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Dr. Neal Sumerlin in Belk Observatory

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Dr. Neal Sumerlin keeps us abreast of happenings in the night sky and the progress of the new Belk Astronomical Observatory.

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Seeing and Patience

Posted on 04/22/2008

Looking through the eyepiece of a telescope and seeing everything it has to show you is an acquired skill. This has been brought home to me several times, as I have accompanied family members, faculty colleagues, and students at the Margaret Gilbert 20-inch telescope. None of these folks lack intelligence, but they often have great difficulty in seeing anything, or at least in seeing all that is there.

Some of this is just logistics: knowing where to hold your head, learning to ignore what your other eye is seeing (or closing it), moving your head around to get the full image, or (depending on the eyepiece design) getting closer to or farther from the glass. But much of this depends on something in all too short supply, and that is patience. You have to wait for the image to come to you. Patience is of course not a hallmark trait of youth (and therefore most students), but it can be taught. It certainly rewards those who cultivate it.

We sit at the bottom of an ocean of air. Photons of light that travel hundreds of millions of miles do so essentially unimpeded except for the last fifty miles or so, and therein lies the need for spending more than five seconds at an eyepiece. Layers of air at different temperatures will bend the light to and fro; when the light enters our eyes from more than one apparent direction, what should have been a pinpoint is transformed into a shimmering blob. A night of "good seeing" is a night without sharp atmospheric temperature discontinuities, when stars give those pinpoint images, and when the moon doesn't look as though we are seeing it through a swimming pool's depth of water.

But even on a good night, we move back and forth between a fuzzy image and a sharp one. Last week, out with my students looking at Saturn and its moons, we had a night of better-than-average seeing, and so used a new accessory that gave us a magnification of 633x. The image of the planet and its rings would fuzz and shimmer, and then, for about half a second, snap into sharp focus. In those brief moments I could see the Cassini division (a gap in the rings), the shadow the planet cast on the rings, and atmospheric bands on the planet itself. But I couldn't see them continuously. It took patience.

We have all seen the beautiful pictures of galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Here is an iconic image of the so-called Whirlpool Galaxy as seen by Hubble:

Whirlpool Galaxy

For a higher-resolution version of this, go here: http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2005/12/images/a/formats/print.jpg

This is an easily accessible object with our telescope. It isn't that small (it's a relatively nearby galaxy), it's just not very bright. What it requires is a moonless night--the moon makes the background sky so bright that the "dim fuzzy" galaxies are washed out--and…patience. When I took another class out earlier, it was the first clear night in weeks, and the presence of the moon in the sky was just something we had to deal with. We found the Whirlpool in our scope. What did we see?

This was a much larger group, so I didn't take the time to linger at the scope. What I saw were the bright central regions of the two interacting galaxies, and not the spiral arms. Had I more time, I could have turned out all the lights, allowed time for my eyes to adapt fully to the darkness, avoided looking directly at the object so as to let the lower-resolution but more sensitive portions of my retina receive the light, and waited. Given the searchlight in the sky that was the moon that night, I might or might not have seen the spiral structure. But I plan to exercise some patience on a future moonless night!

One of my favorite poets wrote of a New Hampshire neighbor (and of course now you know the poet) who burned down his house for the insurance so he could buy a telescope. In "The Star-Splitter", Robert Frost has his house burner say:

"The best thing that we're put here for's to see;
The strongest thing that's given us to see with's
A telescope."

Amen.

Blog and journal content is produced by an individual. All opinions are those of the individual writer and may not reflect those of Lynchburg College.