 |
Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday November 27, 2000 Volume II Number 48 |
FOCUS - Mount Palomar
Polaris is not the brightest star in the night sky. It’s not the most prominent.
But for us earth dwellers, it is unique in all the heavens for one simple reason. It doesn’t move. It’s the only fixed point among all the stars.
We like to know where we are. No matter where we travel, we are uncomfortable until we know which way is North. Once we know that, we also know which way is South. Then East and West. When we are unsure, a strange new place can be just that much more disturbing. Most of us do not carry a compass, so we rely on the horizon. During the day, the sun can help. Well, in the morning or the afternoon anyway. At high noon, it’s tough to get your bearings from the sun. You know that big old ball of fire rises in the East and sets in the West, more or less, depending on the time of year. And it’s not really precise.
But at night, particularly if the sky is overcast, or if you are in the big city with those all-night lights obscuring the heavens, you’ll have difficulty locating yourself.
Unless you can see Polaris. Otherwise known as the North Star.
* * * * * * * *
My astronomy college professor began his lower division 101 course with a strong assertion. None of his students (it was a large class) would pass the course if they could not distinguish between the two terms astrology and astronomy.
To confuse the first with the second was an automatic fail.
The mystery of the heavens stirs up all sorts of wonderment. The more you know, the more you need to push the boundaries of human understanding to the outer ranges. We think of our landscapes as big and broad and expansive. But at night, when we look up from a place where the full circle of the vast horizon’s sphere is in plain view, and the gazillion points of light come cover us like a dome and we think about the speed of light, and the distance between where we stand and where that star is, a lifetime barely contains enough years ever to travel to the distant place represented by that one speck of light twinkling in our eyes, barely visible, somewhere out there beyond us exists a world we will never know, and it’s only one among a countless number of similar dots, little pin-points of blue light against the velvet backdrop of empty space. We ponder the mystery of it all, the beginnings, what life forms there might be somewhere on a distant undiscovered planet, perhaps something like ours, and is there a God who oversees the whole thing? Is it the reflection of a master design, the blueprint of a Designer’s handiwork? Or is it the random collection of particles, the result of a catastrophic cosmic accident; is it perhaps the molecular or atomic structure of some other world yet unknown?
The prof said, “Astrology is the some total of all the myths and ancient pre-scientific stories and legends about how these shadowy figures and movements and motions might in some direct but obscure way effect human existence. Astronomy is a science; the rational, mathematical, methodical study of the motion, position, distribution and composition of all things celestial. In Astronomy, there is no room for hocus pocus, no voodoo, no magic, no ability to predict the outcome of human events by pondering the patterns and motion of the sky. Astrology is not Astronomy. We are here to study Astronomy,” he declared. “Do not, I repeat, do not get the two confused.”
Some of our most vivid scientific experiments and theories in history come from the human fascination with the stars.
* * * * * * * *
It was Galileo who turned the first crude telescope towards the heavens in 1609.
It was a refracting telescope… that is, two ground glass lenses, one at either end of a long tube, which magnified images about twenty times. The device had been utilized by militaries for a couple centuries, primarily to locate distant troops, and identify the opposition forces on land or at sea. Galileo utilized a telescope to make observations on astronomical objects. He discovered four moons orbiting around the planet Jupiter. He discovered that the Milky Way was not a luminous gas spanning the heavens, but instead consisted of countless stars. He mapped the Moon. He even identified dark spots on the surface of the Sun.
The English scientist, Sir Isaac Newton perfected the design of the Scottish Astronomer James Gregory, and utilized a much more powerful telescope in 1688. It was a reflecting telescope. Light entered the end of a long tube, a tube with a larger diameter than the refracting telescope. At the bottom end of the tube was a carefully placed mirror – a polished concave mirror. Instead of bending the light, as light passed through the lenses of the old refracting telescopes, light bounced off the curved mirror to a focal point at the center of the tube. The focused beam of light was then redirected by a flat mirror out the side and through another lens, magnifying the image even further. Newton’s research produced a prodigious amount of information about the heavens, and added to Galileo’s findings.
Newton’s experiments triggered a new technology. As interest in the planets and the stars and the galaxies grew, so did the inventor’s work focus on new and better ways to explore the night sky.
By the mid 1800s, Irish astronomer William Parsons built an enormous telescope with a seventy-two inch mirror. It gave him spectacular insight into the heavens, causing scientists to realize that the heavens were even more complex than anyone had ever imagined.
In 1904 the Carnegie Institute built a state of the art observatory more than five thousand feet above Los Angeles. In 1908, Mt. Wilson completed the sixty-inch mirror telescope; at that time, it was the world’s largest. In 1917, the Carnegie Institute built the one hundred inch Hooker telescope at the same location. From the top of Mt. Wilson, they studied the sun and the galaxies and nebulas.
In 1928, plans were approved at the California Institute of Technology to build a two hundred inch mirror, twice the size of the largest mirror on Mt. Wilson. A tract of land was secured atop Palomar Mountain, just north of San Diego. It took twenty years. In 1948, the Hale Telescope was completed. The mirror is cast of Pyrex glass and weighs a staggering thirteen metric tons. The colossal telescope is covered by a massive dome that rotates on its circular base, allowing the machinery access to any point on the horizon. The facility was utilized for the first several years of operation to construct a photographic atlas of the most distant objects in the night sky.
It’s a technological marvel.
* * * * * * * *
The day after Thanksgiving, some thirty of
us, parents, children of all ages, a
Jack Russell Terrier, all made our way up
the two mile trail at over five thousand feet elevation from the trail-head to
the Palomar Observatory which to this day searches the heavens for more
scientific information, and a greater understanding of our universe.
It was a spectacular day, through the meadows and forest of the high country, past the streams, and remnants of snow from a November storm.
The Observatory and I are the same age.
The great symmetrical structure, visible for miles and miles, and a landmark for high altitude pilots, stands as a monument to scientific curiosity, that insatiable quest to peer into the distant corners of space. The pure white Dome sits on a mountaintop, which once enjoyed near total darkness, far removed from the “light pollution” of the bright lights of Los Angeles (which has robbed Mt. Wilson’s telescope of much of its power). Now Palomar Observatory suffers the encroachment of housing developments, and city lights that shine all through the night, and even Casinos under construction, which will add even more light to the black California nights.
As we looked at the machinery, and imagined the men and women whose labors made it a reality, we recognized the purpose of it all.
On a starry starry night, as we all gaze into the heavens, we ask the same questions as the astronomers who sit late at night in a little cage positioned at the focal point of the two hundred inch mirror. Well, their questions may be more sophisticated, more technical, more specific. But we all want to know the same thing. What’s out there? And what does it mean?
I go with the Master Designer thing. How about you?
* * * * * * *
On this Monday morning, while we still dwell in the uncertainty of our national destiny, one thing is certain.
The North Star isn’t going anywhere.
There is a fixed point from which we can determine our location, map out our route, and find our destination.
If you are feeling a little confused today; if you are having trouble focusing on the task at hand after a long and joyous weekend; if you are wondering when all the ambiguity is going to end; if you are weary of the posturing and the spinning and legal hair-splitting and ambient noise of talking heads and partisan blowhards…
Let me make a suggestion.
Tonight, after dark, go outside. Look up. Locate Polaris (the North Star). It’s at the end of the Little Dipper’s handle. When you find it, you’ll be lookin’ due North. Just like the navigators of old. You now have a reference point. You now know which end is up.
And that’s all that really matters.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
|
|