There are many reasons why people get interested in Astronomy. The Universe is an amazing place. The vastness of our cosmos can be hard to fathom though. Chapter two of NightWatch by Terence Dickinson takes you through 11 steps to help visualize this. Each drawing represents a cubic volume of space a million times larger than the one before, beginning with Earth, moving out through the solar system and our Galaxy, taking in more and more Galaxies until you expand beyond our known Universe. Currently Hubble reveals an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the Universe, but this number is likely to increase as telescope technology in space continues to improve.
Whenever you point your telescope skyward into the Heavens, you are actually looking back in time. Your telescope becomes a visual time machine where you look into a time in the past, depending upon how far away the object is you are viewing. Our nearest star is Alpha Centauri, and yet it takes 4.7 years for its light to reach us. And this is the nearest star! What we see when we point our telescope at Alpha Centauri is how it looked 4.7 years ago.
Several years back the Hubble telescope was pointed to a very small region of the sky (about the size of a grain of salt held at arm’s length) in the constellation Ursa Major. This area is so small that only a few stars in our own Milky Way galaxy lie within it. Thus almost all the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies outside ours. Later this was repeated in a small region of the constellation Fornax, producing the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image containing an estimated 10,000 galaxies.
Whenever you point your telescope skyward into the Heavens, you are actually looking back in time. Your telescope becomes a visual time machine where you look into a time in the past, depending upon how far away the object is you are viewing. Our nearest star is Alpha Centauri, and yet it takes 4.7 years for its light to reach us. And this is the nearest star! What we see when we point our telescope at Alpha Centauri is how it looked 4.7 years ago.
Several years back the Hubble telescope was pointed to a very small region of the sky (about the size of a grain of salt held at arm’s length) in the constellation Ursa Major. This area is so small that only a few stars in our own Milky Way galaxy lie within it. Thus almost all the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies outside ours. Later this was repeated in a small region of the constellation Fornax, producing the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image containing an estimated 10,000 galaxies.
Being able to exploring the vastness of space, whether it is from a telescope placed in orbit, or from your own backyard, is one of the attractions of Astronomy. Then there is the thrill of viewing deep sky objects that are visually stunning. The Orion Nebula is an easy object to see through your backyard telescope, and using video astronomy enables you to see it in even more color and detail. Here is an image capture of my live view of how the Orion Nebula (M42) looked 1,350 years ago.
These are just a couple of the reasons people become fascinated with Astronomy. As an Orthodox Christian, my interest is primarily to learn more about God’s creation. Many areas of Science have been explored by those who wanted to do likewise, to learn how God put this great Universe together, how the laws of physics work, what are the processes at work. No, you do not have to be a believer in God to appreciate all this. But if you are, it expands your appreciation, not just of the Universe, but of our Creator who designed all of this.
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