I look out at the night sky and see into the past. I don’t need a fancy
machine like that conceived by H.G. Wells, but only my eyes or a pair of
binoculars. Light travels at the speed of
light. This may seem obvious or redundant, but it has its implications for
the night sky. If a star is ten million light years away from earth, the light
entering my eye tonight is ten million years old. I do not see the star as it
is today, but rather as it looked so long ago. Some of the stars I gaze upon have
long been extinguished, but due to their distance, the flame from their burnout
or explosion has not yet reached here.
Some
places we look in the night sky are dark. This does not mean that there
are no stars there. It is probable that the light of newly ignited
stars has simply not reached here yet.
The night sky is your own private time machine where one can look into the past and wonder about the future.
Jim - Jan. 2019
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