My wife asked me if “Young Guns” was a new movie. Looking at Keifer Sutherland’s photo of 1988 should have given me a clue. He looks a little older now after all the mayhem on the years of “24”.
Anyway, Denny, I like this photo of the young suns, which are only a few million years old. Many of these astronomy photos give me goosebumps. Hard as I try, I can’t quite get my handle on distances in millions of light years. After all, light travels at 186,000 miles per second, so it can travel a long distance in just one year (186,000mi x 60sec x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days). My little business calculator just gives me an error message. Suffice it to say, astronomical distances are huge and beyond human comprehension. Yes, we can calculate the number, but can we really conceive what that number means?
Back in the 70’s I worked for the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Besides the telescopes on Kitt Peak outside of Tucson, we also had a sister observatory, Cerro Tololo, in Chile, South America. During the time that I worked for Kitt Peak, I witnessed the grinding of the large four meter lens that was being made for the large telescope on Cerro Tololo. A similar telescope was also in use on Kitt Peak. Little by little, in a period of over a year the lens was ground and polished to perfection. I traveled to Los Angeles to make arrangements with the steam ship lines that was to carry the mirror and other telescope parts to South America. The good news is that everything went as planned with the shipment and installation of the telescope and that the telescope is now one of the premier telescopes in the southern hemisphere, not the most modern but still an important research tool.
Doug, if you put together a timeline of things you’ve done, that would take all the fun out of reading the next thing that you write that you’ve done.
I know what you mean about the goosebumps. My afterlife itinerary includes a free float through the universe to check out things up close and ride through a Black Hole.
Ummm, be careful what you wish for.
Let’s have a whip-round and send him now!
