Star Stuff
 | Author:
Jeff Ross
Contributor |
Star Stuff Jeff Ross My first telescope was a Sears refractor Santa brought as a Christmas present when I was eight. A cardboard tube, barely adjustable for focus with a single eyepiece on a flimsy tripod. I'd asked Santa for a planetarium I'd seen in the Sears catalog that would project the constellations on the ceiling of the bedroom I shared with all my siblings. It most certainly cost more than my folks had to spend on all us four kids.
Instead of a toy, Santa gave me the entire Universe.
My first target should have been our Moon, but on Christmas night, 1964, our Moon was just about Last Quarter. I didn't know that then, of course, I just knew it wasn't there in the early night sky.
But the line of stars I'd watched many times riding in the back of the station wagon on the way home from Grandma Hourt's was. I had decided those three stars in a line were the end of a bear's nose so this was my Bear constellation.
With no little effort, I got that telescope pointed to the Bear. I didn't know it then but, there, on the prairie of western Nebraska, I saw for the first time what I came to know much later as Orion's Nebula.
That small smudge I saw, with a telescope no better than the telescope Galileo used 400 years before to see the visible Moons of Jupiter, hooked me for life.
It's nearly a ritual now, for me to revisit that moment these many decades later at this time of year. What is it that draws us to observe the night sky?
Cosmologist, Carl Sagan, may have said it best: "We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff".
Step outside tonight and look. North lies the Pole Star and the Little and Big Dippers. Cassiopeia points to the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million light years away. South is Orion the Hunter, Taurus the Bull, and the Pleiades. With a little luck, you and your children or grandchildren will be along for a ride that will last a lifetime.
With clear skies, of course.
