Me, you, and the universe

I’ve been following the debate about visual observing vs various form of imaging on various online discussion lists. I’m a dedicated visual observer, but I have the greatest admiration for those doing asronomical imaging today and do not see this really as a one-is-better-than-the-othee situation. In fact, I’m not at all sure it’s the right question. It took me 40 years of buying, trying, and selling a huge variety of telescopes and related equipment before I finally understood that the key ingredient in the observing equation is not the equipment, but me – or in your case, you.

What’s more, I believe this is true whether we are doing visual observing, or using some sort of imaging technology. And, I remain woefully inadequate as an observer, but I am learning. My goal is simple and perhaps unusual, though I would love to hear form others in this respect. When at the telescope I want my observing experience to bring about the state of mind described by Albert Einstein in this wonderful little paragraph:

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed."

I fear I have spent too many hours at the eyepiece with my eyes closed. Oh yes, I have “seen” the moon, the planets, the Messier Objects and much more. But there have only been rare moments when I can honestly say I stood “rapt in awe.” I treasure those moments and seek more of them and what’s more, I think I know how I can get there from here.

My approach has two main ingredients. First, I want all the right equipment and I want it working perfectly. Second, I want my mind clear of trivia and fully receptive to the photons pinging my brain.

To meet the first goal I’ve brought together a 15-inch Obsession, ServoCat, ArgoNavis, Denkmeier binoviewer with Triple Power X switch, two 21 mm Denkmeier eyepieces, and a CatsPerch observing chair. I got this combination because I decided I didn’t need the most powerful telescope, but I did want the most powerful telescope I could forget I was using.

This last business – forget I was using – is critical. That’s why I want a comfortable, effective observing chair. That’s why I use a binoviewer – not simply because two-eyes are better than one – I’m not positive they are – but because two eyes are more natural than one and thus more relaxing. And I felt I needed something close to 15-inches of aperture to see deep sky objects for what they really are. Of course I don’t see them as they are revealed with digital imaging – but 15-inches captures enough light to give a convincing slice of reality. My eight-inch just didn’t quite make it on some objects, though it does fine on others and for a few objects, a pair of good binoculars is sufficient.

But the bottom line is, after I have set up my equipment I want to forget it is there. It should, like any good piece of technology, meld into the background – become transparent to the user.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not trying to provide an equipment prescription here for others. These are simply my choices and rationale. They also fulfill the simpler of my two goals. The second goal – clearing my mind – is far more difficult.

My first crude approach at this task was learning how to draw by reading “Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain” by Dr. Betty Edwards ( http://www.drawright.com/) . I love that book and felt by any measure it brought me reasonable success. I don’t mean I became a great artist. I mean I learned how to see what was really in front of me. This is no small accomplishment – he said with dangerous pride. Seriously, I went through about 50 years of my life not knowing how to really see.

What passes for seeing in most cases is a whole lot of very rational prejudices that prevent you from really looking at something. It is best illustrated by how an adult typically attempts to draw something in perspective, such as a table top. They invariably make it far too large because their left brain tells them how large the table top really is. They don’t draw what they see because they don’t see what they see. Instead they see in their mind something much larger and they draw it. The bottom line here is that drawing anything – including portraits of people – is really an exercise in forgetting what we know about something and really seeing what is before our eyes. When we can do this, putting pencil to paper to produce a credible image is ridiculously simple.

That exercise – developed over a couple of years - made a better observer of me. I now tend to see what I see, not simply what my brain tells me I should be seeing.

But that leaves me far, far short of what Einstein was talking about when he said that we should stand “rapt in awe.” And here the problem is staggering. Most of what we know about an astronomical object we obtain from our left brain. Put simply: we study astronomy. Believe me, I in no way put this down. My library is well stocked with frequently read astronomy books. I hold many of the key facts about celestial objects in little pockets of my brain and can still summon much of this data to the surface as I observe a given object. What’s more, I think this kind of study is absolutely necessary because the visual image we receive at any given instant provides us with very little information.

However, it has a big drawback. We are dealing with abstractions that are incredibly far removed from our experiential reality. I won’t belabor this, but suffice it to say, the quarter million miles or so to the moon is almost imaginable through extrapolation of our experience of driving or flying across the country.

The number one million is almost comprehensible if we think of it in some experiential manner – such as counting every second for 11 days, for example. The number one billion, however, is meaningless on this level for it would take us about 32 years of counting every second to imagine this and who can even imagine the experience of counting every second for 60 minutes of every hour, 24-hours of every day, 365 days of every year, for 32 years – with no break for sleeping, eating, going to the bathroom and, well, other stuff ;-)

I appreciate all the wonderful little left brain devices that various scientists and writers have developed over the years to make these numbers more comprehensible. These devices help. But in the final analysis they simply can’t solve the problem. They point us in the right direction, but leave us way short of the reality.

So I glibly rattle off numbers for the size and distance of the Andromeda Galaxy in my mind, though I know I am kidding myself. Only once in my observing life – and that was more than 30 years ago – did I think I knew how far away the Andromeda Galaxy really is. That was on a lonely summer night, about 3 am, when I had been standing at my 6-inch Dynascope for hours peering at various things, but last of all M31. Suddenly, a dog howled in the distance and this sent the proverbial chill up my spine and stood my hair on end - and that chill seemed to hit me like a lightning bolt and for a few magical moments I was not scared of the dog – or some imaginary creature it might represent – but instead I was gripped by a primordial awe and that 2.2 million light year gap between me and what I was looking at suddenly became awesomely real. (Ok, I hear the nitpickers chiding me about that number, and they’re right. Today it isn’t 2.2 million light years – as I understand it this distance is once again under debate. But at the time that was the distance in my mind. )

The bottom line here is simple. I want to know the science. I want to know the numbers. And then I want to get past it all into that level of reality Einstein describes where you appreciate the mystery that remains beneath all of these wonderful numbers and you stand “rapt in awe.”

I also want to escape the inevitable linear thinking of most science where events seem to happen one at a time and “a” always leads to “b.” This is not the real world. It is an undeniably, overwhelming useful mental construct. But it is not the reality we experience. In the real world an unimaginable number of events from my indigestion to the rotation of Mars to the explosion of a star in a distant galaxy to the flapping of the proverbial butterfly wing a continent away are happening at the same time and are interconnected, influencing one another. When you look deeply enough, all are involved in a dance easiest to symbolize by the falling pieces in a rotating kaleidoscope. All work together to create a picture that is one thing this instant and something else the next.

My most recent foray into accomplishing this – experiencing what I consider to be deep reality - is to bring meditation to the observing experience. What does that do? For me it sharpens my focus, empties my mind of trivia, and allows me to see deeply – to see things that are very difficult – or impossible – to translate into our wonderful world of symbol manipulation where we line up words and numbers in a convincing fashion. (Of course, even if it is impossible to bring back what you experience, I still think it’s worth trying. Getting part way there is better than not making the trip at all.)

Again, I won’t belabor the mediation process. There are loads of books on the subject. I just want to make two points that are frequently misunderstood. First meditation, while relaxing, is not meant to put you to sleep. Quite the contrary, it’s meant – at least as I practice it – to make you more awake, more deeply aware, of everything. And for me it works.

Second, meditation must be practiced. Books help – but the only real way to get there from here is to sit down and do it. I regard daily mediation exactly as I regard daily physical exercise. The physical exercise is done to keep your body in shape for doing other enjoyable things – such as playing tennis, hiking, sailing, or whatever. So it is with meditation. The exercise is not an end in itself. It is a way to keep your mind in practice so you can enjoy other things – well, every thing else - more deeply and fully.

So that’s it. I have assembled what I consider an ideal observing set up and now I am trying to take the most advantage of it by using meditation to prepare myself for observing. In actual practice this means that some significant amount of my time spent at the telescope is spent with my eyes closed, clearing and focusing my mind. When I feel I am ready, I open my eyes. And at that stage I frequently feel like a passenger on a spaceship, approaching my subject – say M92 – from a few dozen light years distance, and observing it through a huge window. When I achieve that state of mind – and my left brain provides a quiet background of information – I feel like I am having a real and special observing experience. I become, in Einstein’s fine phrase, “rapt in awe.”

But as the poet and sometimes astronomer Robert Frost said:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.