Seeing the Bigger Picture

I've just come back from a short holiday visiting friends in the South of France, an hour North of Toulouse. They have a lovely old French farmhouse with an acre of land on the edge of a tiny village in the Occitanie region (https://about-france.com/regions/midi-pyrenees.htm). Consequently, the nights are dark and the stars are gloriously bright.

My pal was keen to share his new star-gazing equipment, a computer controlled, 8-inch reflecting telescope, a thing of beauty in itself. One night we lugged it out onto the edge of his patio area and we settled in for an evening's star and planet watching.

Photo by Usukhbayar Gankhuyag on Unsplash

It's been a long time since I've seen such dark skies and my eyes were instantly drawn upwards to view the beautiful Milky Way (the edge-on view of our own spiral galaxy) meandering across the void, interspersed with hundreds and thousands of individual stars and immediately recognisable planets (Mars, Saturn and Jupiter being the brightest and most prominent in the South).

As I gazed up in wonder (I never tire of the majesty of the night sky), my pal was struggling to get his telescope properly aligned, so that once we had selected any one object (Mars, for example), the computer would take over and follow it's progress. Unable to help, I continued to scan the heavens.

Ignoring the background muttering, fiddling with glasses, handsets and cables, and the increasing frustration of my pal, I saw a couple of meteors, some satellites, excellent (although not in detail) viewing of Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, various constellations and of course, the over-arching Milky Way.

My pal didn't.

With the best of intentions (to share closer views through his expensive equipment), he got lost in the tech and in so doing, missed the joy of just looking up and enjoying the big picture. Even when I reassured him that I was having a grand time doing just that, his frustration and some embarrassment, excluded him from the more natural and ancient act of just looking and wondering.

That said, we did manage to get some brief closer views of Mars and Saturn (the Rings!) through the telescope, but without the proper alignment and auto-tracking, they were just that, brief.

Sometimes, tech is not the answer, not the enabler you were hoping for. Sometimes you just have to #LookUp.