Sky and Telescope - December 2016 - 45

OBSERVING

Northern Hemisphere's Sky

Fred Schaaf welcomes your
comments at fschaaf@aol.com.

Fred Schaaf

Through a High Window
Peer into the awesome majesty of the starry skies.

The passage above describes Frodo's experience of
ﬁrst having his eyes uncovered in the enchanted land of
Lórien. Frodo stands, lost in wonderment, on a bright,
sunny day, and yet this passage reminds me of the
enchanted - but real-life - experience of astronomical
observing on a starry night.
Stars twinkle to produce a new sight every instant,
yet they are "ancient as if they had endured for ever." We
don't see new colors in heavenly objects, but they certainly seem fresh-found, glowing in purity in the dark.
The innumerable stars, star patterns, and especially features on other planets provide us with the opportunity to
create for them "names new and wonderful."
But the most important similarities between Frodo's
experience and an astronomer's observations on a dark
December night are those of the "high window" on "a
vanished world."
A high window on utterly original sights. What
is a telescope essentially but a "high window" that
opens upon something truly awesome: sights absolutely
unavailable on our planet or in any non-astronomical
component of our lives? No natural sight on Earth comes
close to simulating the view of a crowd of up to hundreds
of sparkling lights witnessed in a telescopic observation of open cluster M37 (in Auriga just outside the
constellation's pentagon) or M35 (in the northwestern
feet of Gemini) or M41 (in Canis Major about 4°° south of
Sirius). No riverine landscape or desert plateau mimicks the brilliant view of the two perfect, intense, and
almost-touching sparks of a double star like Castor or
Rigel or - the most challenging - Sirius in a telescope.
Nothing we see around us comes close to reproducing

FAREWELL TO LORIEN BY TED NASMITH

"The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass,
but Frodo stood awhile lost in wonder. It seemed to him that
he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had
no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed
at once clear cut, as if they had been ﬁrst conceived and
drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they
had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew,
gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and
poignant, as if he had at that moment ﬁrst perceived them
and made for them names new and wonderful."
- J. R. R. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring

the dramatic view of the luminous and colored, multistar-centered and star-sprinkled fan of M42, the Great
Orion Nebula.
Frodo feels that he's "stepped through" the high window. But isn't that the impression we astronomers often
have, especially with the wide, ﬂat ﬁelds oﬀered by the
modern generation of eyepieces, pioneered by Al Nagler?
A high window on a vanished world. But what
about Frodo's idea of a "vanished world" on the other
side of the window? In astronomy there are countless
worlds vanished in a special but quite literal sense:
vanished because what we're seeing is what the stars or
galaxies looked like years or even billions of years ago,
not what they look like now. Even light, the fastest thing
in the universe, takes long periods of time to cross those
immense distances.
There's an even more amazing kind of vanishing in
astronomical observing. We're the ones so short-lived
that we're vanishing. A human lifespan is no longer than
one swift glance in comparison to Carl Sagan's "cosmic
calendar," the life of the universe compressed into a
single calendar year. But when you think of how much
joy and wonder that all of us astronomical Frodos can
take in during just a quick look through the telescope or
at the sky, a glance doesn't seem like a small thing. ✦
Sk yandTelescope.com December 2016

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Sky and Telescope - December 2016

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