it I was convinced I was finally going to have something strong enough to actually make contact with some kind of extra-terrestrial intelligence.  I nearly dropped it when I was carrying it outside, my hands were sweaty with anticipation.  I took my time.  After all, if this was going to be the moment of contact I wanted to collect myself and my thoughts.  I realized at that moment the glaring problem with my plan.  My feeble S.O.S. probably wouldn't cut it for actual communication, in fact, nothing I could think of would cut it.  Instead, I decided on a slow steady pulse.  I clicked the button to examine just how powerful this beam of light was.  It was substantial, light saber substantial.  I chose the brightest star I could find and began pulsing the flashlight towards the sky.  I don't remember how long I sat there, probably to long, but I was determined.  At one point the star twinkled slightly and my excitement reached a fever pitch.  Alas, there was no contact that day with the Mag-Lite.  It was another blow in my quest to contact aliens with a flashlight.

For all the realistic expectations and precise calculations, there is still something romantic about space.  There is something that calls to me, that reminds me to continue to push forward, to learn new things, to explore not just the world around me but the world within.  The questions and possibilities of what is and what was and how it all came to be continue to fascinate me.  I still like to think that one of those beams of light could reach someone else out in the desolate expanse that is the universe and that one day we'll know more than life on this singular pale blue dot.