Just Saying: Look to the heavens

When I was a kid in grade school, I became quite focused on two subjects that fell outside the usual academic regimen: Egypt and astronomy.

How this came to be is not entirely clear, but there was a time that if you wanted to chat with me about ancient Egypt, I could hold my own. I’ve forgotten 99% of that knowledge.

I can only dimly recall that the rulers in the Old Kingdom were the pyramid builders and the rulers in the New Kingdom were more imperial and sought to extend Egypt’s power and influence to the eastern Mediterranean.

As for astronomy, I knew all about the planets and comets and meteors and constellations. I knew about our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and tried like heck to get my head around the notion of an infinite universe. (It still seems hard to reckon with that concept.)

I begged my parents for a telescope and they supplied me with a sturdy but unsophisticated refracting telescope atop a tripod. I spent countless nights scanning the night sky and located many wonderful things: the surface of the moon in great detail, the rings of Saturn, the nebulae in Orion’s belt, to name but three of dozens of sightings.

As childhood telescopes are wont to do, that telescope wound up in a closet and was eventually discarded.

Shortly after we arrived on Shelter Island, my desire for a telescope flared up again — I’m guessing it was the Island’s clear night sky that piqued my interest.  This time I got a mid-level reflecting telescope with more powerful lenses.

But the key to this telescope was software that empowered you, at the push of a button on a keypad, to aim the telescope at dozens of celestial bodies. I was pretty excited.

But you had to align the telescope to something up there (a star?) in order for the software to do its nighttime sleuthing. I will cut to the chase here and confess that I was never able to get the darn thing aligned.

I sicced my step daughter, a whiz at such assignments, on the case and she couldn’t do it either. So the telescope sat, quite handsomely I must say, in our office gathering dust.

But it did finally make itself worthy. We had some waterproofing work done in our basement which uncovered some unexpected problems that exceeded the original estimate. Do you see where this is going?

The waterproofing guy had commented on the telescope several times on previous visits and we swapped the telescope for the extra work. I wished him luck aligning it and have not heard back whether he did.

Speaking of telescopes, the James Webb Space Telescope has become something of a fixation for me. Launched on Christmas Day 2021, it traveled a million miles to a particularly advantageous viewing spot, parked there and started sending back astonishing images of stars, nebulae and the like from some of the earliest eras of the universe. (If we big-brained mammals can do that, we ought to be able to figure out how to cool down planet Earth.)

I still really dig astronomy. The newest headline arrived a few days ago. Scientists have known for a while that the Milky Way harbors rogue planets, orbs that have become unmoored from their host star. Astronomers estimated there were billions of rogues wandering about the Milky Way.

New studies suggest that there are trillions. The Times article said that it was conceivable that the rogues could harbor life. Let that sink in.

When as a boy I was blown away by seeing the nebulae in Orion’s belt in my eyepiece, I had no idea what miracles would arise down the road in my hobby.

I wish I had become an astronomer.