Evanston: FAR OUT
Evanston: FAR OUT
One of the websites I visit each morning that I have an Internet connection is NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html , which today has a link to a six minute YouTube movie that I had already viewed, depicting the known universe, starting on top of the Himalayas and moving out to the most distant galaxies. It is very impressive and can be found at the NASA site and here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U&feature=player_embedded
The same journey can be made more leisurely and even more beautifully in a book I saw mentioned in the NY TIMES last week and immediately ordered.
FAR OUT: A Space-Time Chronicle is the creation of Michael Benson, who has collected and sometimes reprocessed Images from the world’s observatories, again beginning close--but farther out than the Himalayas--and moving distant in time and space thirteen billion years to within seven hundred million years of the creation of the Universe.
My copy of FAR OUT arrived only yesterday. It is big and heavy, and I will not be reading it in one sitting. In fact, it will be kept close at hand for months, if not years.
The photographs are breathtaking and mind expanding.
Even those that I have seen before, such as the famous “Pillars of Creation,” are more beautiful, and reportedly more true to reality, in Mr. Benson reworkings than the originals. And as far as I have read, his words are worthy of the images. He begins with a line of poetry from William Blake, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” and a comparison of the similar forms of the most distant galaxies and fossils of Permian fusilinids, which lived in our oceans two hundred and fifty million years ago.
The Times reviewer concludes, “If you don’t have your own Hubble Space Telescope, this book is the next best thing.”
That such images exist is even more impressive when you realize that it was only eighty-five years ago last December 30 that Carl Hubble, after whom the Space Telescope is named, proved that the spiral nebula Andromeda is another galaxy and that our own Milky Way does not comprise the entire universe.
Of course I am honored that the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is being named after me. The Webb Space Telescope is due to be launched in 2014. After the World Wide Web, this is more than I expected and almost too much.
Rumors that the telescope is actually named after some former NASA administer named James Webb are patently absurd.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010