Tag: Telescopes

Gave Away My Telescope

I haven’t used my telescope for about 3 years, so when a lady at work started talking about saving up for a telescope I gave her mine.  Now, it’s not that I’m losing my interest in astronomy, but it’s a recognition I’m not much of an observational kind of amateur astronomer.  The night before I bought Archives of the Universe:  A Treasure of Astronomy’s Historic Works of Discovery by Marcia Bartusiak.  What does it say about me that I find it far more exciting to read about the history of astronomy than look through a telescope?

I’m learning a lot about myself in my fifties.  Or maybe I’m learning the same things a second time.  My fifties, and I’m 58 now, have turned out to be a decade of returning to the interests and desires I loved in my teens.  I had a telescope in my teens and I gave it away too.  I even took astronomy and physics courses in my first two years of college, and dreamed of being a real astronomer, but I didn’t stick with it.

I’m a bookworm at heart and not a doer.  I’ve always dreamed of being a doer, but I just don’t have the personality for action.  I had a hard time adapting to the world of 9 to 5 work in my twenties, and for decades now my job has used up all my active energy.  I think about retirement all the time now.  Like in my teen years when I fantasized about what I would do when I grew up, I now fantasize about all the things I’d like to do when I retire, but I’m starting to think I won’t do that much.

It’s sad to say, but I’d rather spend time looking at a big picture book about astronomy than looking through a telescope.  Or I’d rather read biographies about astronomers than trying to recreate what they did.  My telescope was better anything Galileo, Copernicus or even Kepler had, and I did so little with it.

There are several pitfalls to owning a telescope.  The primary problem of small scopes is they never give views like the photographs you see in Sky and Telescope.  However, photographs are never as exciting as seeing Jupiter, Saturn or the Moon in real time with your own telescope.  After those three objects, how well a person will enjoy using a small telescope is determined by their temperament.  Most new scope owners will go hunting for the faint fuzzies, the term amateur astronomers use for all those gorgeous galaxies and nebula you see in Sky and Telescope, but when you find them they are more like tiny gray smudges than swirls of stars.  And they are damn hard to find.  

And it’s the skill in finding faint fuzzies that determines whether you’re going to really love owning a telescope.  I was never patient enough to develop a knack for star hopping, a technique of finding a naked eye star and looking at fainter stars through a low power lens to hop from one pattern to another until you find your target.  Through a telescope, you can aim it in the sky where you see one star, and through the eyepiece see twenty stars.  Learning those patterns within patterns is essential, and I never developed that skill.  Comet hunters learn the sky so well they can spot a new dot of light among old familiar patterns by memory. 

Amateur astronomers are a noble group, and some of them actually perform useful scientific research.   Another trait that separates me from real amateur astronomers is I don’t like  being outside or staying up late.  Oh, I love being out in the country, under dark skies looking up at the whole sky full of stars, but after about an hour, I’m satisfied.  Real amateur astronomers can stay out all night.  I’ve even discovered I prefer to stargaze without a scope under remote skies because I like the magnificent wide-field vistas to close-ups of tiny points of light .  Through a telescope you see way more stars, but a eyepiece full of tiny lights gets boring to me quickly.

The one skill I hoped to develop with my telescope was getting some kind of 3D sense of awareness of where I am in the universe.  Living on a big ball that’s spinning between day and night skies makes that difficult.  If the Earth wasn’t spinning on its axis or orbiting the Sun, most objects in the sky would remain fixed, and it would be easy to learn and remember their positions. 

I always wanted to master the constellations, so when a star or galaxy was mentioned, I could mentally picture in which direction of the sky to look.  Except for a handful of constellations, I never did this.  In urban skies, it’s very hard to make out constellations.  Ancient people saw far more stars than we do, and they spent way more time under the night sky, so memorizing the constellations was second nature to them.  Now, the night sky is a theoretical concept to most people.  That’s a shame.

I hope the lady at work can do more with my telescope than I did.  She has good vision and likes spending time outside, so I’m expecting to hear some great observing reports from her.

JWH – 6/20/10

The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy

If you are the kind of person who believes that science explores reality and would love to catch up on  the latest explorations in cosmology and subatomic particles, then The Edge of Physics (2010) by Anil Anathaswamy is the book for you.  For years I’ve wanted to know where the big experiments are taking place, and even daydreamed of being a science journalist whose nine-to-five job would be to visit them, well Anil Ananthaswamy has my dream job.

The Edge of Physics is mostly a travel book, and Ananthaswamy even has photos for each of the sites he visited at his web site, collected chapter by chapter.  What Anil has done, and I hope he pardons my familiarity, because typing his last name is work, is weave science history in with his travelogue and then explain what each experimental site he visits hopes to achieve. 

To enjoy this book does not require a deep understanding of experimental physics or math, just a sense of wonder.  I’m praying to Einstein that  PBS’s NOVA makes a multipart series based on this book.  The average person is afraid of science, and Anil really goes a long way to making it accessible.  Anyone who hates that we’re spending billions on theoretical science needs to read this book too, because it makes you wish they’d spend billions more, because in the end, Anil helps us understand the mysteries that are remaining to be discovered.  And I hope I live long enough to hear those results reported too.

On the day I started this book I experienced a bit of serendipity.  The first chapter is about Mount Wilson and why the work it did back in the 1910s and 1920s is so important to the work being done today.  While listening to the book on audio I wished I could see pictures of what Anil was writing about.  Well, my wished was grant that very day, because that night NOVA started a two part Hunting the Edge of Space that featured photos and films from the early days of the Mount Wilson Observatory.  This documentary overlapped wonderfully with The Edge of Physics. 

Now, if NOVA would only film the other chapters.  Most people are familiar with visual telescopes but how many have heard of a neutrino telescope?  One of the more adventuresome trips Anil makes is to Lake Baikal, to where scientists brave the Siberian winter to build an underwater telescope beneath the ice of a large freshwater lake.  Anil also visits two sites in Antarctica, Chile, Hawaii, South Africa, deep underground in Northern Minnesota, India, and of course Switzerland where the LHC is located.

I read Sky and Telescope every month but I never knew there was so many big telescopes around the world.  I wish someone would build a web site for telescopes like they have for the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites.  And I also wish someone would build the Top 500 largest science research sites.  And reading The Edge of Physics I could imagine a new tourist industry based on visiting scientific research.  I don’t have the money to take up that hobby right now, but I’m inspired to see if I can find web sites for all the places Anil visited in his book:

All this travel is glamorous but the real value of The Edge of Physics is what Anil reports about the status of all these experiments.  He really is trying to show his readers where the edge of physics lies, and what that means.  I can’t summarize that, you need to read the book, but if you haven’t read any science books in a few years, you’ll be surprised by how far science has gotten to explaining all of reality.  We are far from finished, but wow, scientists are hot on the trail of explaining almost everything.  Research in particle physics, dark matter, dark energy, cosmic background radiation, string theory, multiverses, radio astronomy, neutrino astronomy, are converging towards filling in missing puzzle pieces. 

It’s like doing a Sudoku puzzle.  Finding any one number can solve problems in all nine quadrants.  Breakthroughs at any one of these sites Anil visits means more evidence for the other sites.  Everything is interrelated.  I’d love to be able to list all the areas of research covered in this book with hyperlinks and explanations, but I’d have to write a book and Anil Ananthaswamy has already done that for us.  Be sure an visit Anil’s blog for newer reports.

JWH – 4/24/10