by Nate Sheff
We all naturally take an interest in the night sky. Just last week, my fiancee and I attended an event put on by the Astronomical Society of New Haven. Without a cloud in the sky, near-freezing temperatures, and a new moon, the conditions were ideal for looking through telescopes the size of cannons. To see anything, you had to stand in line, in the cold, for your opportunity to look at something for a minute.
A surprising number of people turned out for this opportunity. By the time we left, there had to be about a hundred people (and more likely arrived later), making up a good cross section of society. And they all enjoyed themselves. The most memorable attendee was a woman in front of us in line to see Jupiter. The astronomer at the telescope told her to look at the dark bands that are the eternal storms in the planet’s atmosphere.
“Wow,” she said, stepping away.
The astronomer asked, “Did you see the moons?”
“The moons?” She looked again. We could see them through the binoculars we brought: four points almost in a line near the planet, glittering in the dark.
“Those are moons?”
That one piece of information transformed the appearance of the planet from a lonely island to a tidy neighborhood.
Immanuel Kant’s tombstone has a line from the Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Whether or not you agree with him on the moral law, you can’t fault him for his view of the stars. Read more »