There was once a day—when I was much, much younger and Lasik eye surgery hadn’t yet been invented—that I was nearly legally blind. But since I was a teen and looking good was way more important than, well, looking clearly at anything, I refused to wear glasses or contacts. Walking around in this constant state of blur shaped my early worldview. I learned to recognize people from afar by their blurry outline. And I spent summer nights at the beach staring at the biggest, brightest, most colorful lights in the sky.
To my mistaken eyes, the stars were huge and beautiful. For some reason—probably because of the way my eyes bent and blurred the light—I was also able to see stars flash blues, greens, and reds. They were incredible. When I finally got contact lenses, I headed out under the night sky to view the stars through my new eyes. It was a big disappointment. The stars I thought I knew became tiny white pinpoints of light, and then I stopped looking at them—until recently, when the prospect of joining some astronomers at Santa Barbara’s Westmont campus to view the skies through a giant telescope presented itself.
It’s called the Keck Telescope, and every third Friday of the month visitors can show up and look up. Other members of the Santa Barbara Astronomical Unit also come out with their telescopes and let people view other celestial objects.
I confess that before the viewing, my brain sent me images of The Big Bang Theory, and I expected lots of geek speak from nerdy, but adorable scientist types. Then entered Professor Ken Kihlstrom, rushing to the observatory with a stack of books, files, and other academic-looking paraphernalia. The professor speaks with great enthusiasm about eyeing the skies, and I imagined that’s the same enthusiasm he had as a child.
He was a child, in fact, when he received his first telescope: “When you get your first backyard telescope, you never think to look at anything else but the moon and the stars, but there’s so much other crap out there.”
When Prof. Kihlstrom says “crap,” he’s using it as a positive descriptor. He explained that there are masses of “stuff” out in space (the word “stuff” is my positive descriptor) that are also interesting. There are comets and double stars and more than your basic backyard stargazer tends to think about. To illustrate, he told one of his favorite stories about Charles Messier.
“He was low man on the totem pole in Paris,” Kihlstrom said. “In those days, to become high man on the totem pole, you discovered a comet. So he started searching the skies for comets. The thing you look for is a bunch of crap. The way you know it’s a comet is you take a look at it two days later; if it moves, it’s a comet. If it doesn’t, it’s a bunch of crap. So he began to mark the crap so he could keep track of what he already saw, and he discovered like 13 comets, but the crap he marked ended up being some of the coolest things, like nebulae and galaxies.”
Hearing that, and having never peered at the stars through the lens of a telescope, I needed to see for myself all the crap I was missing.
We took a look at the moon, because it doesn’t have to be totally dark outside to get a good view. In fact, a little light helps moon craters cast shadows. The view was incredibly sharp and brought the moon surprisingly close. My son Chase, who views the sky as a harbinger of alien life forms, looked a little worried after his turn at the eyepiece. It didn’t help that out on the deck, we spied a cylindrical row of lights flying by. Chase promptly asked, “Do we have aluminum foil at home?” And I knew he wanted to make a hat so aliens couldn’t probe his brain.
Kihlstrom and another astronomer, a young man who really did look like the guy from The Big Bang Theory (which made my brain tell me “I told you so”), did some manual calculations, and soon we were looking at Saturn.
Unlike the moon, Saturn resembled one of those glow-in-the-dark planet stickers you put on your ceiling when you were a kid. It was a yellow, perfect silhouette of Saturn tilted to its side, with its familiar rings. Nonetheless, it was amazing, the realization that here is this planet so far away in the sky, yet there I was staring at it like some astronomical peeping Tom.
I watched as one person after another peered through the telescope, and I asked the professor, “Does it ever become mundane? Does it stop being amazing? Do you ever just think, ‘Ah, just another nebula. Whatever’?”
“It never stops being amazing,” Kihlstrom said. “My favorite thing is Saturn’s rings. I never get over how amazing it is.”
And I believe him. As we walked toward the base of the observatory, people were clamoring to get another look at the moon through an AU member’s binocular-style telescope. More amazement. The gentleman told us it was the 41st anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, and my son Jake, the budding scientist, swears he saw the site where it landed.
With that thought, I peered through the telescope. Suddenly, I realized the moon surface looked different from what I saw earlier. I guess my view of the skies really does depend on the type of lens I’m using.
Sometimes Arts Editor Shelly Cone can get a little spacey. Bring her back to Earth at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 5, 2010.