Easter in M92 and M13 with Eliza and Higgins

M92 is where I “went to church” on Easter morning – sort of beating the traditional sunrise service to the punch. The “service” I attended was held at about 4 am and I don’t have a clue who else was in attendance. But I do know that I got in more than an hour of the type of deep, meditative observing that for me is as renewing as worship is to others. It is an opportunity to celebrate life – to celebrate being alive – and being aware of this magnificent universe, from it’s smallest pebble, to its globular star clusters and to our human brains which can span both – that is worth a celebration in the best sense of the word.

So there I was, comfortably seated in my little office chair, the 8-inch LX90 pointed nearly straight up as it peered through the observatory dome at this fuzzy spot in Hercules. I had aligned on brilliant Vega, still very visible through the dome slit, and moved slowly – lovingly – from it to the double-double (very nicely split at the 16mm click stop on the Hyperion Zoom) - then on to M57 and M13. I spent a lot of time with M13, really enjoying the use of the zoom to slowly frame it differently and relish each new perspective. And that lead me to M92.

M92 – call it Eliza – and M13 – call it Higgins - Those are our two Cockapoo puppies. . . And as I sat in the near freezing night air, the wind occasionally rattling the observatory door, they popped into my mind. See, they are brother and sister, but quite different. Higgins is a guy – big and soft and covered with so much apricot-colored hair that it makes you wonder if he has some English sheep dog in him. And Eliza – she couldn’t be more different. Mostly black, short hair, on a compact, solid little body. She is 7 pounds to the 11 of Higgins at this stage in their growth.

M92 struck me immediately as Eliza – compact, tough, wiry little cluster that tends to get over-shadowed by it’s bigger, fluffier “brother” in Hercules, M13. But I was talking worship and well – what am I saying? Puppies are one of the most magnificent things on our planet and certainly can teach us all something about loving life. So I won’t apologize for this little side track. Besides, what is, is – and these two globular clusters brought them to mind and for that connection, took on a new life in my mind.

But the subject of my meditation this Easter morning was a lead fishing sinker. That was the first image that came to mind as I tried to hold onto the photons pouring through the scope from after a journey of thousands of years. A lead sinker. Typical little chunk of lead that every fisherman uses. The one I had in mind is on my workbench and weighs about 4 ounces. See, I was trying to picture that same sinker – no bigger – but being so dense that it weighed 4 pounds instead of four ounces.

In my mind I mentally squeezed in the incredible amount of extra lead to make that possible. Then I told myself I was not dealing with lead at all, because lead is a solid. That is, it is a substance where the atoms have bonded together in a well-established form and unless you hammer it, it retains that form. But what I was trying to see was this super dense lead not as a well-structured solid, but as a chaotic gas where its individual atoms had been stripped of their electrons and they were whirling around in a totally chaotic fashion, repeatedly crashing into one another, changing their basic condition from hyrdrogen to helium, and in the process releasing some energy.

Energy. Oh great. One of those fundamentals things which we can describe in terms of the interactions we detect, but in the end its essence remains a total mystery. Energy that gets its initial kick from the center of a star where the density of the hydrogen gas is 16 times that of the density of lead and thus the atoms collide and release energy. And that energy, after a million years or so, makes its way to the surface of the star where it is releaed as an electromagnetic wave.

And that wave – or the part that’s in the miniscule segment of the spectrum we humans can detect visually - makes it way through about 30,000 light years of “empty” space and eventually some of it finds its way to Earth and to my particular observatory where it meets this wonderfully curved pieces of glass that constitute the heart of the LX90 and is concentrated in a small, but real, image which I then examine with this new Hyperion zoom eyepiece. What am I looking at? Several hundred thousand stars held together in a tight little ball about 100 light years in diameter. (Just multiply 100 by six trillion to get an idea of the miles involved, then divide by 500 – that will give you some concept of how long it would take you to fly from one side to the other in a commercial jet. Once you have your mind wrapped around that, imagine how far away it has to be for the whole thing to fit in my eyepiece with lots of space left over. )

And there are so many points of contact here – the lead sinker, the brain that somehow discovered these things – well the many brains – and the telescope and, of course M92 itself an incredibly ancient collection of incredibly ancient stars – perhaps as many as half a million of them, jammed together in this wonderful old cluster – one of the oldest known things in our old universe and all of it hanging out there about 30,000 light years away. . .

Well, if sitting there alone in the chill spring air and viewing such an object doesn’t raise that sense of spiritual awe in you – that utter sense of amazement that you are here at all and that all this stuff is here as well –hop toads, and daffodils and puppies and non-Easter bunnies, and lead sinkers and human brains and . . .

Well, that’s my church, that’s my worship – that’s my celebration of life on this Easter morning.