Editorial: Climbing a Little Closer

Mercury, March/April 2000 Table of Contents

©2000 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

In the late 1950s, my uncle Morgan and his best friend, Gerald, were using my uncle's small telescope to look at the night sky. In particular, they were fascinated by the Moon, but having made photographs of it, they wanted a better view of those cheesy features.

These same fellows were that era's Tennessee "rocket boys" in the Homer Hickam, Jr., sense. Sputnik spurred them like so many others to build ships to climb into the sky, to join that chilly, violent Universe that embraces our little warm droplet of life. I know they did these things. I've seen the old 8mm movies of their rocket launches and near launches (read fizzles). Yet they climbed higher each successful shot.

That night, however, as tensions flared between global powers and winter wrapped the area, my uncle's friend climbed - literally - into a tree with his telescope. Through rocket lift-offs and those returns to earth from great heights, this boy soon to be a man had come to see that Universe above as reachable. I can imagine my uncle yelling to his partner-in-science, the chill of the air turning their southern speak into jilted barks. "What...are...you...doin'...up...thair?" Uncle Morgan must have asked. But Gerald was too busy trying to perch the scope for a better look at the Moon.

Can we really reach the heavens, can we truly touch that Universe above? Oh, certainly, there have been a few score humans who have been there. More like they've been immersed in it, but they have been there. When we shake the hand of an Edwin Aldrin or an Alan Shepard, we touch someone who has been out there and returned to earth, like those boys' rocket ships.

The heavens can reach down to us, too. We can be smacked by a scorched meteorite. Warmed by eight-minute-old sunlight. Illuminated by light from a galaxy two billion lightyears away (which came all that way just to fall against my cheek). Immersed constantly in the seeming nothingness of neutrino creeks. Plunged into eclipse darkness by the Moon's passing shadow. Goodness, and what more intimate connection is there than the cobbling together of our atoms in Big Bang and stellar furnaces?

Two weeks ago I climbed to my apartment building's roof to watch a total lunar eclipse. I was brought up on such fare, my family having weenie roasts sometimes on the nights of eclipses for the pleasure of getting outside under something majestic. But on that recent night I was alone. Around me the light of San Francisco fell, trapped by the cold and damp, and above were thin streamer clouds, flowing toward the east and the full Moon. During the night, as the Moon's brightness turned to blush, I thought again of my uncle and his friend. I probably could have seen the Moon from a lower vantage - indeed, I should have gone down and stood on Market Street to point out the lunar draping to passersby. But, like they, I chose to climb higher. Not just above the lights, but to be closer to the sky. It seems more real when you're closer. I understood my uncle's friend Gerald hoisting the telescope up that tree to be closer.

"What are you doin' up thair?" Trying to climb higher. Trying to climb higher.

James C. White II, Ph.D., Editor

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