Twinkle twinkle little star,
how I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high,
like a diamond in the sky!
The old nursery rhyme we’re all familiar with, first published in 1806. It has a certain nostalgic charm to it. Indeed it comes from a simpler time when we didn’t know any better so we had to use poetry to describe the night sky. It’s certainly better than what the modern alternative might look like:
Twinkle twinkle little star,
how I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high,
a plasma sphere with a thermonuclear core held together by its own gravity in the sky!
Our understanding of our environment seems to have grown exponentially with each generation. No need to wonder anymore what stars are or even why they twinkle in the night sky. 200 years later we now have the answers. (For the record, a star’s twinkle or its stellar scintillation is a trick of the eye that occurs when the light waves punch through the invisible folds of our atmosphere and refract as they pass through the varying lawyers of density, which our eyes then interpret as twinkling.)
We’ve solved the riddle, but that doesn’t stop us from looking up in wonder. And though they have gotten harder to find, there are still places on the planet which boast a night sky so clear that the stars are fixed points of light, so bright and unwavering that you could play connect-the-dots with the constellations and recognize the ghostly smear of the Milky Way.
I’ve seen a night sky just like this in areas of northern Chile like El Norte Chico (the Little North) where there is very little ambient light from the power grids of big cities and the skies are crisp and transparent an average of 330 days a year.
Small wonder that the world’s astrological outfits have all staked out turf in northern Chile to erect some of their most ambitious observatories. And the funny thing is that there is something of an arms race going on between the various scientific bodies to see who can construct the largest telescope.
Yes, with telescopes as with many things in life, size does in fact matter, and the measuring contest has been raging for some time.
The Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory had a 4 meter telescope on the premisis which used to be the strongest in the southern hemisphere.
Not to be outgunned, the Carnegie Institutes built twin 6.5 meter telescopes at its Las Campanas observatory.
Shortly thereafter, the Cerro Paranal christened the VLT (Very Large Telescope), a telescope array consisting of four complementary 8.2 meter monsters. When working in concert these telescopes are so powerful that they can clearly make out a person on the surface of the moon.
The ESO (European Southern Observatory) quickly countered by sketching out plans to build an Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL) but had to scrap the designs when they were unable to get it up. That is to say, they had difficulty with its erection. Oh you know what I mean. They were forced to scale back and now propose to construct a less ambitious 42 meter diameter EELT (European Extremely Large Telescope) instead.
I think they should just cut through all the subtly and call the next one they build the PENIS (Powerfully Enlarged Nocturnal Imaging System). Or better yet, the MEMBER (My Erect Manhood Beats Every Rival’s)
I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ogle the night sky, so I signed up for a tour to the Mamalluca Observatory outside of La Sereña, a facility dedicated exclusively for tourist use. Using the puny telescopes we had at our disposal (the largest measuring in at a measly 30 centimeters) we were able to see that the 7 Sisters or the Pleiades, an open cluster in the constellation Taurus, actually contained over 1000 confirmed members. Only 6 are visible to the naked eye. (Legend has it that the 7th Sister ran off with Orion the Hunter, and can you blame her? His constellation is HUGE.). We viewed a few other astrological oddities - a nebulae, a binary star. It was interesting, and I enjoyed myself and all, but I wanted to get deeper into the action. There were no fewer than 3 professional observatories within striking distance of La Sereña and their hardware made our little guy at Mamalluca the laughing stock of the astrological locker room. I needed access. Problem is that these professional facilities are not open to the general public. So I set out to change all that.
First I stopped by the local offices of the ESO and was informed by the administrator that I was welcome to make a reservation for a guided tour of the facilities at their La Silla observatory, but that using the equipment for viewing was strictly limited to visiting scientists and professional astronomers.
Strike one.
Undaunted, I netted a phone number for their main office in the capital of Santiago and gave them a call. A nice but curt young lady told me that before I could schedule a tour of the facilities they needed some information - passport number, my time of arrival, the licence plate of the car I was going to approach the observatory in, etc. I told her that a tour was not necessary, that I was really interested in looking through the looking glass, so to speak. She assured me that this was simply not possible for the general public. We were at an impasse, so I put on my negotiator hat.
“I know that you have a standing policy on this issue, but surely there have been exceptions in the past.”
“Actually no, none that I can ever recall.”
“Well what if the president of Chile wanted to take a look in the telescope?”
“Are you the president of Chile?”
“OK, OK, what if it was a dying boy’s last wish to look into the telescope. Would you turn him down?”
“Just so we’re clear you’re no longer the president of Chile, now you’re a child with a terminal illness?”
“Look, I think we’re getting tripped up in hypotheticals here. Bottom line - what’s it going to take for me to peak into your telescope?”
“A degree in astrophysics, for starters.”
“How about an insultingly small bribe instead.”
Click.
“Hello . . . hello . . . &%$! astro-fascists.”
Strike two.
I admit that I can be argumentative and perhaps a bit off-putting over the phone, but I’m damn persuasive on paper, so I hit an internet cafe and went to the ESO website to see if there was a way to submit my request in writing. Sure enough I found a visitor request package. I fudged my way through the credentials - got my Masters in Black Holes from Ptolemy University and my PhD in Nebulae from Copernicus U, and so forth. But then there was trouble.
Like any hot Broadway show, tickets to the telescope at La Silla were booked up months in advance. I would have to wait more than half a year before my request would be approved and I was allotted a time slot. Luckily I found a loophole where I could bypass the velvet rope altogether and apply for immediate access. Its called a Target of Opportunity form, a very useful tool for commandeering observation time when there is an unpredictable and sudden astronomical event which requires immediate observation.
I had to get creative.
Event:
I have good reason to believe that the object in orbit around Alderaan is not actually a moon but a new type of celestial anomoly. A kind of “death star”, if you will. Billions of lives at stake - need immediate access to the telescope.
I attacked the form, trying to stay as vague as possible.
- Provide a description of the observing strategy.
Look in telescope with right eye, squint with left.
- Provide precise coordinates precessed to J2000 and integrated to the epoch of observations.
A galaxy far, far away.
- Exposure times.
As long as necessary.
- Slit position angle if relevant.
Not relevant.
- Any constraints such as time, seeing, photometric conditions, moon distance, airmass, etc., must be clearly specified. For example, for transient sources such as GRB it is critical to observe the sources as soon as possible after the alert. This and any other science constraints must be clearly specified in order to preserve the scientific value of the observations.
My droids are working on this - will forward along as soon as available.
The form went on interminably demanding pages of information. Insensibly, they wanted me to provide them with what I intended on seeing before I had the opportunity to even look into the telescope. I was perplexed. How would one know what one was going to see BEFORE one saw it?
I had spent a good hour on my Target of Opportunity form but in the end I didn’t bother submitting it. What would be the point? There are many things I can fudge my way through, but fooling astro-nerds with pseudo-scientific jargon lifted from Star Wars is not one of them.
Strike three. I was out.
The ivory tower elitists had won the day. I sulked in my failure and felt like a indigent child coveting the rich kids’ toys. There they were in their high-tech observatories having the time of their lives with their super-cool telescopes while I was stuck sitting around the plaza drawing unflattering figures of them in the dirt with a stick. I hopped a bus for the Pisco Elqui Valley to get away from my frustrations.
During my tour at the Mamalluca Observatory our guide told us that for New Year’s Eve he and another astronomer climbed into the nearby mountains and performed a ritual common in astrological circles - they located the star of the upcoming calender year using the one of the astronomical catalogues. I have since forgotten the prefix, but the number of the star was 2009.
They did find it, though he admitted to us that it was not all that impressive and there were probably better ways to spend the night. Yet anyone could see that there was something in the man that makes him do it. For over two decades he’s been looking up at the midnight ceiling. With a laser pointer he was able to pick out every visible star in the sky for us and rattle off information about it - scientific and mythological. Several times he even pointed straight into the mountains at the stars that were below the horizon, due to surface in a couple hours time. I have no doubt they were resting precisely where he was indicating. Knowledge, it seems, has done nothing to dampen his sense of wonder.
The Elqui Valley was peaceful, and had one of the clearest skies I’ve ever seen. As I lounged in an evening hammock trying to recollect and reconnect all the constellations the guide pointed out for us I thought of all those astronomers in the observatories working through the night. It occurred to me that I had the better of the deal. Let them wrack their brains trying to figure out the how and the what and the why behind every distant glint. People are nothing if not insatiably curious and persistent. One day they just might succeed. Even so, on the day we know all there is to know and the riddles have all been solved I still think that something inside of us would yet find simple pleasure in lying down on a hammock and staring up at all those twinkling little stars.
———————-
What’s so amazing that keeps us stargazing
What do we think we might see,
Someday we’ll find it, the Rainbow Connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me.
-Kermit the Frog - The Rainbow Connection-
Taken through the lens of one of the “puny” telescopes at the Mamalluca Observatory.
