The Rhetoric

brentdanley

Tonight I drove out to the Lake Afton Public Observatory. When I arrived the 16-inch telescope was pointed toward and focused on the planet Venus.  It looked like a very small very bright dot.  Then I went outside.

What I wanted to do was try out the new 15×70 binoculars Kirsten gave me and maybe take a few pictures. Behind the observatory is a concrete pad with about a dozen stands for observers to rest as they view the sky through binoculars. It was dark and I couldn’t see well. Before my eyes had adjusted to the extremely limited amount of available light a gentleman approached me and introduced himself. I had not noticed him before and he was just a few yards away.  Chris didn’t have a simple tripod setup like mine but a 10-inch diameter telescope, laptop computer running star chart software, cooler, a table, and two chairs. He was very knowledgable and experienced and showed me many stellar objects that took my breath away. We saw the Orion Nebula, Saturn with her rings and four of her moons, and many nebulae, double-stars, and star clusters. It was a tremendous treat for me. I was awed and inspired.

Using the new binoculars I was easily able to see the impressive Orion Nebula. It was cool to see the many stars visible through the binos that I couldn’t see without them. One of the highlights of the evening was watching a bright artificial satellite fall steadily across the night sky and pass through the constellation Orion.

Star gazing is for me a very spiritual experience. The vastness of space is incomprehensible yet I can see a tiny portion of it by simply looking up.

photography astronomy, cosmos, science, space

Carl Sagan’s new book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, is easily one of my favorite books. Dr. Sagan’s description of the cosmos opened up for me an interest I will undoubtedly cherish for the rest of my life. He describes nebulae, star formation, comets, galaxies, planets, star clusters, and darkness. One of my favorite quotes is about the vast nothingness of space.

“The universe is mainly made of nothing, that something is the exception. Nothing is the rule. That darkness is a commonplace; it is light that is the rarity…We must remember that the universe is an almost complete and impenetrable darkness and the sparse sources of light, the stars, are far beyond our present ability to create or control.”

Carl died more than 10 years ago. In 1985 he gave a series of lectures exploring the boundary between science and religion. His widow, Ann Druyan, felt that in the wake of September 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution that it was time to publish those lectures. Her search for the transcripts led her to one of the 1,000 filing cabinets in the archives at Cornell University.

I’ve long been mystified as to why people of “faith” give so little thought to how the world their god created actually works. In his first lecture Carl asks,

“If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understand nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy?”

In lecture two Dr. Sagan explains why it is decreasingly necessary to invoke god as an explanation for natural phenomenon.

“So as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It’s a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that’s no longer God’s realm. The theologians give that one up, and it walks over onto the science side of the duty roster.”

Read more…

book review, philosophy, religion astronomy, atheism, book review, carlsagan, cosmos, science, space

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Last week I read Carl Sagan’s new book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, which kindled my interest in astronomy. I plan to write a review of Carl’s book for The Rhetoric in the next few days.

I picked up a brochure at WSU this week about the Lake Afton Public Observatory. One night each month photographers can bring their cameras and shoot celestial bodies and phenomena using the huge telescope. I though it would be fun to take the girls to see what the observatory was like before I take my camera in a few weeks. We all went tonight and had a blast! They pointed the 16″ telescope toward the relatively small rectangle of night sky visible through a giant slit in the observatory dome. The first object we saw was the Orion Nebula, followed by Betelgeuse (pronounced beetlejuice), Saturn, and the craters of the moon.

The two staff persons at the observatory were excellent! They thoroughly explained what we were viewing and competently answered all our questions. While other visitors were looking at the moon through the telescope I did a self-paced presentation at one of the several computers in the exhibit. In the middle of the presentation one of the staff members approached me and asked if I had any questions. We discussed light pollution, nebulas, and native American astronomers and culture. He then took me outside and gave me a personal tour of the night sky. His knowledge of and enthusiasm for the heavens was inspiring. My appreciation for the cosmos was increased tonight by orders of magnitude. It was a night I will not soon forget.

family astronomy, science, space, technology, wichita, wsu