You can't believe your eyes . . .

That's the bottom line - it's about what I'm seeing, or not seeing . . .

It's muggy, it's humid, it's 3:30 am. Any astronomer with a modicum of experience would tell me to go back to bed. The transparency is on the bottom of the scale and the seeing has dropped off the bottom, All this morning has to recommend it is darkness and dampness and a warm cup of tea - and forme, a suprising insight about sight.

Oh, and it's dry in the observatory and I have a new - to me - 55mm Televue Plossl. This is the lens that the Rigel folks who make the little spectroscope I bought for thepublic programs recommend. The spectroscope works with other lenses, but presumably it works better with this one. Besides, it gives me about the lowest power, widest field possible for the LX90, Could be intereting in its own right. I'm always eager to give a new toy a try.

Of course there's very little time. Technically, astronomical twilight is just beginning as I open the shutter to the dome, though it still looks dark. Then to complicate matters the LX90's little brain wants me to align it with Arcturus and Arcturus has just gone behind a tree. I can't remmber how to tell the little idiot to choose another star and time's awasting, so I align on the tree branch which I think is hiding Arcturus - not recommended - and move on to the second star, Altair. WIth liberal use of the finder I grab it, and pea brain announces that the alignment is "successful" - he thinks any day he wakes up and gets to see two stars is successful, no matter how inaccurately!

But what the heck, I want to try out the 55mm, so I put it in, take off the rubber eyeguard and plunk the spectroscope on top of the eyepiece. Voila. Hmmmmm. Altair has a lot of blue in its spectrum. Ok, What about Vega. I ask the sweet little idiot to find Vega and he gets close enough to it for me to manually find it. Hmmm... lots of red and green - little blue. Maybe some black lines - not sure.

You know, the truth is, I don't have a clue what I am doing with this thing! Well - maybe a clue. I know I'm trying to see the spectrums of bright stars and I know what a spectrum is - I just don't really know what to make of the information that's then before my eyes.

Still, rather fascinating. I prowl around some more - actually looked for M27 - but end up at my favorite double, Albireo, which is in the same neighborhood. Hey - what about a double spectrum? Yes and no. Yes - I see two sets of spectral color bars very close together - but no, the fainter one shows little color. The brighter one looks a bit like Vega.

So what's going on here? Well, I thiink the only important thing that's going on is I'm watching incredible nuclear conflagrations - that's what a star is, a continuing nuclear explosion - and I'm taking the light and instead of focusing it to a point, I'm breaking it into its constituent parts. Makes a beautiful rainbow - and that's what kids notice. Gives me an excuse to talk a little about how we think we know so mcuh about objects we can't get near, can't sample, can't touch, and can't disset in the lab. But scientists, of course, have been dissecting the spectrums of stars for over a century. They have learned a heck of lot by taking light apart this way.

What I learn are two things:

First, the light I see is really a bunch of discrete light packets of different wavelenngths - colors - all rolled up into one so that it generally - in the case of a star - looks white, but with a slight tint of yellow or red or orange or blue - or sometimes maybe green or violet. The spectrum make these diffeent wavelengths apparent. Now youmight say that's the "real" world. I'd say it's just the world WE see - and that's the message of the spectroscope.

Which brings me to the second, more profound point, which is what I don't see. Visible light - we act as if that's something special - but it isn't. It's simply what we see. Our brains have evolved to process the energy that comes from a tiny part of the electro-magnetic spectrum and that's how we see the world - through this tiny window. And man, that begs the question, of what does the world really look like? The spectroscope gives me a partial answer. And thanks to a variety of other machines we know what a good deal of the rest of the world - the world in the direction of the infra red and radio waves and the world in the other direction, towards the ultra violet and X-rays and gamma rays - looks like.

But that raises what is for me a much more profound question - just what is out there that we don't see and that our machines don't see? Is the electro-magnetic spectrum the be all and end all for transferring information? Or does it just happen to be that part of the information transfer we know how to receive?

And that's the sort of thing that goes through my head as I sip my tea and soak in the humidity on a quiet, early summer morning while watching the nuclear fires of distance stars burn peacefully, quietly shouting their existence to the consciousness of man - and I use all these wonderfully complex little device to get apeek at anothe world in where energy arrives in lots of different wavelengths.