“O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space…”

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

It’s been at least twenty years since I last looked through the telescope that my grandfather gave to me for my birthday many many years ago. I still have it, and it’s been with me since then; it lived in my parents’ garage for a long time until I finally decided to take it home with me about five years ago. And it lived with me and Jennifer in Woodland, and came with us to Dixon, all without me peering through it even once.

Tonight I took it out from its corner in the garage and set it up. Some of the bolts that hold it together have loosened over the years, and the lenses are all dusty. I used to have a sun filter, a little screw-in filter I could attach to look directly at the Sun through my telescope — I remember doing so when I was young, and staring at sunspots and solar flares and thinking how cool it all was.

I took out my telescope because when Jennifer and I went to the California Academy of Sciences the week before last, we saw a planetarium presentation all about the celestial events coming up in the year 2003, and one of them was the opposition of Jupiter — which means that Jupiter is directly opposite the Sun from Earth. This means that it’s prime Jupiter-viewing time right now.

Our back yard is pretty conducive to stargazing: the streelights are mostly blocked by neighboring houses and trees, and right now Jupiter is very high in the sky. So I took my telescope and found a particularly shaded spot and started focusing. I looked through the viewfinder and found Jupiter, then spent a good forty-five minutes adjusting and focusing. In all the time since I’d last used my telescope, I’d forgotten some of the finer points… like how my back would get sore after having to bend over to peer into the eyepiece.

I finally did find Jupiter. And the sight was worth the fuss with the adjustments and the ache in the back. Not only could I see five of Jupiter’s moons, but I could also see, faintly, some of the lines that mark that planet’s surface, as thin bands of darker color.

It was beautiful.

Tomorrow during the day I’m going to take a few minutes to tighten some of the bolts on my telescope so that tomorrow night I can see Jupiter more easily with less fiddling and adjusting and without worrying that I’ll lose the sight if I accidently breathe on the tripod. And then I’ll look around at some of the other sights of the night sky that I know are out there.

Earlier this evening I was browsing through Space.com, looking up articles about the Columbia investigation, when I found this article about the Challenger explosion. On that page is an audio file of Mission Control’s transmissions through the launch of Challenger to confirmation of its explosion. It’s chilling; from the cool, steady voice stating, “Obviously a major malfunction” to the same cool voice just close to trembling with emotion annoucing, “We have confirmation that the vehicle has exploded.”

I’m heartened by news that NASA is determined to proceed with the manned space program, that even Mr. Bush has recommended an increase to NASA’s budget, and most of all by the joint statement issued by the families of the seven astronauts lost on Saturday morning: that the journey must go on.

I also found this quote from Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who was also the first Israeli to go into space: “The world looks marvelous from up here, so peaceful, so wonderful, and so fragile.” Down here we squabble and fight and talk about war and destruction, while the view from space can make it all seem insignificant. And that is one of the many reasons why the journey must go on.

The full line from Hamlet is, “O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” Our physical realities are small — we’re bounded by nutshells, so to speak. Yet in our imaginations we can travel the Universe and explore and discover things that we never dreamed of. Can we let our “bad dreams” — our hatreds, our fears, our prejudices and angers — get in the way of that?