Once again, here is our guest blogger, Dr. David Levy. This post is dedicated to the memory of our friend, Terry Dufek, avid astronomer and aficionado of action figures.
Skyward
for March 2022
Picture Caption: Eureka, one of my telescopes, is probably s bit
better than the one referred to in Wordsworth's 1806 poem Star Gazers.
Star
Gazers
What
crowd is this? What have we here? We must not pass it by;
A
telescope upon its frame, and pointed to the sky…
n
William
Wordsworth, 1806
While
I was working on my master’s degree at Queen’s University in Canada some 42
years ago, I came across this poem, loved it, and decided to include it in my
thesis. Norman MacKenzie, my thesis
advisor, a scholar and a genius, pencilled one comment at the bottom of this
poem: “Wordsworth wrote some wretched
verse.” Norman did not have much of a
sense of humour, but I am still laughing at his written comment.
In
his poem, Wordsworth complains about how many people who look through a
telescope are disappointed in what they see.
At no point in time is that idea more cogent than now. If a telescope we look through cannot offer
us a view as good as a space telescope, then that telescope is a failure.
By the end of the poem, the crowd abandons the
telescope:
“One
after one they take their turns, nor have I one espied
That
doth not slackly go away, as if dissatisfied.”
For
me, the night sky is far more than our imagined perceptions of what we can see
through a telescope. Some of us can look
at an internet photograph all day long, but not I. The beauty of the sky lies in its reality.
The planets I see are real worlds. The
constellations I point out to young observers contain real stars. One evening I asked a group if they had seen
the recent eclipse of the Moon. “Yes,”
answered one, “I saw it online.” No, he
didn’t. Eclipses are real only if you
see them in the sky, while they are happening.
It
is a given that a back yard telescope will never show us Jupiter as detailed or
as colorful as a telescope out in space will.
What that telescope does show us is the genuine sky, a sky without
artificial color enhancement, a sky as it really exists on top of our heads on
every clear night. It shows us a sky
untarnished by the trivial events of the day, and unspoiled by petty concerns
that are bothering us. Our own telescope
truly shows us the Moon as it was a third of a second ago, a
star as it appeared thirty-four years ago, or a galaxy as it appeared twelve million years in the past. Our back yard telescope shows us what is
there, and unlike the crowd from 1806 that left dissatisfied, the people of
today can understand that the sky they see is real.
