Thank you from the future

Being a professor at Caltech, I get to dress up in a gown and funny hood one morning every June and sit on stage, watch hundreds of new Doctors and Masters and Bachelors go by and listen to a commencement speaker impart words of wisdom on the graduates. One June, a few years ago, I even got to be one of those commencement speakers. I spoke at the graduation ceremony for Cal State LA in their football stadium, with 20,000 people in the audience – a personal record that I suspect will never be exceeded – and my image projected, rock star style, on multiple giant screens around the stadium. I had a few butterflies in my stomach that morning. But I managed to give a speech that I ended up liking. It went something like this:

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First, I’d like to thank President Rosser for inviting me to be here to share this morning with you. I’d like to thank all of the students for inviting me, too, except that I can see all of you down there discretely picking up your programs and flipping through saying “um, who exactly is this guy again and why is he here?” So let me help you out with those two because really if you ask your neighbor he or she probably won’t know either, but that’s OK.

Who am I? You got the quick intro: astronomer, professor at that much smaller university about 5 miles north of here, discoverer of the 10^th planet or perhaps destroyer of the 9^th planet depending on who you talk to. And I guess those are the official qualifications for why I’m here talking to you today. But let me tell you how I would actually introduce myself if we met out in the parking lot. I’d probably ask where you were from and I’d say “oh I’m your neighbor; my house is about 10 miles up the road that way.” And then I would probably tell you that I teach geology classes to large groups of Caltech freshmen many of whom seem to have never been outside during the daytime before I take them and make them look at the world around them. And then I would start talking about my wife and our 11 month old daughter and you’d have to find a way to get me to shut up because, you know, you need to be somewhere by dinner time and I might keep talking for weeks.

OK. So that’s who I am. The next question is: why am I here? The goal of a commencement speech is to give you a seed of advice at this precise turning point in your life – some seed that is going to implant in you and grow and help steer you as you commence on your new life. It’s a powerful idea that that I could do that, that I could transfer a little bit of wisdom from me to you to help steer through all of the cross currents and distractions of real life to finally get to your ultimate goal. Now that would be seriously influential.

But I’ve got bad news for you, though. I’ve got no advice to tell you how to get along in life. No little words of wisdom. No seeds to plant. As my wife will attest, I barely know how to get along in life myself, and if I had any seeds I probably set them down somewhere in the other room and now I can’t remember where I put them even though I just had them a second ago. I can’t really give you any advice on how to get to the future because the most important thing that you will realize – which you probably already realize since you have made it this far -- is that really you just have to figure it all out on your own. OK maybe that even counted as advice, but if that’s all you get after all of those years of classes and driving and rearranging schedules to get here on time then you should really ask for your money back. No, really, I’ve got no advice to give, unless, of course, you wanna run off and find planets, then I’m definitely your guy. But otherwise? Nothing really.

So I thought: what can I do? No advice to give, but I’m supposed to talk for ten minutes I can just try to be funny for a few more minutes then we can get on with the serious business of whooping and hollering as all 3600 of you walk across the stage. Then I remembered what my wife told me: scientists are not funny people. Why do you think they put them all in the far back of the stadium there? Not funny at all. Don’t even try.

So I’m going to go out on a limb and try to do something that is a lot harder than trying to be funny, which is trying to be serious. I do have something I want to tell you, which is maybe better – or at least more rare – than advice. I want to tell you thank you. Thank you for everything that you’ve done to be sitting right there right now. But really this is not from me, I really want to tell you thank you from the future. And you might think that I am uniquely qualified to talk about the future since I’m an astronomer and all, but, um, really, being an astronomer has very little to do with predicting the future. That’s an ASTROLOGER. They’re the ones that get paid better. But people do get confused all the time.

So it’s not that I am an astronomer and thus know the future, no, I think that the one qualification maybe I have for talking about the future really is my 11 month old daughter. Some of you down here – and certainly many of you out there – know what having a child does to you: you immediately start projecting to the world of the distant future, but you also start thinking a lot about the past and your own parents.

So before I start talking to much about the past, first let me ask: How many of you are in the first generation of your family to go to college? (At Cal State LA first generation college students make up the majority of the population.) This thanks goes to you, but the rest of you need to listen to because it will be your job to pass this thanks on to the right person in your own family.

So first, let me admit: I’m not one of you. I’m in the second generation to go to college.

My father grew up in a small Missouri cotton farming town along the Mississippi River. My mother grew up in a small Illinois manufacturing town along the Mississippi River Neither of their parents had gone to high school in their little river towns. My mother’s family came from recent German immigrants and ran a series of grocery stores in town. My father’s family came from all over – Ireland, France, Nebraska, Pennsylvania – before settling down along the river and opening a small business repairing the newly invented TV sets. By the end of the 1950s with college opportunities beginning to expand around the country they both set off to do something no one in their family had never done: go to college. My mother traveled down the river to the big town of St. Louis; my father went up the river to the big town of St. Louis; and they both arrived at St. Louis University with little idea of what was in store for the next 4 (or 40) years

My mother and father both went to college in the 60s and so in my family there really wasn’t much question of college vs. no college. It was simply a where (in Alabama the choice was usually based on whether you were a fan of the University of Alabama or the Auburn University football team). But things were different for my parents. My father grew up in a small cotton farming town along the Mississippi. My mother grew up in a manufacturing town further north along the Mississippi populated by German immigrants.

And, so, in case you haven’t figured this part out yet, my parents are you.

And if my parents are you, I am your children.

You are my parents. I am your children. Your children, though, will never quite understand this well enough to thank you for all that you did. So I’m going to thank you instead.

I’ve got a second thank you that I need to say this morning. It’s not really for you, so I’m only going to give it to you so that you can pass it on. And this is the thanks for the parents and the siblings and aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins and everyone else who is here supporting you today and who has been supporting you through all of this. Those people – all of you out there – are like my grandparents pushing their children from opposite ends of the Mississippi River in the same direction towards their own goals. The funeral for my grandmother – the last of my living grandparents – was just this last Monday in that little Mississippi River town. Until I sat down to think about what I was going to say this morning to you it never really occurred to me to think very hard about all that she had gone through that allowed me to be where I am today. It certainly never occurred to me to tell her thanks. But she deserves the same thanks that I just extended to you. I wish this one could be from me to her, but I’ll have to settle for from the future to all of you. For your parents out there, your grandchildren – present and future – thank you for all of the things that you did that will make their lives better, even though they won’t really know most of them.

Once you start thanking people it actually gets kind of addictive. Particularly when you are actually doing the thanking for someone else in the future. I’ve thanked you from your children and from your grandchildren, but I’ve got one more that is a little closer to home for me. I think a lot about my daughter these days and I think a lot about the future that she is going to have. In maybe 21 years or so – let’s say June of 2027 -- she could be sitting down right there where you are now. What will the world be like then? I sometimes think the bad thoughts: with 20 more years of global warming will LA be a place that we can live? Will the WORLD be a place we can live? Will the top speed on the freeways be 10 MPH? Will some psychopath figure out how to get a nuclear device into LA before Jack Bauer can stop him? But you think the good thoughts, too: in 20 more years maybe people will have learned to be nicer and more understanding. For the most part, though, most of these things are going to be imposed on us all from the outside and there will be little we can do. [sorry; this is a commencement speech faux pas. I’m not supposed to admit to you that much of what happens in the world you can do little about. Ok, for the record everything is possible you can be anything you want to be and completely change the world and we all believe in you to do anything. OK? OK. Now back to the real world]. OK, no, but really most of the thoughts that I have when I think about what the world will be like in my daughter’s future involve things that few of us – no matter how influential Time magazine says we are – can do much about. They are just the fabric of life, the collective interactions of the millions of people living out their lives at the same time in our community. And I can’t tell the future, so as much as I try to use the Tarot cards they issue you with the astronomy degree to predict what is going to happen, I really have absolutely no clue whatsoever. But there is one thing that I know – one part of my daughter’s life and future – that will be a constant no matter which of these things – good or bad – comes about. That one part will be you. You are the future fabric of this community of Los Angeles. You know, somewhere out there might be my daughter’s mayor – and by now you gotta trust that I don’t mean that in the cheesy commencement speech “you can be anything” kind of way – I mean that in the very literal “somewhere out there might be my daughter’s mayor or maybe city council member or Senator or whatever” way. Really. It actually seems pretty likely doesn’t it? Somewhere out there might be the high school English teacher that inspires my daughter to go write the great American novel. Somewhere out there might be her older next door neighbor who feeds her cats when she is out of town. Somewhere out there might be the parents of her husband. [If so we will need to talk right after this ceremony is over]. Somewhere might be the owner of the first company she ever works for. Somewhere might be the doctor who delivers my own daughter’s own daughter. Big parts of the fabric of her life, of the fabric of this city are sitting right here.

So, as her father, I’d like to thank you. It will never occur to her to thank you for anything since you’re the fabric and people tend to take fabric for granted, but I’ll thank you from the future for making and being the city and community of her future.

And, OK, I have one request. Really just one thing for you to remember to do when you leave here today. (And, of course, don’t forget what I said before about thanking those people who are here for you today). I still really don’t have meaningful advice, but I do have this one request. You guys are the Los Angeles of my daughter’s future, the fabric of her life in this community. And I just ask that you be nice to her. And to look out for her. It’s not too much to ask of you is it? Just to be nice to someone? Like she’s your own daughter, or your baby sister, or your favorite niece? And I meant to bring with me a big poster board picture of what she looks like so you could know who you were promising to look out for and be nice to, but I got up way too early this morning – astronomers aren’t traditionally morning people – so I just plain forgot. No baby pictures for you, so you really don’t have any way of knowing what she looks like – although you probably wouldn’t go wrong by looking for someone who looks an awful lot like me but is a good bit shorter and much much much cuter– but still, you’ll never know for sure which one of the toddlers then kids then teens then adults that she is, so really I guess the only safe way to honor my request to be nice to my daughter is just to be nice to everyone. And look out for them. You are the future of everyone’s community of Los Angeles and I want you to look out for everyone. It will make the Los Angeles of all of our futures a better place to be.

Sony Pictures and the end of the world

Based on all the email inquiries that I’ve been getting lately, it seems pretty clear that the world is going to end in 2012, and it is at least partially my fault.

The email inquiries are, of course, generally misguided: the world is not going to end in 2012, and whether it does or doesn’t has little to do with me.

For years I’ve been getting these emails, asking if Eris, the biggest of the dwarf planets, and something that actually does exists, is somehow related to Nibiru, a made-up planet allegedly known to the Sumerians that, in fact, does not actually exist. The main reason for the confusion is that both the real Eris and the mythical Nibiru have extremely elliptical orbits. The non-existent Nibiru does things that the real Eris can never do, however: in 2012 this made-up planet is supposed to swing close by the earth and, well, destroy life as we know it. Bummer.

I try to respond to most of the email that I get from people who are generally interested in understanding more about the universe around them, but I tend to simply ignore inquires about 2012 or Nibiru or Sumerians. People interested in this type of pseudo-science tend to be uninterested in understanding the scientific reasoning which shows that those beliefs are unfounded. But lately I have been getting an ever-increasing amount of this email along with frequent phone calls from 2012 people. What is different this time is that these people sound truly worried. One voice mail I received said “I’ve got kids; this really scares the hell out of me. Is there something I should be doing? Is this real?” He left an email address. Slightly shaken at his tone, I wrote back saying that, no, this is one of those crazy internet hoaxes and that I’ve got a four year old myself and my biggest worry for 2012 is what she is going to be like as a seven year old. He wrote back relieved. Weird, I thought. This didn’t seem like typical pseudo-science wackiness. This guy was inherently skeptical about the 2012 claims, and was happy when someone with a ring of authority told him there was nothing to it, but, still something had made him worried enough that he had tracked down some astronomer he had never met and called him to reassure him about the safety of his family.

What gives?

Curious about why some people are more than usually worried about this sort of stuff, I actually read a piece of spam I got this week from something called the “Institute for Human Continuity.” It seemed ever so slightly more slick than usual:

Greetings,

As the Communications Director of the Institute for Human Continuity, I'd like to thank you for taking an active role in preparing yourself for 2012. Please note your ticket is only valid for one person. Therefore, we strongly suggest that you encourage your friends and family to register for lottery numbers at TheIHC.com.

The IHC has uncovered evidence indicating that the disasters of 2012 are both real and unavoidable. We believe with 94% certainty that exactly four years from today, cataclysmic events will devastate our planet and many who inhabit it. December 21, 2012 cannot be ignored.

Though the future is uncertain, there are several things we can and must do to prepare. You have already begun by entering the IHC lottery and visiting our website. In the coming weeks, I will be hosting an online discussion during which I will answer your questions and provide additional knowledge on how you can continue to prepare. You may submit your written questions to me via twitter and email. We will also be accepting video questions and will have more details for you in the coming weeks.

I look forward to receiving your questions and working together to ensure that the end is just the beginning.

Sincerely,

Dr. Sorën Ulfert, PhD
Communications Director
The Institute for Human Continuity
Twitter: sorenulfert
Email: s.ulfert@TheIHC.com

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Curious, I decided to check out the web page linked above. As I ran my mouse over the link, though, my eye was momentarily caught by the real address that popped up at the bottom of my browser:

http://news.sonypictures.com/sb40/c4.php?SPT/231494770/49919474/H/N/V/http://www.theihc.com/?hs308=email

Sony Pictures?

OK, now I was really intrigued.

Check out the web site yourself. It’s got press releases, an “education” section all about Planet X, a history of the IHC, and a list of the Ph.D.-heavy staff. Some even wear bow ties. And, hey, you can participate in a poll! (“Which sport would you like to see reestablished first after 2012?” I vote for stock car racing, though basketball and football might be doing better so far.) You are encouraged to sign up for a lottery to see if perhaps, by the grace of the IHC, you will survive the cataclysm. But your chances are limited, and the number of slots is almost full. Best act quickly, you are told. An odometer showing how many people have already signed up for their chance to live continuously increases in the upper right corner of the web site (8,422,601, as of this moment). Most of these people, sadly, are destined to die.

On occasion – usually late at night at a telescope trying to stay awake -- I amuse myself by going to similar apocalyptic sites. They all have a similar look and feel, sort of like the web equivalent of a typewritten piece of paper that has been Xeroxed dozens of times. It’s clear that they’re kooky just by looking at them.

This one is different. It is slick. It is professional. There is no obvious sign anywhere that this is the work of kooks.

And then, if you look ever so closely, you might note at the bottom that all of this is copyright 2009 by Sony Pictures. And you might see a link to the “2012 Movie Experience.” But you’d be forgiven if you missed these, what with the end of the world happening and all.

Wow.

So the entire web site and spam that I received that directed me here is an advertisement. Except that it never says that. It purports to be a real site from real scientists with real concerns about the end of the world, but, in the end, it just wants to make a buck by having you go to what is likely to be a crummy movie.

If the spam email had tried to scare me about the end of the world and then directed me to a web site which turned out to simply advertise the movie, that would have been distasteful. But what is the right word for a spam email that tries to scare me to go to a web site which then tries to scare me even more and doesn’t even admit to being simply an ad for a movie. Well beyond distasteful. Disgusting? Outrageous? Putrid? Reprehensible?

Am I overreacting? It’s just a movie, right? And a witty viral ad campaign, right? At some point they will break the silence and say “Surprise! The world is not ending! This is just a movie! Aren’t we clever?” And we’ll all be so happy that we’ll decide the best way to celebrate is to go see a movie. Any movie except one from Sony Pictures.

Maybe at that point I’ll quit getting phone calls from people who are scared for the continued existence of their families. Or maybe not. Maybe this fear-mongering ad campaign is not the reason I’ve gotten so many more scared phone calls and email messages lately. Sadly, though, if it is the fault of the ad campaign, Sony Pictures would presumably be pleased.

Homeward bound

I’m on my way home today from a quick trip a third of the way around the world to use a telescope.

Astronomers are, of necessity, vagabonds. Sometimes the thing that you want to look at in the sky is only viewable from the southern hemisphere, so down to Chile you go. Sometimes the thing is so faint that only the biggest telescopes around are worthwhile, so it’s off to Hawaii. What’s rare, though, is to spend 24 hours flying from Los Angeles all the way to the Canary Islands – a group of high volcanic crags off the coast of Africa with a latitude almost identical to that of southern California – to use a telescope smaller than the one that is just a three hour drive from my house.

When, after a day of travel, I got to La Palma, the island whose highest peak is strewn with telescopes, and I stepped outside into the dark dark night sky, I was greeted with exactly the same sky that I see in Los Angeles. OK, there were many many more stars, but they were all in their right places, and nothing was there that I couldn’t have seen from home.

So why spend all of that time to travel to a telescope smaller than my local one when all of the same sights were visible? Because when it was night time in the Canary Islands the sun was still high overhead in southern California. And the thing I was hoping to see only happened right then. If I had stayed home and waited eight hours to look later I would have seen nothing.

Here is what I hoped to see: that night the funny oblong fast spinning dwarf planet Haumea was passing directly in front of one of its satellites (Namaka is its name). If I could determine precisely when it happened and how long it lasted I could learn many things about Haumea (its size and crazy shape, maybe also its interior structure) and also about Namaka (how big it is, how much it is being tugged around by the other satellite, Hi’iaka). But all of this was happening so far away that the only way I could tell when Namaka disappeared behind Haumea was that the total amount of light coming from Haumea should dip by about 1%, So at the telescope I spent two entire nights doing nothing but staring at Haumea and measuring precisely how bright it was every two minutes. For comparison, I also checked a couple of stars nearby at the same time. If they stayed steady while Haumea dipped in brightness I would know I was in business.

It all sounds so simple.

In reality, though, stars never stay the same all night long. They get brighter as they get higher in the sky and fainter as they drop. Even on the clearest nights they fluctuate due to changing atmospheric conditions. Seeing this tiny drop in brightness of Haumea in the face of all of this intrinsic variability is a tough task.

But I tried.

After two nights at the telescope I am leaving with my laptop filled with pictures of the sky and my hopes high. Did we see it? Did we detect this tiny dip which told us that Namaka disappeared? I think so. I have a plane ride from London to Los Angeles tomorrow to look at the data more closely and convince myself what might or might not be there. But I think so.

If we didn’t detect anything it’s bad news. Perhaps our predictions are off, or it’s just too small of a blip for us to ever really see. But if we did detect it then our work is really just begun. Turning that little blip in the sky into concrete information about Haumea and Namaka will take a lot longer than tomorrow’s plane ride. There will be many more such trips around the world to be in precisely the right place when it happens again. There will be detailed computer models of the exact time and depth and duration of the blips. There will be confusion and ambiguity. But that is all in the future. For now I have the simple pleasure of long uninterrupted plane ride where I can stare and poke at the data, catch up on some reading, and think about these dwarf planets. And at the end I get to pick up my daughter from school and she’ll ask “Daddy daddy daddy did you see any stars?” and I’ll tell her that I did, but that the stars here at home are always the very best ones in the sky.

Heavens above!

Almost ten years ago I got to be involved in an astronomical experiment. The US Air Force had recently completed a technologically sophisticated telescope on Haleakela, the highest peak on Maui, for the purpose of spying on satellites as they went overhead. The National Science Foundation was interested to know if the new telescope might prove useful for astronomers, too, so they recruited a few test cases to come see if they could make it work.

The tests were, ultimately, ambiguous. We were trying to observe Saturn’s moon Titan to see if we could take images of hurricane-sized storms moving across its surface. We were stymied as much by horrendously bad weather (on Haleakala, not on Titan), as we were by cultural differences between astronomers and the Air Force. (My favorite: our observations of Titan were temporarily classified, because “Titan” is the same word as “titan” which is a missle. The people doing the classifying thoroughly understood that we were observing the moon of Saturn but, by the rules, any observations of “[T]itan” were to be classified.)

But though we were generally stymied, one moment at that telescope will stick in my memory forever. We were waiting for Titan (the moon of Saturn) to rise high enough in the sky that night and watching over the operators’ shoulders as they spied on satellites. Whenever they were foreign satellites we were kicked out of the room. But whenever they were U.S. satellite we could stay and watch.

At 4am the night before, as we were driving down the mountain after a night of observing, we had listened intently to the news of the Space Shuttle parked at the International Space Station and the installations to be done that day. They were having problems, apparently, with getting a solar panel to unfurl correctly. We went to sleep not knowing what had happened. As we drove back up the mountain the next day we had still not heard any news.

Around 8pm, though, Elvis, one of the operators, said “ISS coming!” meaning that the International Space Station was soon to fly overhead.

“Hey, you guys seen the ISS before?” Elvis asked.

“Not that I know of” I said.

“This a sight to see; hold on.”

And the giant telescope swung to the horizon and started tracking the space station as it went across the sky and the other operator came in and starting making adjustment on the computer and then, suddenly, the Space Station came into focus.

It looked much like all of the other pictures of the Space Station that I had ever seen before with two exceptions. First, the solar panels were unfurled.

“Ah ha!” we said. “I guess they were successful last night.”

Second, we could see the Space Shuttle parked next to it. Every other picture I had ever seen had been taken from the Space Shuttle, so I had never seen what it looks like when the shuttle is parked right there.

The view was so good that if a spacewalk had been happening right then and an astronaut had turned around to wave at the earth we would have seen him well enough to know to wave back.

The telescope tracked the Space Station for about 4 minutes. When it was over, I picked my jaw up off the floor. It was, perhaps, the most amazing pictures I had ever seen a telescope make before, and it was just over our heads, rather than in the remote depths of space.


Only a few weeks ago, on these very pages, I tried to remind people to Look Up! To remember that stars and planets and galaxies are not abstract things that we read about but are real concrete and viewable things in the sky above. But, really, for most of my life, I’ve been just as guilty when it comes to those other things that occupy our night skies: the satellites. It’s not that I don’t see them all the time when I am looking at the sky, but I never think of them as anything more than spots of light moving across the heavens. Sure, I know all about the Space Station. I use the Hubble Space Telescope as often as I can. I think about the astronauts and the Space Shuttle and watch NASA TV to make sure the launch and the walks go ok. But somehow I still fail to make that cognitive leap that reminds me that these things are real, and are really in the skies over head.

Until this week.

Knowing that the Shuttle was up visiting the Hubble Space Telescope for the last time, I got an overwhelming urge to see them both, to somehow make a visual connection with the astronauts who are up there risking their lives so that people like me can continue to make astronomical discoveries. I knew that, in theory, you should be able to see such things, but I didn’t really know how. I did what any rational person would do in 2009, which is to search Google. And I found my new obsession: www.heavens-above.com

Simply tell the web site your latitude and longitude and it will tell you all of the bright satellites that will go overhead tonight.

I tried it the other night. The Space Station was making what I now realize was a particularly favorable pass. At 9:51pm I went outside (a full 2 minutes early, just in case, though I need not have). I waited. I traced precisely where I thought it was supposed to go and stared and stared just in case it was a bit faint to see in the glow of the Los Angeles skies. And then, precisely, on schedule, it silently and majestically moved from the southwest horizon to nearly overhead to the northern horizon over the course of about 4 minutes. It was brighter than anything else in the sky at the time.

I had seen it before, I am certain. But I had never seen it and known what I was seeing. I ran back inside and said to my wife Diane:

“I just saw the Space Station go overhead. It was one of the most amazing sights in the sky I have ever seen!”

She looked at me, nodded, and went back to the email she was writing.

OK. I get it. Satellites aren’t for everyone. But they’re out there. They’re real. They’re waiting. That bright light travelling across the sky contained three people who at that precise moment could have been looking down and seeing the crescent earth with the sun still illuminating the Pacific while California was now bathed in dark. Those people are really there.

As for the Space Shuttle, which set me on this mission, it hasn’t been visible yet. You can only see satellites when – like an airplane high in the sky at sunset – they are still illuminated by the sun while you are in the dark. By chance that has not happened over California yet while the Shuttle has been up. I might get a chance on Friday, when it is low in the sky around 5am. I will definitely wake up for it. It’ll be my last chance to see the Hubble Space Telescope and the Shuttle together and to remind myself that up there these things that we built, these people that fly to them, are all real, and finally on their way back home.

Godspeed

We astronomers like to toy with the ideas of life and of death. We name distant objects after gods of the dead and underworld, like Orcus or Pluto, we eagerly discuss cannibalistic galaxies and gamma ray bursts that would wipe out civilizations for light years in radius. We talk about catastrophic impacts and the possible slow death of the entire universe. But, usually, it is just a vicarious show. Nothing that we study out there in the universe will is likely to actually affect anything down here on earth. Nothing that we do is really a matter of life and death.

Except for this week.

This week, for the sake of astronomy, seven people will strap themselves on to the top of a controlled explosion and launch themselves almost 200,000 stories into the air. If all goes well, they’ll spend nearly two weeks confined to a tiny container holding the only patch of livable space for 400 miles in any direction, before they drop back to earth in a flaming descent that transforms into a supersonic glissade to the ground.

The seven are the astronauts on the final Space Shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. If they are able to carry out everything on their extensive list, they will leave behind an enormously capable telescope capable of years more of distinguished and fascinating scientific inquiry.

Astronomers the world over will rejoice, but I will rejoice a bit more than average. A year ago, I proposed to the committee in charge of the Hubble Space Telescope that they allow me to spend a significant amount of time on the telescope to use one of the brand-new instruments being put in by the astronomers to study the origin of the Kuiper belt. It was a bit of a long shot, I thought. These committees tend to favor things such as figuring out the origins of distant things, like galaxies, or the universe itself. Our local neighborhood is often overlooked. But the committee liked the idea and now all that stands between me and getting to use this fantastic new instrument in space is the fact that the instrument itself is currently sitting in Florida. At least as of this moment. But come blast-off it and the seven astronauts will be on their way to space.

This moment almost never happened. If I were in charge, it never would.

After the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia break up over Texas, NASA declared that the only safe way to fly the Space Shuttle was to go to the Space Station where it could be inspected and, if problems were found, astronauts could temporarily stay while repairs or rescues were mounted. But because of their very different orbits, you can’t get to the Space Station if you go to the Space Telescope. Thus, there would be no more flights to the Space Telescope and it would soon plummet to the earth and burn up in the atmosphere.

There was a great outcry. Hubble is invaluable! Hubble is a national treasure! It seemed as if every astronomer out there had stories to tell about why Hubble was spectacular.

I agreed. I had my own stories, even. Many of the fabulous finds about dwarf planets over the past decade have been made by or aided by the Hubble Space Telescope. And there are many many more things that I still want to do with it. And then I said that it was OK to let it die. Hubble had had a spectacular decade and a half, and if it was not safe to refurbish it anymore we astronomers needed to celebrate its legacy, mourn its loss, but accept that it was for the best. This was no longer an abstract matter of galactic life and cosmic death: this was a matter of real life and, quite possibly, death. This actually mattered.

I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, a thoroughly dedicated space town, and reminders that things do not always go as planned are strewn throughout the city. The high school to which I went was named after Gus Grissom, who died during a pre-launch test of the Apollo 1 mission. Ed White and Roger Chaffee – who died along side Grissom – have their own schools just across town. You can see the Challenger school from the back deck of my parent’s house.

I love space exploration. I love human space exploration. I grew up on it. I wanted to be part of it. I became an astronomer because of it. I understand – I think – the risks, and am even willing to accept them. Sometimes. But not blindly. I feel that many of the astronomers pushing and pushing and pushing to get the Shuttle to fly to the Space Telescope never once thought about the risks, never drove around a town with schools memorializing astronauts who never came home. This actually mattered.

What are the risks of catastrophic failure, as the worst-case scenario is known? I have heard absurdly precise estimates of 1 chance in 187, though I neither know how these numbers are arrived at nor put much faith in them. I do know that this next mission is designated STS-125 – the 125^th Shuttle flight. Two have ended in disaster. That’s 1 in 64. While that’s not quite Russian roulette with a six-shooter and a single bullet, neither is it a short drive to the office in light traffic. It was worth thinking hard about this. This actually mattered.

In the end, the tea leaves were clear from the beginning. The outcry was too loud for the Hubble to be allowed to fall from the sky. The Space Shuttle would go after all.

It’s probably good that I wasn’t in charge. I don’t think I ever want to be in the position of making decisions that could directly lead to someone never coming home to their family again. But someone has to make those decisions. I would have chosen differently, but I understand the choice. The astronauts themselves know what they are getting in to and are itching to go. Who am I to say no? And, since the decision is made and they are indeed going, I’ll be the one watching from down here on earth cheering loudly, remembering the excitement I’ve felt with every blast off I remember from Apollo on. And this time I’ll be cheering even more loudly, thinking about the years of discovery ahead and the origins of the Kuiper belt and things about which I have not even begun to dream.

You will likely not be surprised to learn that I am a non-religious person. I draw my spiritual inspirations from Etruscans and Inuits and small children and the full moon itself. And yet, when searching for the right incantation, the right words of encouragement and amulet against harm, the best one that comes to mind describes something that those seven astronauts will both have in an almost literal sense and certainly need in the intended sense:

Godspeed, STS-125, godspeed.

Encore: Yelping at Saints

[I've been watching the moon, which made me remember a much earlier column that almost no one read. Forgive the rerun, but watch the moon!]

If your skies have been clear for the past week you might have been noticing -- as I have been -- the slow but unstoppable growing of the moon. There's nothing new here. It does essentially the same thing every 28 days, but it is still a show worth watching.

In my backyard I see this: each night as the moon moves further and further in its circle around the earth and we see more and more of the illuminated half, the moon is getting just a little brighter. In a few days, as the moon finally goes from just-barely-not-full to finally-completely-full, the moon will finally brighten its last incremental amount and it will be its brightest of the month, though only a little brighter than it was the night before.

This gentle brightening to a muted peak sounds prosaic and reasonable. But it is not true.

I remember once being out on a backpacking trip in the wild mountains inward of the Pacific coast south of Monterey. Some friends and I had hiked all day to make it over a range and down to the bottom of a creek where a little stream of hot water poured out of the earth making a tiny pool in which to soak sore legs and shoulders. We camped a bit away from the hot pool, ate a warm dinner as the sun was going down, and finally began climbing our way to the top of the little ridge separating us from the hot spring. We didn't even bother with flashlights in the dark because the full moon had made the entire woods faintly glow -- plenty of light to get around at night even in the dark of the wilderness. As we had almost reached the top, though, somebody silently flipped a switch and a blinding spotlight was suddenly tracking us from the ridge.

This was miles away from any roads or machinery down a long windy trail, so perhaps I could have reasoned my way out of the situation given a little time for relaxation, but, in the instant, I did what I think most anyone would do when unexpectedly illuminated by a spotlight deep in the woods far from where anyone or anything should be: I yelped. Loudly.

My yelping didn't affect the spotlight, which refused to flinch. It refused to flinch, I realized an embarrassed moment later, because it was no spotlight, it was the moon. It had been hiding behind the ridge until we had gotten near the top, and as we rose over one bump it suddenly revealed itself like the flip of a switch. My credibility as a young astronomer (I had just started graduate school that year) was seriously diminished amongst the friends who had seen me frightened of the moon.

Which is to say that the full moon is really bright.

The fact that the full moon is bright is perhaps not a startling fact, but what is startling is that if I had been coming over the ridge on my way to the hot pool and I had seen the moon a day earlier or a day later, I would never have mistaken it for a spotlight.

You don't have to take my over-tired-from-hiking-all-day's impressions for it. If your skies are clear this week as the moon is finally puffing towards full, go outside and see for yourself. Go out on Wednesday, two days before the full moon, and look around. Check out the barely visible shadows. See what fuzzy shapes you can make out in the distance. Look up and notice that the moon is definitely not fully illuminated, but it is getting close.

Go out Thursday. To really do the job right you should go out an hour later than you did the night before, since the moon will have risen an hour later. Look around. You probably won't be able to tell any difference at all from the night before. Same vague shadows, same fuzzy details. And then look at the moon. Definitely bigger, but one edge is still a little flattened. Tomorrow it will indeed be full.

Finally, go out on Friday, an hour later still if you can. Stare right at the moon, if your eyes can stand it. It does look like a spotlight up there in the sky. It is much brighter than it was just the day before. Look at the now-crisp shadows on the ground and the sharp details on the rocks and the plants that you can now pick out. Now go ahead, if you need to, and let out a little bit of a yelp. I'll be understanding.

What is going on with the moon? How can it get so much brighter in just a day? Who turned on the spotlight?

In medieval paintings, saints and anyone else holy are always depicted with a halo around their heads. Unlike modern halo depictions, which look like a gold ring hovering slightly above the hat line, these medieval halos appear more like a general glow coming from behind the entire head. Whenever I see one of these glowing medieval halos I think about how bright the full moon is.

I have a hypothesis -- totally without the benefit of supporting research, necessary expertise, or, likely, even minor merit -- that the medieval painters painted halos like this because they had seen such halos around their own heads. And I know what the painters saw, because I have a halo around my head, as well.

Here's another experiment to try. Go outside on a bright sunny day and start watching your shadow. Walk along until you find a place where the shadow of your head is falling on grass. Focus on your head shadow while you continue to walk, letting the background grass blur in you vision. You will gradually notice that there is a diffuse glow around the shadow of your head. It won't be around any other part of your body, and you won't see the slightest hint around anyone else's head. Point out your halo to any else and they will see precisely the same thing: a halo around their own heads and nothing around yours. Everyone is holy to themselves.

In reality what you are seeing is not some sort of corporeal representation of your own ego or a mystical aura of self-realization, but simply a literal trick of lights and shadows. When you are looking at the shadow of your own head, you are looking, by necessity, directly in the opposite direction of the sun. Stop focusing on your glowing halo for a minute and now focus on the grass itself. You'll notice that in the region where your halo is you will not see a single dark spot due to a shadow of one blade of grass on another. There can't be any shadows; with the sun directly behind you, any piece of grass that you can see can see the sun, so it can't be in shadow. Start looking away from your head shadow and you notice that you are now starting to see collections of tiny shadows, so the overall scene gets darker and darker even though it, too, is fully illuminated by the sun. Your halo is simply the total lack of shadows that can only occur when you are looking almost exactly opposite the sun. I've seen my halo from many places, on many surfaces: on grass or rough dirt or asphalt while walking, even on the tops of a forest full of trees while looking out of the window of an airplane flying low enough right before landing that I could pick out the shadow of the fuselage and see a beautiful glowing ring around. Anywhere you have sunlight and a surface rough enough to make millions of tiny shadows you get to glow the glow of the saints.

And so it is with the moon. When you look at the full moon you are almost looking at where the shadow of you head would be. The sun, though it has set over the horizon, is directly behind you as you face the full moon. If you could see down to the surface of the moon, you wouldn't see a shadow anywhere, not in the craters, not amongst the craggy mountains, but, more importantly not even at the finest scales of the rocky dust that covers most of the surface. The next day, when the moon is just past full, the shadows will begin to reappear and the spotlight will be extinguished.

It happens every month. It's just a trick of light and shadows. But, every now and then, I still look up at the full moon and think about saints and I feel a little bit of a yelp deep inside.

Baby Pictures

Last night, for the second time this decade, I got to have dinner and give a talk on the floor of the dome of the famous 200-inch Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory. It’s rare for anyone to give a talk on the floor of the 200-inch telescope, because Palomar, like every other large telescope around the planet, is used night after night after night looking at everything from the nearest asteroids to the edge of the universe. Few or no pauses are allowed for frivolities such as dinners and talks (in this case we got in, had dinner, gave a talk, and vacated the floor just as the sun was setting). So it was a treat when I got invited to speak to an intimate gathering of supporters of Palomar and Caltech – the university where I work and the one which, not incidentally, owns and operates Palomar – on the floor of the dome. It was even more of a treat because I had been the speaker at the last one of these dinner 8 ½ years ago, and it was particularly interesting to reminisce about what had happened in the almost-decade since then.

When I gave that first talk, in September of 2000, I was a young assistant professor at Caltech who had embarked on what I think it is fair to say was an audacious project: I was going to go find the 10^th planet. I had spent the previous two years systematically scanning a wide swath of sky using the seemingly ancient technology of manually slapping giant glass photographic plates to the back of a wide-field telescope, exposing the photographic plates to the sky for half an hour at a time, developing the photographic plates in the darkroom downstairs, and then looking at repeat exposures of the same patch of the sky to see if – perhaps! – I could find something that had moved. It was exactly what Clyde Tombaugh had done 70 years earlier that had led to the discovery of Pluto, but, no, I had the advantage of a much larger telescope and the use of computers to help analyze the final photographic plates.

At the time of the talk 8 ½ years ago I was in the third year of the project, where I was going back with a larger telescope to try to confirm anything that I thought I had detected during the first two years with the photographic survey. I told my audience sitting under the 200-inch telescope about what I was doing and about what I hoped to find. I told them about photographic technology versus the new digital cameras now widely in use. I told them about why I thought that after this third year I was going to have made that discovery I was hoping for and the 10^th planet would be in our grasp. It was, I daresay, a talk full of exciting promise.

It’s a good thing I wasn’t asked to give a follow up talk right away.

By the following year it was clear that my three year survey had found a grand total of absolutely nothing.

I told that story last night at the 200-inch telescope and everyone chuckled. They chuckled, of course, only because they knew what came in the years that followed. What came next? We scraped the photographic plates, installed experimental digital cameras, roboticized the telescope, and kept scanning and scanning and scanning. With the benefit of the faster and more sensitive digital cameras we slowly surveyed the whole northern sky and blew the outer solar system open.

Last night I showed my baby pictures from the past decade. I showed Quaoar, the first large Kuiper belt object that we found, the one named for the creation force of the local Tongva Native American tribe, the harbinger of larger objects to come. I showed Orcus with its newly named moon Vanth, and talked about its odd mirror-image orbit to Pluto. I showed Sedna, far beyond the Kuiper belt, in an orbit that takes 12,000 years to go around the sun, named for the frigid Inuit goddess of the sea, a beacon pulling us even further in the distant solar system. I showed Haumea, with her two moons Hi’iiaka and Namaka, spinning her was across the sky, I showed lonely Makemake, bird god of the Rapa Nui, the runt of the litter that produced the Big Three of Makemake, Pluto, and Eris. And then, of course, I showed Eris her, in all of her discord and strife, with her tiny moon Dysnomia circling her.

I really do feel like each one of these is like a child to me. And, like children, whenever the rest of them are not in the room, I will secretly tell you that this one is my favorite. They’re all my favorites. I can tell you stories about their little quirks, their odd habits, and a funny thing that this one did the other day when it thought no one was watching (did you know that the night before Namaka went right behind Haumea playing a little hide-and-seek with us? Silly little moon.).

Something else was particularly interesting to me about my talk 8 ½ years ago at Palomar. Something happened that day that I am certain I will never forget. I was inside the telescope waiting for the group of Caltech supporters to arrive, and finally hearing the knock on the outside door, I opened the door, and, as my eyes adjusted to the blinding outside light, I was greeted by the director of the group of Caltech supporters. She had worked on the Caltech campus for years, but somehow our paths had never crossed. I had certainly never seen her before. How do I know for sure -- you might ask. Trust me -- is my answer. I would have remembered. She walked in the door, and I fumbled my words introducing myself. Her name was Diane Binney.

Diane Binney doesn’t work at Caltech anymore, but she came on the trip to Palomar last night anyway. It was her first time back to the mountain since that time 8 ½ years ago when I gave a talk up there. She came to see old friends and revisit old places. And, since she hadn’t seen many of the people in a long time, she brought baby pictures of her own. She has a 3 ½ year old daughter named Lilah. Lilah has Diane’s last name as a middle name, but she gets the last name from her father. Me. Lilah Binney Brown.