82 AUSTRALIAN SKY & TELESCOPE May | June 2018
FOCAL POINT by Richard S. Wright, Jr.JASON ABBOTTMy plastic spaceship
A child’s lofty dreams are realised, though not quite as he’d imagined.
destination. My course is celestial,
though, and to the music of Enya or
some sci-fi soundtrack I sail off across an
ocean so vast few can comprehend it.
I am made of stardust, I think as I
marvel at how my craft’s machinery
collects and records photons a million
years old or more. I ponder the
duality that to me they are ancient
in years beyond counting, while from
their perspective they were created a
moment ago by some star many light-
years away and only just spanned thisAS A YOUNGSTER in the late 1960s and
early ’70s, one of my grandest dreams
about being a grown-up was living in
the Space Age. I fantasised about flying
cars and vacations on the Moon while
devouring endless episodes of Space 1999,
Star Trek and Lost in Space. Astronauts
were still being sent to the Moon when
a trip I took to a planetarium in primary
school sealed the deal and left me with a
hunger that I’d never satisfy.
Today, alas, there is virtually no
chance I will ever drive a flying car or
vacation on the Moon. But I have my
own spaceship, an enormously capable
one. It can carry me on voyages through
the Solar System, across the galaxy and
even into intergalactic space. It’s also
a time machine. With it I can travel
to the distant past, to an age when
dinosaurs walked the Earth or, with
some effort and care, to a shadowy
period before our planet even existed.
You see, at some point in my adult
life I became an astrophotographer.
Like many who are serious about
such a passion, I’ve built my own
observatory under the dark skies of a
remote location. My observatory is my
spaceship. It’s one of those domes that
folds over and slides to the side, and the
whole thing consists of the same plastic
material that comprised my children’s
backyard playhouses.
Many a night I have laid down on
the floor beneath my dome and stared
up through the opening, as if through a
portal into outer space. At such times,
the equipment in the centre of my ship
warbles and clicks in the faint glow of
red lights pulsating with the implied
power of my mighty craft. Our galaxy
arches overhead, and occasionally a
fellow traveller flies by, be it a streaking
meteor, a comparatively slow-moving
satellite, or an aircraft with other
travellers heading to a more terrestrialimmense distance.
Is it this crisscross of time streams
that gives rise to the fabric of the
universe? Am I the universe too, the
dust or ashes of dead stars assembled
here on Earth in such a way that I can
reflect upon the universe, and myself, in
such a fashion?
Yes, I have a spaceship, and it’s more
powerful than I ever imagined as a boy.RICHARD S. WRIGHT, JR., is a
software developer at Software Bisque.