Editorial: Voices in the Darkness

Mercury, March/April 1998 Table of Contents

(c) 1998 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

Out of the silence came a swoosh from just above my head. It was night, and it took me a moment to figure out that the noise belonged to a local owl. Large wings lifted it higher until it finally landed and perched on a lightpole 50 meters away.

"Anyone want to see an owl?" I yelled back to my students, milling around outside the campus observatory. They flowed from the darkness toward me, binoculars around their necks, skycharts and observing sheets clutched to their chests. "Hey, I see it! It's in Cepheus!"

To be so far away, to be so seemingly alien and unconcerned about us, the heavens touch us intimately and sometimes even appear to frame our existence and experiences. I grew up on a farm in the country ("Yep. Just turn off the main road, and..."), far from city lights and intimate with that chilly otherness above me. The stars and planets and constellations were things I recognized early, faces of relatives you should know because they are, well, related. But it wasn't until I aged that I really began to know some of them.

Along the way I also came to know other people who knew them. A few became friends and many acquaintances, all of us part of our astronomy community. Constituting an "imagined community," appropriated from political scientist Benedict Anderson's description of nationalism, astronomers are linked by their fascination with things extraterrestrial, by the nexus of the inclusive language of science (astrospeak dialect, of course), and by that feeling of familiarity with the unfamiliar above.

Yet while we work away in observatory warmrooms or the cool darkness of our offices, we can, intentionally or not, isolate ourselves from those outside. I don't claim these ideas as my own; they are well-known to scientists. We all need reminding, however, that what astronomers do is of great interest to the larger community. And Mercury, as I see it, is a wonderful vehicle to educate, to enlighten, and to challenge all its readers-the educators, the amateur and professional astronomers, the interested non-astronomers.

For the past three and a half years George Musser steered Mercury through the thickets and sometimes overgrowth of contemporary astronomy. The magazine increased in size and broadened its scope to include topics occasionally that some might consider peripheral, or more directly, "on the edge." This is well and good, and I would not have accepted the position as Mercury editor were it not so. But Mercury's foundation will always be astronomy's endeavors and discoveries, related in astronomers' voices.

My students left me that night and returned to their work on star colors. Their sounds fell away as I thought of the voices of the writers in this Mercury. The personalities who seek to unravel creation, to understand the way our universe is cobbled together. The people among us who dedicate themselves to finding out the why of the universe for all of us. Yet those murmurings faded, too. In the hoot-hoot call of that owl sitting high in the stars of Cepheus.

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