BAN #373: The Numinous

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Blog Jam

What I’ve recently written on the blog, ICYMI

Monday 1 November, 2021: Why is the asteroid Bennu’s surface rocky and not smooth?

Tuesday 2 November, 2021: The complex diversity of the gorgeous globular cluster M5

Wednesday 3 November, 2021: Where *isn't* Planet 9?

Thursday 4 November, 2021: What is causing galaxies in the Virgo Cluster to die?

Friday 5 November, 2021: Hubble portrait of a galaxy shows it shines in stellar birth and death

Personal Stuff

Yeah, but not too personal

Let me tell you a short story, with a long view.

In November 2004 I attended the Australian Skeptics National Convention, held in Sydney. I gave the keynote lecture (the Moon Hoax, of course, which was still A Big Deal at the time) and participated in a few other events.

It’s a big trip, and expensive. A bunch of other local groups pitched in to help get me there, so I wound up visiting other cities to give talks as well. At this time the entire country was in the grips of a massive drought, just huge and devastating. The year before, a wildfire raged out of control near Canberra and destroyed much of the Mt. Stromlo Observatory; we toured the site and it was heart wrenching. They hadn’t cleaned it up yet so we saw domes charred, observatories wrecked.

One instrument, the Great Melbourne Telescope, was destroyed; the fire hadn’t melted it so much as it sagged in place, the weight of the metal framework bringing it down as the iron in it softened. The 122-cm mirror had shattered in place from the intense heat, like someone had taken a hammer to it. One of the folks at the observatory who took us on the tour gave me a shard from it, which I keep on my shelf. A reminder of fragility and ephemerality.

Still, one aspect of the adventure I was very excited about was seeing southern skies. Much of that part of the sky is forever hidden to us northern hemisphereans by the bulk of the Earth, and I really wanted to see those stars.

So imagine my disappointment when it started raining the day I got there.

Remember, this drought had been grinding on for years. The odds of it raining the day I landed… well.

Of course, everyone I met was overjoyed, happy for the rain. I was probably the only person there even mildly disappointed about it.

It finally cleared up a bit on my third or fourth day. I was in a car with my friend driving at night when I saw a very bright star over a tree. I got excited, and looked near it for other stars so I could figure out what I was seeing. Another star was visible, not as bright, and I wracked my brain trying to figure out what it was.

Then we turned a corner, a gap in the trees opened up, and I saw three bright stars in a row below the very bright one, and had several seconds of brain freeze. Suddenly I realized what I was seeing: The bright star was Rigel, the three in a row were the belt, but below Rigel… it was Orion, but it was upside-down.

Take that, flat Earthers! If you want evidence that the planet is round, seeing a familiar constellation upside-down is a decent one.

Sometime later, maybe that night or the next, we were driving down to Canberra and my friends decided to take us up a hill to do a little stargazing. What happened next is something I remember very, very well.

It wasn’t terribly late, maybe 10 p.m. and we drove up to a relatively dark site. I opened the door, stepped out of the car, and looked up…

…and froze. The first thing I saw, the very first thing, was the Large Magellanic Cloud just hanging there in the sky. I hadn’t even closed the car door yet, but I stood there, slack-jawed, just staring at it.

The LMC is a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way, technically a dwarf galaxy but still bearing some heft with several billion stars in it. At 160,000 light years away its light is diminished, but not by any means extinguished. It’s easily visible to the naked eye, though only from the southern hemisphere.

But that’s a technical description. That’s very different from seeing it.

I was riveted. Nailed to the spot. I recognized it, the bright bar down the middle, more subtle features coming into view as my eyes adapted to the dark, especially as I absently closed the car door and the interior lights went out. I was overwhelmed.

Please understand: At that time my PhD research was a decade old, but for several years I studied a star that blew up, a supernova the light from which reached Earth in 1987. Called Supernova 1987A, it changed the way we understand exploding stars in many ways. I was on a team that got Hubble data of it, and I spent day after day, week after week, working on those images, squeezing everything I could out of the data — Hubble, you may recall, was launched with an out-of-shape mirror, and our early images were out of focus and extremely difficult to analyze.

That was a rough time, trying to figure out what that star’s demise had done to the gas surrounding it in images that were not quite up to the task. I spent two years wondering if I had made a huge mistake, laboring over math textbooks trying to understand arcane equations, making countless notes and wrote countless lines of code. I also met the woman who would marry me during that period; a lot happened in my life during this time, both wondrous and difficult, that changed who I was.

So what does this have to do with Australia? The star that blew up, Sanduleak -69 202, was located in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

This was an object I had never in my life seen except in photos, but whose demise I had spent so much time and effort trying to understand. And, for the first time, I was standing there on a hill and photons that had been traveling since around the time humans began wearing clothing were entering my eyes.

I choked up, a lump in my throat, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. I was overcome with awe, with beauty, with a sense of being in the Universe and knowing I was a part of it.

It was one of the most deeply profound and poetic moments of my entire life.

And, if I were asked what that moment looked like, I’d say it looked very much like this.

This photo, by the brilliant astrophotographer Mark Gee, captures what I was feeling very well. Carl Sagan called it numinous, a feeling of awe of the sacred.

I know that feeling well. I was awash with it that night on the other side of the world. A lot of roads diverged  to bring me there, many contingencies, luck, privilege, hard work, zagging instead of zigging. In the years since I’ve tasted the numinous again and again — usually at the eyepiece — if not been saturated in it as I was that one time, but even a hint of it is a circumstance for which I am very, very grateful.

My thanks to Mark Gee for letting me use his image here — seeing it is why I wrote this in the first place — and for reminding me of why I do what I have to do.

Et alia

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