#but you lose something. that magic. that soul. when your astronomg experience is not actually stargazing

[oflgtfol]

“But no one actually ‘looks’ through [modern telescopes]. Margaret Huggins lamented the shift from gazing at the heavens to squinting at tiny patches of light. Now we’ve gone much, much further. In today’s astronomy, photons of light from the sky, along with the celestial secrets they contain, are picked up by electronic detectors, converted into digital data and crunched through impossibly complex equations by some of the most powerful computers on the planet. In 2016, bricklayer-turned-astronomer Gary Fildes described visiting Chile’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in his best-selling book An Astronomer’s Tale. Incorporating four mirrors, each 27 feet wide, the VLT collects visible and infrared radiation and can distinguish points in the sky separated by less than a millionth of a degree. Here, at the forefront of today’s attempts to understand the stars, Fildes was struck by the sight of scientists hard at work in control rooms, eyes glued not to their telescopes but to banks of screens: ‘They didn’t look as if they had seen the real sky for days.’”

- The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars by Jo Marchant

#brot posts #astro posting #GOD this puts to words something i really felt #as someone who fell in love with the idea of astronomy as this awe-filled wonder of the vast universe #and then going to college and sitting in a fucking dark classroom at the brink of dawn fucking 8am and doing nothing but MATH !!!! #like - theres no judgment here #very very obviously we need these technologies and math techniques to truly understand astronomy #but like the whole thesis to this book (so far? im thinking) is that like #in doing so - you lose something fundamental #astronomy is one of if not theee oldest sciences known to humanity #but the way it was practiced for millennia upon millennia of human history is so incredibly different from how we practice it now #i got a whole ass Bachelors of Science in Astronomy and never once was i required to actually look at the night sky . #and i dont think this same phenomenon exists in other fields of science #like as time goes on we ofc learn more and theres a certain level of abstraction as you get more separated from the immediate knowledge #afforded by your immediate senses #but the level of abstraction for astronomy is just. not really seen as much or as bad in other fields? imo? #anyway i remember a while ago saying that as i got further through my degree the less magical space felt to me #compared to when i was younger and knew nothing at all #and i said yeah its nice to /know/ things now but i still miss that magic when everything was new exciting and real #but you lose something. that magic. that soul. when your astronomg experience is not actually stargazing #but instead sitting in a room doing math on paper or doing nothing but staring at a computer screen