cosmic

I should really use this before voicing my opinion, but I can’t shake the feeling that this is another layer of abstraction between the observer and the glories of heaven which sort of defeats the point.

I’m quite scathing about GOTO scopes, at least for small starter scopes, because I’m old school and crotchety and believe that if you want to get into astronomy, you should deal with the frustration of reading star charts in the dark and wobbly mounts and no finderscope and trying to find things in a tiny field of view just by line of sight down the barrel of your scope. Because that’s what I do and that’s how I’ve always done it.  What I know of the night sky was learnt this way, through experience, like to learning how to read or learning the way around London back streets. The Knowledge. It’s how I know that M57, the Ring Nebula, is on a line halfway between two little stars in the diamond-kite bit of Lyra.

The only time I have ever punched in coordinates to a telescope to slew it to a faint object is when it involved at least 12 inches of glass and a CCD.

So here we are, now, in the computer days when I don’t even need a telescope.  I don’t even have to go outside!  I can just do it in my web browser.

I donno, where’s the romance? Or maybe I’m just like some old geezer bemoaning the sterility of digital images as compared to film photos.  But note the persistence and even resurgence of film, or at least film-like-processing on digital photos. 

To be honest, the reason I am more interested in astrophysics than astronomy is because astronomers sit in rooms in observatories and punch buttons and stare at screens, just like this.  And then astrophysicists try and make meaning of it all. I like the meaning.

Because, to me, it isn’t about the telescope. It’s about looking for reasons to stand in the dark, alone with your frustrations and frozen hands and feet and a flask of tea, covered in mosquito bites, still looking for the damned comet that will just end up a disappointing ball of faint fuzz when you finally spot it.

This is the difference between growing and killing your own food and buying it from the supermarket.  Amateur astronomy is about the experience of the night, about the direct detection of photos falling straight from space from hundreds or millions of light years away, uninterrupted and unmediated, from the past straight to your retina. It is spiritual. You cannot Google up numinous experiences.

But, I suppose it works on cloudy nights!