The Telescope

There is a beckoning about space—an indefinable pull towards its airless environment. While I share a childlike excitement of zero gravity far off planets, I don’t lose myself in heavenly dreaming. Infact, what is more my fascination, is the technology that allows children to have their dreams, that allow them to grow up and actually touch the stars! And thus, I put forward for your enjoyment and enlightenment, a detail and profile of the most landmark instrument ever created for observation of the stars!

Two pieces of glass (three at most) are used to either refract or reflect light emitted by a far off source. Radio telescopes are similar (though will not be addressed here) in that they collect energy signals from far off sources.

People commit hundreds of hours of their lives, willingly, to a continuous myopic view of the universe, generally very alone atop some secluded high mountain like a Buddhist monk. What do the efforts of these researchers matter to us? Wouldn't their time be better spent raising their children or contributing to their community? But these researchers do matter and their efforts are fruitful. What these martyrs of loneliness are providing is a biopic view for the rest of humanity. They are providing a complete and ever expanding image of our place in the solar system—an account of the space in which we live.

Space is the substance of metaphysical conjecture and childhood visions. It is, to borrow famous words, "the final frontier"! Profound landmark discoveries have shaped our interpretation of our manner of habitation and altered our ways of living to live in a cleaner, more humble, relationship with the substantive universe around us.

These researchers have studied the births and deaths of stars, the motions of planets and space bodies, the unbelievable natural phenomena of the heavens that, in their spectacular magnitude and power, seem to bring our universe back down to where is feels more real.

We can only take in the reaches of space one eye at a time, but little by little, but picture becomes clearer.

Politics

The early 1600 were a time of church authority and undisputable tradition. Such were these high emotions that in 1616, an edict was past prohibiting support of the Copernican thought of a heliocentric system. At the slightest suggestion of any thought other than the earth being the center of the universe and the church would actively rise against the authors of those notions.