Spacewalk

Way, wa-a-a-a-y back when I was in college, a very strange book hit the bestseller lists and stayed there for seemingly forever - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. Like pretty much everyone else on planet Earth at the Time, I read it. But now, 45 years later, I can really only recall one passage from the work. Fairly close to the start of the book, the author goes into some detail describing the differences between driving through a beautiful landscape in a car, and riding through it on a motorcycle. In a car, Pirsig tells us, we are curiously divorced from the outside world. Perhaps it has something to do with the windshield, or from the fact that the interior of an automobile is very much like a room. The world passing by seems "out there", while the driver remains ensconced in his mobile cabin. Meanwhile, the motorcyclist is fully enmeshed in his surroundings. There is no "out there"; he is amongst them.

I had the same experience the one and only time I had a seat up in the super elegant skyboxes at a baseball game. There were plush, living room type seats inside, and we were separated from the stadium by a window which made up one whole wall. (This was at the then brand new Washington Nationals stadium.) Well, when the national anthem started up, no one in the skybox payed the slightest attention to it. Not a soul stood up or doffed his cap, and no conversation ceased or even slowed down. Yet there was no hint of discourtesy. After all, when you watch a game at home on TV, do you stand for the anthem? Of course not. And here we were at the stadium, yet that glass wall somehow made it seem like we weren't.

So what does any of this have to do with amateur astronomy? Attend, grasshopper, and gain wisdom.

I can't count the times where I've been showing Saturn in my telescope to someone who's never had the experience before, and their reaction is "Wow. Is that real? It looks just like the pictures!" This resistance to believing the evidence of one's own eyes has always puzzled me. So when the same thing happened a few days ago for the millionth time right in my driveway, sharing with a neighbor my view of the ringed planet, I got to wondering. Does anyone upon seeing, say, the Eiffel Tower for the first time, doubt that it's real because it looks just like the pictures he's seen of it?

And I must confess to falling into the same feelings when somewhat lazily going from warhorse to old warhorse on a less than inspiring night out. My reaction to swinging over to M13 in Hercules is not that different from seeing an image of it on my computer screen. What's going on?

I'm convinced it's the eyepiece. Its presence means there's something between me and the object I am observing. My equipment has distanced me from it by more than the actual lightyears of interstellar space separating us. I have to consciously overcome this barrier to feel its reality, to get the sense that M13 and I occupy the same universe. But it's an effort worth making. I know I've succeeded when the sky no longer feels like it's above me, but rather in front of me.

There's a sort of ritual I perform on most evenings that I've been out. After I'm done for the evening, I'll tear down and stow everything away... and just look up, drinking in all the constellations and the Milky Way itself if it's in view. This can easily go on for half an hour or more, after I'm supposedly done for the night. We often fail to realize that many of the constellations we see by naked eye are as or even more beautiful than the open clusters and globulars that we peer at through our eyepieces. Yes, the Double Cluster is stunning, but so are the Pleiades and the Hyades. Yes, Kemble's Cascade is a wondrous sight, but it doesn't hold a candle to Orion in all his wintry majesty. Yes, splitting a difficult double with my highest power (and therefore narrowest field) is pure joy, but kicking back, slapping in a widefield (such as my 30mm Pentax), and looking at nothing in particular is, I believe, as close to Nirvana we can come in this sorry world.