The Deep Look

 

Look at all the stars in Rio!

The Deep Look (30 Aug 2023)

On a recent plane ride I watched a documentary on the Hubble and James Webb telescopes that reminded me of something we had on the farm in Idaho: a sky full of stars…

Those stars were typically there as I was leaving the house after dressing and stuffing a few frozen cookies into my pockets. And as we lived far from any semblance of civilization and light pollution (assuming I remembered to turn off the light in kitchen before leaving), those Idaho stars were so beautiful that occasionally even the 4am grumpiness would dissipate enough so I could feel a deep awe of the beautiful night sky.

As I got older I loved camping with the scouts, hearing my scoutmaster talk about how the sun was really just a star in an immense universe, and imagining how many people from distant worlds were gazing at the star we call our sun. 

I never was great at identifying constellations, but I did learn to identify a few when I earned the Astronomy merit badge at scout camp. I liked pick out the Orion Constellation on those early mornings as I would shuffle towards the barn.

Can you identify the three stars of Orion’s Belt in this photo?

Over the years, other than the few stars I saw falling when camping out in sleeping bags with my brothers on the front lawn, those beautiful stars didn’t seem to change much. That is until I was preparing to enter high school and got contacts. For some reason many more stars appeared and they suddenly seemed less fuzzy.

That brings me back to the documentary I saw on the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. For many years the Hubble Telescope provided mankind’s best views of the universe. It delivered fantastic pictures to the layman and scientific evidence to the scientist of what lay deep inside our universe. 

Shortly after we moved to Ohio in 2003, scientists started an effort called a deep look. The idea was to spend nearly two weeks of exposure time looking at one tiny part of the sky where absolutely nothing could be seen. Some complained that this would be a waste of time for this precious telescope that was needed to answer so many pressing scientific questions. But the Deep Look proceeded and over the course of just less than four months, 400 orbits around the Earth, 800 exposures, and 11.3 days of exposure time the Hubble camera focused on that vacant piece of the universe.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo showing nearly 10,000 galaxies (Id: heic0611b).

The resulting image changed how scientists saw the universe and was part of the push to build and deploy the much more powerful James Webb space telescope. The James Webb launched out of French Guiana in 2021 as the COVID-constrained scientific community watched in anxious anticipation, highly aware that any of a hundred things could go wrong and doom this expensive investment. Thankfully this powerful telescope has safely settled into its orbit of the Earth at about four times the distance of the moon and is starting to send some beautiful images back to Earth.

James Webb’s First Deep Field image

And just to answer the questions I know you have… 

• Yes it’s true, France does share it’s longest border with Brazil through French Guiana.

• Yes, I am sure my pockets were always clean and sanitized when I put cookies in them- anything else would be unthinkable.

• Yes, I suppose we should all behave because odds are someone in one of those distant worlds has a better telescope than James Webb (maybe it has contacts) and can see us.

  
  

  I love and miss you all!

  Dad

  
  

  

  Photo of the Chilean desert’s night sky.