I underestimated the space telescope.
As NASA struggled to build the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, I came to think of the project as a problem child, ever- delayed, swallowing money that could have gone to other telescopes and space missions.
The telescope was named for someone else. It was named after the man who oversaw the Apollo program to land on the moon but also allowed the purge of gay and lesbian people at the State Department. I didn't think it could have an impact on the Hubble because it was an IR telescope.
I wasn't correct.
There has been a lot of activity in the area. It's been a week since the news media was graced by another spectacular image or tentative but striking measurement of the universe. It has captured faint distant galaxies that floated into view when the astronomer was still trying to focus the telescope.
The images were closer to home. Jupiter, the king of our planetary realm, is glowing like a disco ball. Astronomers hadn't expected to see details about the guardian of the solar system in the new images. Jupiter's faint rings are only one millionth the brightness of Jupiter itself, and are picked up by the telescope. There is a haze of light at the North and South poles.
Imke de Pater, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley who headed the Jupiter work, said in a news release that they didn't expect it to be this good. She said that the new observations will allow them to study the interplay of dynamics, chemistry and temperature in and above the Great Red Spot.
The telescope was too large for me to overlook. It has an advantage in seeing the stars far away and in time. The primary mirror of the telescope is seven meters in diameter, dwarfing any other telescope in space and most on the ground, allowing it to pull in fainter and fainter galaxies.
The Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey was led by Steven L. Finkelstein of the University of Texas in Austin. The patch of sky is one-tenth the size of a full moon. They are the equivalent of looking up through a soda straw.
What number of straws do you need? A single straw is not enough to explain the mystery of existence. There are 30,000 of them, strung out in time and space, islands of creation where something might have happened or is happening now.
If you zoom in on the survey image, you can see that the space is similar to the one depicted on the show "Cosmos."
The deeper you get, the more you can see. It has been suggested that the earliest days of the universe were 200 million or 300 million years ago, when the big bang lifted the fog and made the universe light up.
I think that whatever happens in these pinwheeled wonders stays there, lost in space and within our imaginations. I was overwhelmed by the idea of what life and matter might look like outside. We can't imagine what is possible in the horn of plenty depicted in the images.
I haven't been interested in seeing the heavens for a while. There was a time when I was a teenager and my friends were debating the fate of the universe at a campfire in the mountains of Washington. The stars were so bright that they were a revelation to a young person. I spent a lot of time looking up at the stars, trying to get a sense of how far away they were. You can't measure your stride against a light-year. I couldn't imagine it anymore.
It has been broken a second time.
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