All That Black

“Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend unto Heaven, Thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, Thou art there!” (Psalm 139:7-8)

     One of the most fascinating things about looking through a telescope is how much one does not see. I am usually one of the first to arrive at a star party, setting up just as the sun is going down, then waiting with varying degrees of patience for the evening light to fade and the sky to get dark enough for some serious observing. But I always find things to keep me occupied during this time. Among my favorite ways to make use of this enforced break in the action is to point my telescope at a random spot in the sky and watch patiently as the stars gradually appear. Look away for a minute, and the three stars you were just looking at have become five, or even six. Wait a few minutes more, and they’re starting to be sprinkled all over the field of view. But come away from the eyepiece and look upward naked eye… and still nothing – the evening twilight is still too bright to allow anything to show. You begin to appreciate the light gathering power of your instrument.

     But still more impressive is the vast difference between what the observer can see through the eyepiece even on the darkest of nights, and what shows up on an image taken of that same area.  

Here we see a photograph taken of a portion of the constellation Canis Major. Myriads of stars crowd in on the viewer from every side. What is remarkable to me about this image is that I know very well that with my best eyepiece in my largest telescope under ideal conditions, I would see nothing at all like this. Yes, I would see more stars than I could easily count, but they would not be saturating the field of view as in this image. There would still be fields of pure black visible between each individual point of light.  It is the magic of prolonged exposure that enables the camera to gather the photons from otherwise invisible stars and display them to our admiring view. 

     And this image was taken with amateur equipment under light polluted suburban Maryland skies! Far more impressive results are achieved with giant telescopes situated in southwestern deserts, far from city lights. Not to mention what can be seen through orbiting platforms, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. 

     When we come to even more esoteric means of photographing the sky, such as recording emissions from the non-visible wavelengths with, for instance, the Herschel Space Observatory, then we might see a field of view devoid of “black” altogether. 

     Take a good look at this image.

Nearly every point of light you see in it is not a star – it is an entire galaxy, each composed of hundreds of billions of stars. There are more stars visible in that little rectangle than there are grains of sand on the beach at Ocean City, Maryland! And yet the field of view is far smaller than that of the previous image, and that was no larger than what I can take in with a good pair of binoculars, through which I might be seeing a handful of stars surrounded by an ocean of black.

     This got me to thinking about all that black I see when observing. Intellectually, I know it’s crammed full of light – I just can’t see it. One of my favorite science fiction novels is Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis, first published in 1938. I must have read it more than a dozen times already, and I’m sure I’ll be re-reading it again someday. The hero of the story, Professor Elwin Ransom, has been kidnapped by two fellow scientists (for quite evil purposes) and has found himself aboard a spaceship bound for an unknown world. Ransom at first experiences a great terror at the idea of being in “outer space”, that terrible emptiness between the planets where supposedly nothing exists. But he gradually realizes that all his fears were unfounded. They had arisen from a completely false notion of what “space” was actually like.

     But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it “dead”; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he now saw that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the Earth with so many eyes – and here, with how many more! No: space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens – the heavens which declared the glory.

(Out of the Silent Planet, Chapter 5)

     You need to ponder that for a minute; there are huge implications here. For no matter where or in what circumstances you might find yourself, no matter how empty and lonely your surroundings might appear, with sufficiently powerful instruments you could pick up some verifiable trace of every last star and galaxy in the universe. All of them. They might be inconceivably faint, but they’re there. This means that every single point in the universe is filled with light from every other point. The Sum Total of Everything is present everywhere. You are never alone – in fact, you are forever and eternally accompanied by everything that is.

“If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Thy hand shall lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.” (Psalm 139: 9-10)