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Learning about the universe, learning about humanity
“I can’t believe I can really see the rings,” more than one awestruck scout enthusiastically blurted out. I smiled in response, as I always do, when showing public groups and students their first telescopic views of the night sky. Nine days later found me thousands of miles away, on the Egypt-Libya border, witnessing a total eclipse of the sun. Security at the abandoned military facility was unbelievably tight, as one might imagine, made even the more imperative by the appearance of three military helicopters, escorting Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to his private viewing area. Several amateur astronomer friends and I had set up our telescopes and cameras slightly apart from the mass of humanity crushed into the main area, near a brigade of firemen. Noting that they only had a single pair of eclipse viewing glasses, I wandered over and offered them the several spare pairs I had crammed into my suitcase. The ice broken, the men smiled broadly as the sun began to slide behind the moon’s darkened disk. Thanking me profusely in a language I could not understand, they then looked longingly at the telescopes we had set up. “Come look, please,” we gestured, and these most-serious public servants – including what I could only assume were military and secret service types – acted much in the same way as those Torrington preteens had the previous week back in New Britain. More time passed, and with a final flash the sun was “swallowed” by the ebony disk of the moon. There we stood on a normally lonely Egyptian plateau, some 14,000 men and women from across the globe, openly applauding as we shared this cosmic wonder as one collective soul. We stood, sometimes literally shoulder to shoulder, not as professionals and amateurs, politicians and astronomers, but as equal and indivisible members of the human family. Under the moon’s shadow, wrapped in an eerie noon twilight, gasping in awe at the magnificence of the pearly, nearly living plasma of the sun’s corona slowly waving above us, all assembled understood why astronomy was humanity’s first science. We sometimes forget that the universe belongs to us all. The very atoms that make up our bodies were created inside the nuclear furnaces of previous generations of stars that exploded eons before our sun was even a possibility. As Carl Sagan sagely said, “We are star stuff.” Those Torrington scouts and the Egyptian firemen reminded me in a very concrete way how privileged I am to get paid to share the wonders of the universe with my fellow Earthlings. I hope you will come to Central some evening when we offer a free public viewing at the observatory and join us in the wonder. |
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On
a clear, slightly cool evening in late March, an eager group of
Torrington Cub Scouts peered, single file, through the portable
telescope I had set up at Central’s observatory and pointed at Saturn.
The view elicited the customary “oohs” and “ahs” from children and
parents alike.