Light is fast...very fast.  If you understand how fast light travels, you begin to get a feeling for the almost incomprehensible vastness of the universe.

If you could see Paris, France, while standing atop Mount Peale in the La Sal Mountains, you would be viewing light which departed from Paris about .03 seconds ago.  In one minute, light travels about 11 million miles.  In one year, light travels about 6 million million miles.  Light can circle the earth in less than one-fourth of a second.  Zoom.

If you are lucky enough to live in one of the few areas of the U.S. not plagued by light pollution, you're able to see about 2700 stars with your naked eye on a good night.  Every one of those stars is in our own galaxy, The Milky Way.  In cosmic terms, they are close neighbors.  Yet the closest star visible from the northern hemisphere of earth (other than the sun) is 8.5 light years away...or about 51 million million miles.  It has taken 8.5 years for the light from that nearby star, Sirius, to travel to earth.  So when you look at Sirius, you are seeing it as it was over 8 years ago.

If you could see the center of The Milky Way from earth, you would be looking 30,000 years back in time.  And that's only to the center of our own galaxy, which contains an estimated 100 billion stars.  If you started, at this very moment, to count the stars in just our own galaxy, it would take you 3171 years to count them all at the rate of one per second.  You'd be finished in the year 5173.

And it's estimated that there are over 100 billion galaxies...each one containing hundreds of billions of stars.  Is your mind reeling yet?  We can see thousands of those galaxies in amateur telescopes such as those at tonight's star party.  The Andromeda Galaxy is our closest neighboring spiral galaxy...yet it is still more than 2 million light years away.  When you are looking through the telescope at the Andromeda Galaxy, you are seeing it as it appeared over 2 million years ago.  In essence, the telescope is a time machine.  If we want to see what the Andromeda Galaxy looks like right now, we will have to wait more than 2 million years.  In comparison, since our sun is only 8.5 light minutes away, we only have to wait 8 1/2 minutes to see what our own star looks like "now."

All of those attending tonight's star party were, presumably, born on earth.  Yet we were also all born into a universe.  Millions of people travel to Southeast Utah to see earth's natural wonders.  There are also countless natural wonders in our skies...in our universe.  Just as development often threatens earth's wilderness areas, development threatens to make the sky's wonders all but invisible from much of the planet.  Light pollution from streets, businesses, and homes is making it harder and harder to see not only distant galaxies and nebulae, but also the stars in our own enormous backyard.  Even Moab's lights, steadily increasing in brightness through the years, have made it increasingly difficult to see deep sky objects from the neighboring national parks.

Yes, light is fast...but it is also dim and delicate when it travels such wondrous distances.  If we want our ancestors to be able to see the Andromeda Galaxy as it is "now," we must begin to realize that the sky is a resource as worthy of protection as Delicate Arch.
copyright 2002 by Frank L. Mendonca