xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxx16x6

Hello all you respected Canaries. Have you ever been to a star party? Amateur astronomers set up their telescopes and invite anyone who wants a look. It's free. Usually held in a city park, one with a fringe location so it's dark enough, it's so low key you could drive by and never see the telescopes. They have their sights set on the highest possible viewpoint but these astronomers keep a surprisingly low profile. After an hour with them, I understood why. They're a humble lot, for good reason.

•••••••Helix Nebula in the constellation Aquarius, also called the Eye of God

It started with a nebula. His telescope had blinking red lights on its tripod feet so you wouldn't trip over them in the dark. As I walked up, he asked, "Have you ever seen a nebula?" I didn't think so, couldn't place it if I had. His scope was aimed at one of the four nebula in the Orion constellation's sword, don't ask me which one 'cause they all seem to have names like "M643." But that's where the mundanity stopped. As my eye adjusted to the viewfinder, I saw a cloudy mass of interstellar gas spritzed with numberless starry specks. "You're seeing stars being born," said my guide, explaining "it's the off-gassing from a supernova, a star explosion, making all that cloudiness. That's a significant event we're watching... the birth and death of an entire solar system." I always notice the Orion constellation, it's one of the easiest to identify, but I had no idea that such a large scale cosmic event was in progress there! And there were FOUR of them!

The night was crisp and cold, a sharp, clear sky high above Cedar Hill. We were surrounded by a cookie cutter suburb on the edges of this dark little city park. Meanwhile, easily visible through a modest-sized amateur telescope, star systems were exploding overhead. "Does any of that gaseous cosmic debris ever reach Earth?" I asked. "Any oxygen you ever breathe is here because this kind of cosmic activity brought it here, millennia ago," he mused. "We're breathing stardust?," I jokingly asked. "We ARE stardust," he solemnly replied.

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. We are star stuff harvesting starlight."

– Carl Sagan

This revelation suddenly made me shift places with the stars. When I first looked through the scope, I thought the stars looked like mere specks. The realization then dawned on me that WE are the specks. Standing there in a fragile human body on a hilltop in Texas suddenly seemed so insignificant and impermanent. The sensation was a perfect experience of absolute humility.

Another astronomer asked me, "Want to see a galaxy?" A question like this presents a certain sort of mental pause, a bit of a double-take, in which you momentarily remind yourself that you're talking with people of science, not freaks on drugs or street people having psychotic episodes. I had to breathe a nice, deep breath of the cedar-tinted air and mentally re-group after being asked if I wanted to see a galaxy. Then, the obvious answer arose: "OF COURSE, I want to see a galaxy!"

The passionate young astronomer had the biggest scope in the park. Even so, I couldn't prevent an ounce of doubt from eking out: "I didn't know we could see other galaxies." The closest galaxy to ours," he explained, "is Andromeda, and yes, it's visible." Then he swung a laser pen up into the sky to show me its location. To my surprise, the slender green filament of light from the pen seemed to penetrate up and away through space, pointing to an exact star at its tip end. "Oops," the astronomer muttered, "there's an airplane, I'd better not point this up in that direction."

My puzzlement was unrestrained: "Are you implying that this laser pen could be seen by airplanes flying overhead and that they could be dangerous?" "Yes, absolutely," he confirmed. "I wouldn't want to take the chance of blinding any pilots by shining this into their eyes accidentally." He was talking about a pen light that I use to point out details in slide shows. Now that pen was pointing at another galaxy and potentially blinding airplane pilots on the way there!

Mind you, I don't intend to sound skeptical here, I only mean to convey that my sense of scale has been dramatically disoriented. We humans may indeed be specks, but here we are with a light in our hands that can penetrate thousands of miles into space, and that could affect living things in its path. This was a variant of the previous lesson in humility: we may be specks but we are precocious specks, that's for sure!

"Star stuff, the ash of stellar alchemy, that emerged into consciousness."

– Carl Sagan

This precocity was reinforced by the technical set-up of our astronomers, who had laptop computers connected to their scopes that would take the keyed-in coordinates and automatically navigate the scopes to the exact point in the sky that they were looking for. And, out there in the middle of the park, those computers were tapped into a high-speed wireless internet connection too. The astronomers used it to show us photos from the websites of NASA, major observatories and other astronomers, to elucidate the viewpoints of the stars we were seeing live.

A long gaze at Andromeda, our closest galaxy, revealed no visual phenomena beyond its masquerade as a speck. The point wasn't the visual spectacle, the point was the inner perspective. Contemplating stars and galaxies puts you in your place. My guess is that astronomers must be an extremely humble group, no matter how big their telescopes are. How could they not be, with the sustained influence of such frequent contact with the infinity and timelessness of space?

Most of us think of the stars as no more than a decorative backdrop for the moon. But I think if enough of us go to star parties and get a closer look at what we really are, where we came from and where we're going, there might be a chance of breaching mass consciousness. Seeing the stardust that was, is and will be who we are now and forever, our egos might be readjusted just enough to give us a pause from the pandemonium we seem so adept at creating for ourselves. It might give us a step down from the pedestal we place ourselves on. And it might just give us a less frenetic sense of what Time is all about.

Check with your local astronomy clubs for star parties and invite your friends to go galaxy gazing. It's W-A-A-Y cooler than going to a movie or the mall.


Maybe the dawn of a new world isn't so hard to start after all.




with sincere thanks to the
Texas Astronomical Society

Back to the Perch