![]() ![]() Noyes was so moved-by the long journey up the mountain, the egglike domes of the observatory on the hillside, the cathedral feeling of the structure-that he ended up writing a trilogy of epic verse, The Torchbearers, about the history of science. Wilson saw first light in 1917, the poet Alfred Noyes was present. Once there, accepting that your mind has seen farther than biological limitation is its own challenge the implications take their time unfolding. You almost have to say it out loud, " that's Neptune," forcing the cognitive dissonance into place. Of course, Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth and far-flung as it gets, but that doesn't compute. It might be the farthest thing you'll ever see, but it looks so close, and in the absence of contextual clues, the ordinary functioning of perspective fires and misses.Īnd so your awe is self-inflicted. Through the eyepiece of an optical telescope, you see something right in front of you, and your brain says, there it is: a jellybean, four feet away. At a star party a few years ago, at the McDonald Observatory in the desert reaches of West Texas, an astronomer stationed at a telescope-–pointed at a nebula, I forget which-–gravely intoned to me, "this is the farthest thing you'll ever see." That's the essence of it, and what makes it impossible to really appreciate. The pleasure I take in this sight is complex, subtle. Hanging there in the center of the circle, my straw-hole of vision. Or something like it, bluish and strangely aqueous, as though it really were made of jelly, lit from within. It's the black of space now, and, as promised, I spy a jellybean. Inside, the sky is still black but suddenly it's the black of space, not the black of night of course they're the same thing, but the fractal glimpse though lens separates them. I perch strangely and squint into the eyepiece. Now I'm up the ladder and it's precarious, insensibly parked I have to wedge my foot on the heavy metal casing of the telescope for balance. From where I'm standing, on Earth, at the foot of the ladder and looking up with my naked eyes at the stars, all of them look like jellybeans, or confetti. ![]() Clearly they are pieces of something bigger, a whole sheet of paper somewhere, meaningful in its completeness, and whose exacting, cookie-cutter perforations are just a concession to some order we can't quite perceive. I think she conjures the hole punch because the edges it punches aren't quite clean, and stars like torn paper are crenulated, fringed with wisps of filament. ![]() The sky is uncharacteristically alive for Los Angeles, a lattice of flickering light nearly indistinguishable from the trembling, smog-blanketed city we glimpsed through the valley below as we wound our way up the mountain. Like the Eskimo, I imagine, with their apocryphal hundred words for snow, this astronomer undoubtedly boasts a pantheon of personal metaphors for "dot." Through a wide rectangular slit in the domed ceiling, the cosmos lies in wait, ready for the focal beam of the telescope itself: like a plastic straw, I'm told, poking into an ocean of night. Wilson Observatory, incidentally the very place where Edwin Hubble, in 1925, discovered that our galaxy was not the entirety of the Universe, and later, that our Universe was expanding.Ī jellybean, a piece of confetti: it seems her language is primed to describe nuances between round things seen from afar. "Or, you know, when you empty a hole punch? The circles of paper that fall out? One of those." She's talking about Neptune, and I am about to step, carefully, up a ladder painted industrial yellow and wheeled into place in front of the centenarian eyepiece of the 60" Hale telescope at Mt. "This one will look like a jellybean," the session director warns us. ![]()
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