Editorial: Orange-ringed O's

Mercury, September/October 1998 Table of Contents

I imagine I'm not the only person who enjoys working on Friday nights. The campus is relatively quiet, and my building is pleasantly empty. Just last Friday I started up the steps to Wiser-Patten Science Hall, twilight fully underway on a clear night damp with southern humidity. And there sat two people. A man and his daughter.

The fellow nodded his head in greeting, the little girl hung hers over a soda can. "You wouldn't happen to know anything 'bout that observatory over there, would you?" I love serendipity-the campus observatory is half a mile away. "I sure do." We made introductions, and I told him that I'm actually an astronomer and the observatory director. He and his daughter were standing near me now.

"Well, I've got two daughters, and each of them wants to be either an astronaut or an astronomer." The tiny child glanced up at me, her mouth ringed in dried orange soda. I thought of Tang, the drink of astronauts, and of the fact that this small child, no more than six, had already professed her desire for outer space.

My university has a small observatory that houses a 16-inch telescope, and like just about every campus observatory in the world, it is a place that attracts all ages, all religious faiths, all educational levels. In steamy to frigid temperatures, people will stand in line for the main telescope or cluster around the numerous smaller telescopes for glimpses of planets or a long, nearly blinding view of the Moon. Even something as unfamiliar as the colored stardots of Cygnus's Albireo elicits sighs of joy.

It is, consequently, no surprise to me that we wish to build larger, more powerful instruments to study the universe. It's a moral imperative to look. Yes, yes, we want to understand how the universal machine operates-how stars belch out the heavy, silver stuff in tooth fillings, or, say, why galaxies prefer the coziness of clusters. But we want to look. To spy on something that's bigger than we. Nothing against chemists or biologists at all, but astronomers are guides to the most popular display in science. I've seen flyers posted for graduate studies in other fields that have astronomical images!

And the telescopes of the next generation offer even clearer views of the heavens. Enormous light collectors using sophisticated methods to essentially tame the atmosphere's effect on starlight are seeing their "first light" now; yet while studies based on data obtained with these grand instruments are or will be conducted, the first thing the astronomy community and the general public wants is pictures. I can get very excited over spectra or lightcurves, but show me HST's image of twisters in the Lagoon Nebula or first-light images from the new Hobby-Eberly telescope, and I'm six again. Don't we all recall the lumps in our throats when the Hubble Deep Field image was released?

In a few weeks, the fellow and his daughters are coming to the campus observatory. To this point they've relied on naked eyes and binoculars for all their viewing. We'll be able to see a belted Jupiter and its doting Galilean moons, a Saturn flaunting its ring attire, and I'll see two children looking through a telescope for the first time. Small mouths turned into orange-ringed "ohhhhhhhhh's" as they look at the delights above.

James C. White II, Editor

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