Saturday, April 01, 2006

As [not many] young girls do, I went through an astronomy phase. Space was great, space was awesome, it was all happening out there. I read up all the over-simplified and not actually true information on black holes and red giants, and felt terribly claustrophobic pondering the fact that I'd never get off this little rock called Earth.

Then, I found out the universe was expanding, and everything was going further away.

That crushed me, as only 8 year old girls can be crushed. Eventually, there would be no more stars in the sky. (As I hadn't thought it through properly, and while the universe may be expanding, the galaxy isn't.)

Then I grew out of astronomy, and moved on to horses and dolphins, as a great many young girls do.

Now I'm a big girl. Possibly I'm even a woman. When I walk home in the middle of the night, the street lights, building lights, house lights, car lights, drown the stars, and I can barely see any in the sky. They don't have to run away, we're pushing them out of the night all on our own.

And this crushes me, as only a 24 year old girl/woman can be crushed.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous1/4/06 16:15

    Oooh, I was a total astronomy nerd when I was little. My mother and uncle used to take out this ginormous red telescope and let me look at the moon - they even got it focussed on *Jupiter* once, which was teh awesome. One of my biggest regrets about being a city girl is the vast amounts of light pollution, and you don't realize just how much there is until you're on a boat in the middle of the sea on a cloudless night with no moon. When I was visiting Middle of Nowhere, PA the other year, it was a vast improvement over what I've got here, but there was still no comparison to being able to see the Milky Way with all its waves and shadows and depth as opposed to just a vague streak across the sky...

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  2. Yah. Zeh zing zat bozers me iz zat I am rememberink zeeing far mors ztarz vrom ze front yard, ri-eegt here, not zat lonk ago.

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  3. Anonymous8/4/06 05:46

    With technological advancement comes horrible lights, but also cheaper telescopes:

    My new Celestron cost only AU $169, and you can see the rings of Saturn through it even from downtown Sydney. It's humble and loveable, and looks like a penguin when you stand it up.

    Maybe the weather's been particularly clear lately, but at least all is not lost.

    -scott w

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  4. Ze ztarz zhould not to be beink chazed, zey zhould be zere, all ze time.

    ReplyDelete