"When I look at the stars, I see someone else/ When I look at the stars, I feel like myself," sang Switchfoot. "God of wonders beyond the galaxies, You are holy, holy," sang Third Day. That's my relationship with astronomy. The part of outer space I can see, but even more the images that I can't see-- planets, swirling masses of stars and nebulae-- are a window or a gateway to realities beyond the physical.
So I should have known better than to choose Neil deGrasse Tyson's
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Apparently it can be read aloud in 3 hours and 45 minutes, but that was about three more hours of detail about the origins of the physical universe than I could pay attention to. I'm sure if I had the right kind of mind I could find transcendence in the chemical formulas that turn hydrogen into carbon, but I don't, so I can't. Discussion of what happened in the first nanosecond of the Big Bang, or exactly how long ago that event was (yeah, I know, everyone is now saying 13.7 billion years ago, but I remember back when it was a mere shmear 6 billion, so don't act like the number isn't going to change again!) makes me feel more like
Walt Whitman:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
So I gave up on Tyson and went back to the library, where I found The Stars: The Definitive Visual Guide to the Cosmos, a DK book. If you know that publisher, you know this book answered my one burning question about the universe, namely: what kinds of cool things are in it? Lots of views like this, for one thing:
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Also lots of fun facts! So now I know the difference between a nebula and a galaxy, and that lots of stars are actually two or more stars in some kind of crazy dance, and that galaxies come in all kinds of shapes, and that the whole visible sky is divided(for location purposes) into 88 constellations, each of which contains not just the great big stars that make the picture (like The Hunter or The Big Dipper), but hundreds or thousands of stars, star clusters, galaxies, etcetera. I learned that while the Universe is expanding, the galaxies within it are being drawn towards each other, so there's more and more space between galaxy clusters. In particular, I learned that the Milky Way and Andromeda are on a collision course, but, no worries, the event is scheduled 4 billion years from now, so Earth and the Sun will be long-gone by then. But mainly, I looked at page after page of beautiful pictures of space objects, and "when I look at the stars/ I feel like myself."
