44 AUSTRALIAN SKY & TELESCOPE July 2017
“The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but
Frodo stood awhile lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had
stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world.
A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that
he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as
if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of
his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no
colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but
they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first
perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful.”
— J. R. R. Tolkien, Fellowship of the RingT
he passage above describes Frodo’s experience of first
having his eyes uncovered in the enchanted land of
Lórien. Frodo stands, lost in wonderment, on a bright,
sunny day, and yet this passage reminds me of the enchanted
— but real-life — experience of astronomical observing on a
starry night.
Stars twinkle and produce a new sight every instant, yet
they are “ancient as if they had endured for ever.” We don’t
see new colours in heavenly objects, but they certainly seem
fresh-found, glowing in purity in the dark. The innumerable
stars, star patterns, and especially features on other planets,
provide us with the opportunity to create for them “names
new and wonderful.”
But the most important similarities between Frodo’s
experience and an astronomer’s observations on a dark nightThrough a high window
Peer into the awesome majesty of the starry skies.
are those of the “high window” on “a vanished world.”
What is a telescope essentially but a “high window” that
opens upon something truly awesome — sights absolutely
unavailable on our planet or in any non-astronomical
component of our lives? No natural sight on Earth comes
close to simulating the view of a crowd of up to hundreds
of sparkling lights witnessed in a telescopic observation
ofanstaropencluster...M35(inthenorthwesternfeetof
Gemini)orM41(inCanisMajorabout4° south of Sirius).
No riverine landscape or desert plateau mimicks the brilliant
view of the two perfect, intense, and almost-touching sparks
of a double star like Castor or Rigel
or — the most challenging — Sirius,
through a telescope. Nothing we see
around us comes close to reproducing
the dramatic view of the luminous and
coloured, multi-star-centred and star-
sprinkled fan of M42, the Great Orion
Nebula.
Frodo feels that he’s “stepped
through” the high window. But isn’t
that the impression we astronomers
often have, especially with the wide, flat
fields offered by the modern generation
of eyepieces, pioneered by Al Nagler?
And what about Frodo’s idea of a
“vanished world” on the other side of
the window? In astronomy there are
countless worlds vanished in a special
but quite literal sense: vanished because
what we’re seeing is what the stars
or galaxies looked like years or even
billions of years ago, not what they look like now. Even light,
the fastest thing in the universe, takes long periods of time to
cross those immense distances.
There’s an even more amazing kind of vanishing in
astronomical observing. We’re the ones so short-lived that
we’re vanishing. A human lifespan is no longer than one swift
glance in comparison to Carl Sagan’s “cosmic calendar,” the
life of the universe compressed into a single calendar year.
But when you think of how much joy and wonder that all of
us astronomical Frodos can take in during just a quick look
through the telescope or at the sky, a glance doesn’t seem like a
small thing.■ FRED SCHAAF has been writing about the skies for more
than 40 years. FAREWELL TO LORIEN BY TED NASMITHUNDER THE STARS by Fred Schaaf