Specks in Space

What interests me in life, and Why do I write this stuff? Answers include that it's for me, not for you, whoever you are (BTW, why are you even here anyway?). Stuff moves around in the mind, or just sits there, some of it lurking in cubbyholes for forty years, to use a biblical term that means a very long Time. Stuff that anymore I'm barely conscious of is still part of Whoever and Whatever I Am. Some fraction of it needs to get out where I can look at it from outside it, an image of what's in there that makes up the Who and What I Am and/or have been, much of Which only I know about. Truly, you don't know me.

There are smaller parts that from Time to Time have been bursting to get out and be told, shared; and I've not always shown apt discretion in that, as in our longstanding family rule that What's said in the Rectory stays in the Rectory. Sometimes what's shared needs to be only with most trusted and mutually shared, and held close, as in Eyes Only. Or maybe NOFORN.

From a cubbyhole, pigeonhole that's more like a double-forty years, twice too long, a most influential evening in my life, on the basketball court at Cove School, gazing through someone's telescope at the Moon, and at Saturn with its rings, and at Jupiter with its four visible moons, opening Life possibilities and planting in me a seed for lifelong fascination.

That's a recent JWST image of Uranus: did you know that Uranus has even more beautiful rings than Saturn, that Uranus lies on its side to spin with one pole toward the Sun and the other toward the blackness of space, that a year on Uranus (the Time it takes to revolve around the sun) is 30,687 Earth days?

What's important to me? Have you ever gazed through a small telescope at a spiral galaxy? How many galaxies are there in the Universe? Estimates keep growing: currently somewhere between 100 billion and two trillion. It isn't that the magnificence of Creation keeps expanding, it's that our knowledge keeps growing. What matters in life's Time?

What matters? Love and Learning. With apologies to all, I should have been an astronomer, a cosmologist instead of Whatever it is that I'm ending up having been. "Life is short," as the preacher says, "and we haven't much Time." So, What are Life and Time all about? Exploring, inquiring, searching, looking, listening, new knowledge. Startrek, to go where no one has been before. Boldly to go instead of trying to meet the expectations of others.

That, and trying to remember why I picked up my phone just now to look up something. No, really.

As explained below, from JWST, the top image is of a swath of interstellar space that's just 2% of the width of the full moon: thousands upon thousands of distant galaxies in an unimaginatively expansive Universe. Specks in Space so vast that even galaxies are but specks, fighting and killing each other as a matter of national policy and practice, we specks on a speck have a lot to learn.

RSF&PTL

A swath of sky measuring 2% of the area covered by the full moon was imaged here with NIRCam instrument in eight filters and with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in three filters that together span the 0.25 – 5-micron wavelength range. This image represents a portion of the full PEARLS field, which will be about four times larger. Thousands of galaxies over an enormous range in distance and time are seen in exquisite detail, many for the first time. Light from the most distant galaxies has traveled almost 13.5 billion years to reach us. Because this image is a combination of multiple exposures, some stars show additional diffraction spikes.