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In addition to this blog, which I have been writing since 2012, I have written a monthly essay for the Spirit of the Senses salon group in Phoenix, Ariz., since 2015. I was, at various times, a presenter for the salon, which arranges six to 10 or so lectures or performances each month for its subscribers. Among the other presenters are authors, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, musicians, lawyers and businessmen, each with a topic of interest to those with curious minds. I recently felt that perhaps some of those essays might find a wider audience if I republished them on my own blog. This is one, from May 2, 2019 is now updated and slightly rewritten.

While Juno was asleep, the great god Jupiter brought Hercules, the illegitimate baby he sired on Alcmene, to suckle on the breast of his sister-wife and thus become immortal. But the baby bit down too hard on her nipple and Juno woke with a start and pushed the child away from her, leaving her milk to spew into the heavens, creating the Milky Way. The 16th-Century Venetian artist Tintoretto painted the scene in the 1570s.

At least, that’s one version the Romans told. In another, told by Eratosthenes, Juno woke to see the love-child of her husband at her teat and in anger and jealousy, threw him down: same result.

But there are many versions of the origin of the Milky Way, or galaxy, as it was known. In one, the sun, which circles the daytime sky from east to west, leaves behind a trail of sparks which are seen at night as the Milky Way.

Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, says it is a road lined with the homes of the gods, the way the Palatine Hill in Rome was home to the wealthy elite.

 The Roman word for the streak of light across the sky is Via Lactea, or the Milk Road, although they more commonly called it “Galactos,” or Galaxy, from the Greek Γαλαξίας κύκλος (Galaxias Kyklos) — “Milky Circle.”

In his magnum opus, Astronomica, the Second Century Latin poet Manlius catalogs many versions. One suggests the Milky Way is the seam where the two half-globes of the heavens are welded. Or it might be the abode of the souls of heroes who have died. He noted the bioluminescent glow of a ship’s wake and surmised the bright path in the night sky might be the same.

Or, he cites Democritus from the Fifth Century BCE, that it might be the accumulation of myriad stars too faint to see individually. Which is surprisingly the way we know it now.

The Milky Way is a spiral collection of stars in a Frisbee disc about 180,000 light years across — that is more than a million trillion miles (yes, a million, one trillion times over). It contains between 100 billion and 400 billion stars (counting is hard because of dust obscuring parts, and also because counting that high is exhausting). And it is one of billions of similar collections of stars in the visible universe. Each is called a galaxy.

The sun and earth sit about halfway out from the center of the circle and spin around the galactic center about once every 240 million years, traveling at a speed of 140 miles per second.

That spiral shape is iconic, and found over and over in nature, like in the cloud spiral of a hurricane.

But as I was going to say when truth broke in with all her astonishing matter-of-fact, it is the mythology of the Milky Way that is found in religion and poetry. The spilled milk is common to many cultures, but it is not the only primordial explanation for the spew of light that courses the heavens.

In China, it is the Silver River; in Japan, the River of Heaven. The Sanskrit name is the Ganges of the Sky. In Scandinavia, it is called the Vintergatan or “Winter Street,” because it can be seen only in the winter, since the long summer days never darken black enough at night to make it visible. In Medieval Europe, it was known as “The Road to Santiago,” as it was used to guide pilgrims to the church of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. (Conversely, the actual road to Compostela the pilgrims walked was called La Voje Ladee, or “The Milky Way.” And Compostella itself bears a folk etymology from Latin: field of stars.)

In Australia, one Aboriginal peoples in Queensland consider the streak of light as a swarm of termites blown into the night by primordial hero Bur Buk Boon, through a hollowed log that became the first didgeridoo.

In ancient Babylonia, the god Marduk sliced off the tail of the evil dragon Tiamat and threw it into the sky, forming the Milky Way.

 After the Milky Way, the second most common name is “The Birds’ Path,” after a belief that migrating birds used the glow in the night sky to navigate. It is called that in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Turkey, Kazakhstan, parts of Ukraine and Poland, and in variation in the Tatar language.

When you build a campfire at night and poke the logs, a cloud of sparks fly up with the smoke. In Spanish, these sparks are chispas, in French, étincelles, in Latin, scintillae. (In Vulgar Latin, this became ‘scintilia, into Medieval French as estancele and hence our word, “tinsel.” Who knew?) I imagine those flying sparks in my imagination continue upwards, blowing and whirling, to become the band of scintillae in the sky.

There are those of scientific mind, and those of esthetic. In school, my best friend was a math and science whiz — we called him “Gizmo.” We shared an interest in astronomy, although his was objective and filled with numbers, and mine was a delight in the vastness, the beauty and the cosmic. Giz had a Criterion Dynascope 6-inch reflecting telescope and we spent many nights pointing the thing at the sky, looking at the rings of Saturn or the craters of the moon. And the nebulae, including the fuzzy spot in the sky we call the Andromeda Galaxy. To this day, on a dark moonless night, I can still make out with my naked eye among the buckshot of stars, the sublime blur in the sky.

I would spend hours at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, part of my spiritual home a the American Museum of Natural History. It is much changed now, rebuilt as the Rose Center. I loved the old halls, including the black-light murals, the orrery, the meteorites, the scales to compare your weights on other planets and the famous sign:

But most of all, I loved the photographs. Black and white images taken with the Wilson and Palomar observatories’ telescopes, framed and lit from behind to make them glow. The image of the Andromeda Galaxy was stunning.

It may be hard to conceive the magic those old images had, now that we are so used to the full-color pictures sent down to us from the Hubble Telescope in orbit. Those images are also stunning, even though they are often presented to us in false color.

But the real thing can be even more awe inspiring than the pictures. I remember a night I spent north of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, in back country 60 miles from the nearest paved road, on the way to the Toroweap Overlook. 

The night sky was intense; I sensed stars numbered in Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions.”

At 6:30 exactly, with the sun already below the planet’s edge, the first star came out, directly overhead. It was Vega, in the constellation Lyra. The rest of the sky is still a glowing cyan with an orange wedge in the west.

So far from civilization, the night sky is a revelation. As the night darkens, the stars pour out like sand from a beach pail. By 7:30 the sky is hysterical. I hadn’t seen so many stars since I was a child. 

The Milky Way ran from north to south like the river of incandescence it is, splitting like a tributary stream from Cygnus to Sagittarius.

I leaned back on the car hood, with my head against the windshield and stared straight up. For two-and-a-half hours I sat there, looking heavenward, trying to do nothing and think nothing. Just look.

What at first seemed to be a solid bowl overhead, with pinpricks punched in it for the light to shine through, later took on depth. It became a lake with fish-stars swimming in it at all depths. Then, as I reclined on the hood, I suddenly had the sensation of being a figurehead on a ship, or a hood ornament on a car, speeding into the three-dimensional emptiness defined by those stars.

And, of course, I was. It was true. I was having my spiritual vision, as it were, like some Lakota doing the Sun Dance, or a Sufi experiencing transcendence. But it is my particular stubborn sensibility that my vision turned out to be factual. This has happened to me before. Each time I enter the visionary world, it turns out that the transforming image I am given is grounded in simple fact.

I really am on a stony vehicle careening through stars. It is just that in everyday life, we never think of it that way. Given the solitude and the velvet sky, the obvious becomes apparent. The vision-experience may simply be a radical change in perspective. 

When my joints were finally too stiff from sitting in one position for so long, I decided it was time to sleep. I crawled in the tent and dozed off in the silence.

At 3:30 in the morning, awakened by coyotes and owls, I got out of the tent to look at the sky again. It was all turned around. Orion was now up and bright as searchlights. And the Milky Way went east and west, having revolved around the pole star. So, this bullet we’re riding on is rifled.

The night went on like that: One sense input after another, so busy through the nocturnal time-sluice that I hardly got any sleep at all. At 6 in the morning, the coyotes yowled again, and the east was whitening, although the sun was behind the mesa. It had rained briefly during the night and when I drew open the tent flap, I saw the blue sky patched with gray-brown clouds, and dangling from one of them was a rainbow. It was not much more than a yellowish bright spot against the angry cloud, but I saw its familiar arc and promise.

Astronomy has moved ahead, working with computer images now instead of photographic plates. Perhaps because I grew up and became a writer rather than a scientist, I miss the awe and beauty of those million-dotted pictures, glowing white hot, like Moses’ bush, and giving a visual, esthetic image of the majesty and immensity of the universe.

The great color images from the Hubble telescope have replaced the old Mt. Wilson pictures in the popular imagination of most younger students, giving a newer, more rainbowed sense of the awe of the universe. Like so much else, the images have become just more “media.” They are too pretty.

But for me, there is the reality of a night sky that city lights blot away, leaving us only with the snapshots. The spinning Milky Way traversing the inner dome of heaven and the spatter of stars, so far away they cannot be measured in any sense meaningful to our lives on this planet, are the very ground of reality.

hale telescope

When I was a boy, like many boys, I developed an interest in astronomy.

I spent many frozen February nights outside my New Jersey home enjoying “good seeing,” when the cold air kept the stars from twinkling too aqueously. It was an interest I shared with my best high school friend — known as “Gizmo” — and we often used his 6-inch telescope to watch the rings of Saturn or the wrinkled “terminator” of the moon — the deckled line between sunlight and shadow roughened by lunar craters and mountains.

And when there was a total eclipse of the sun in 1964, Gizmo’s father drove us both up to Maine to get the best view. The birds stopped singing in the sudden darkness and Giz and I stopped talking as we were caught up by the final glimmer of Bailey’s Beads — that last-second “diamond ring” before totality — which gave way to a black hole in the sky surrounded by a fluorescent curtain of corona.

As we grew older, Gizmo’s interest proved more genuine. He was inclined toward science and mathematics and went off to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. My interest in the heavens turned out to be the interest of a humanities student — a little too much gee-whiz and not enough trigonometry.

Nevertheless, as a boy, I read everything I could on the subject. One name kept popping up: that of Palomar Observatory with its 200-inch Hale Telescope. All the best photographs, it seemed, were taken through that monster instrument.star picture

It was, I knew, the largest telescope in the world — a title it held until only recently — and sat on a mountaintop somewhere in the West.

And that is the rub. Being from New Jersey, everything beyond the Delaware River was a little fuzzy to me. I guess I knew Palomar was in California, but where in that state, I never really had a clue. The telescope existed rather in some ideal region, not subject to county zoning restrictions or state tax laws. It was just “Palomar.”

So, when I found ourselves in Southern California, driving up Interstate 15 from San Diego, when I came upon the exit for Cal. 76 north of Escondido and a roadsign mentioned Palomar.

I took the detour.

Palomar Mountain is a real place, with real stones and real trees, and, I’m sure, real county ordinances.

It is not easy to get to. It is way off the Interstate, down winding narrow roads through small towns and valley farms. The road gets narrower and more twisted as you turn off Cal. 76 and begin to climb Palomar Mountain on Cal. Route S6. There are some 24 switchbacks on the way up, with long views of an empty part of the state each time the road pokes into the open.090-S24342

The mountain is 5,600 feet high, with a broad flat saddle top. You turn off Cal. S6 onto Canfield Road and it loops the final miles to the parking lot at the observatory.

The woods that have bounded the road gives way to an open space filled with more ferns than you normally find outside of coastal Maine. They sit in the fields along the final few hundred yards to the glaring white dome at the edge of a rise.

The building is immense. The rotating dome is 135 feet in diameter and tall enough to fit a 13-story building inside and still raise a flagpole on top of the building.Palomar Observatory

Although the observatory opened in 1948, its design is from an earlier decade. Plans for a giant telescope were begun in the 1920s and work on casting the telescope’s glass mirror began in 1934. Work had to be halted during World War II. So, when it opened after the war, the building still bore the stylistic marks of the earlier Art Deco style. It is a plain building, but the ornament and proportions are unmistakable.

Yet, it is the machine inside the building we have come to see.

Little effort has been made to accommodate the visitor: There is a parking lot and a small, outdated museum and gift shop at the bottom of the hill. Inside the dome, there is only a small, poorly marked visitors’ gallery, glassed-in to keep the hoi polloi from gumming up the work of busy scientists.

Still, in the daylight murk of the closed up dome, you can see a giant, mechanical eye, the size of a coastal gunnery emplacement.

And it does bear some resemblance to a mammoth cannon, with a barrel that can be pointed in any direction.

Only, instead of pumping ordnance into enemy lines, it swallows down the buckshot of stars, giving astronomers a peek at distant points of light so dim and distant, they speak of the birth of the universe.

The very first photographs taken through the telescope doubled the size of the known universe. Later work doubled it again, when Palomar astronomers discovered quasars.

Size isn’t just for the heavens, though. The rotating part of the dome weighs in at 1,000 tons. The moving parts of the telescope weighs 530 tons. The mirror, nearly 17 feet across, weighs 14.5 tons.hale telescope cutaway

Yet, despite its massiveness, it only takes a tiny motor of one-twelfth horsepower to slew it around its bearings. In fact, you could, if anyone would let you, move that 530 tons with a single finger judiciously placed, it is balanced so well. It helps that it is mounted on a pad of moving oil, a thousandth of an inch thick, which keeps the weight riding frictionlessly.

Astronomy has moved ahead, working with computer images now instead of photographic plates. Yet, in the small museum at the site, you can see large transparencies of some of the observatory’s more famous images.

Perhaps because I grew up and became a writer rather than a scientist, I miss the awe and beauty of those million-dotted pictures, glowing white hot, like Moses’ bush, and giving a visual, esthetic image of the majesty and immensity of the universe.

The great full-color and false-color images from the Hubble telescope have replaced the old Palomar pictures in the minds of most younger humanities students, giving a newer, more rainbowed sense of the awe of the universe. But for me, it is a reminder of who I was and how I got to where I am.

Sometimes, it is why we travel, rather than where, that is the story.