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recent visit to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City brought back memories of Exeter. I'd heard so much about the newly renovated planetarium, I couldn't wait to see it.
The Space Show, constructed from pictures taken by the Hubble telescope, brought to life a 3-D rendering of the night sky. Traveling through space, we zoomed past a fuzzy Milky Way galaxy and then through the pinky-blue Orion nebula.
After the movie, we walked through the exhibits. The "Scales of the Universe" tried to convey the size of various objects. An 87-foot-wide white sphere filled the room. We walked around this blank orb, reading the placards: If the sphere is the sun, then this is the size of the earth. If the sphere is the moon, then this is the size of a particular crater. If the sphere is the planetarium, then this is the size of your brain. My mind felt like a rubber band stretched to its limit, then snapped back. As soon as I grasped one lesson in scale, the frame of reference changed. After a while my head ached.
I guess I am more historian than scientist. More than the things themselves, it's what the things represent that moves me. I wanted an explanation of the context of the discoveries. I wanted someone to tell me a story.
Perhaps my reaction has to do with the fact I was introduced to the stars in a different way at Exeter. I took astronomy in the fall of 1989. At the same time, I took a course called "The Cultural History of Science from Aristotle to Einstein," taught jointly by Mr. Harper, my astronomy teacher, and Mr. Hagen, an English teacher. I can't imagine a better introduction to the mystery of the stars. In class we read Aristotle and learned the structure of the classical universe. We read Copernicus and Kepler, who both tried to reveal God's perfection through numbers. In so doing, however, Copernicus shoved the earth out of the center of the universe and replaced it with the sun. And Kepler showed the orbits of the planets were not perfect circles but squished ones, ellipses.
Next we read The Starry Messenger by Galileo. Galileo observed the moon and its cratered, dented, horned surface. This discovery shattered the idea that the heavens were fundamentally different from the earth. Applying the scientific method to his observations, Galileo went one step further than his predecessors: he believed his eyes.
We also read excerpts from Chaucer, Milton and Frost. Through these writings we glimpsed the transition from the medieval to the modern worldview.
Then we would go out and look at stars.
I remember those nights at the Grainger Observatory, which sits at the far edge of the campus, overlooking the club soccer fields. The fields loomed dark on moonless nights, the best for stargazing. Waiting as my lab partner tried to capture Polaris in the narrow field of view so we could align our telescope, I could see my frosty breath. Numbed by the cold, my fingers and toes would start to tingle because I never dressed warmly enough. Our classmates were stationed in pairs at other posts along a semicircle. They talked and laughed, but everything sounded muted out there in the cold. We walked around waving flashlights wrapped in red cellophane, because red light wouldn't force our pupils to contract. We needed cats' eyes, dilated and large, to take in stars with the faintest magnitude.
On those field trips, I learned the constellations. I saw the moons around Jupiter, Saturn's rings, and Venus, looking so like Earth, its blue surface swirling with white clouds. I saw a double star.
Twelve years later I have forgotten much of my astronomy, but the constellations still stick with me. Wherever I am, I can gaze up and orient myself to the sky. It always looks familiar: the Little Dipper. Cassiopeia. The Northern Cross. And in the winter, there's always Orion and the Pleiades.
I remember feeling disoriented once. Driving somewhere in North Carolina, I turned down a side road and ended up in a meadow. I turned off the headlights. Stars exploded into the sky. I couldn't find my familiar friends, the constellations. There were too many dots to connect. I was lost among the stars.
Then I remembered the medieval view of the sky as I had learned it in The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis. I imagined looking up at stars twinkling 10,000 or 10 billion miles away-the exact number didn't matter because both were unimaginable. Still the heavens encompassed a finite distance, not some forever-expanding universe. I imagined the stars moving in their perfect spheres and listened for the astral music. For a moment I felt the oneness of an ordered, harmonious universe.
The sky connects me to Aristotle, Copernicus, Kepler. We all saw the same constellations, the same stars.
The same sky also connects me to the 16-year-old girl who trudged through club soccer fields one cold, moonlit night to the Grainger Observatory. She wore thick socks and boots so maybe this time her feet wouldn't start to tingle from the cold. That night the girl pointed the blue barrel of a Questar to the sky, trapped the full moon in its circular field of view and then studied the pockmarked lunar surface up close for the first time. And, like Galileo, she almost couldn't believe her eyes.
- Michelle Poblete '90
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