« Grunion Run | Main | Just Another Night in the ER »
July 26, 2005
Take Me to the Moon
Photo by Morris "Mojo" Jones
Old Town Pasadena is especially busy this evening. A man plays a xylophone with thin mannequins looming behind him in a brightly lit storefront window. The sidewalks are packed with Muggles and Hogwarts imitators anticipating the midnight release of the new Harry Potter book. As kids and adults alike queue up in front of the bookstore on the west side of Old Town, they can stop and peer into the Jones’ telescopes. Jane Houston Jones and her husband Morris “Mojo” Jones are Sidewalk Astronomers.
Almost every quarter moon, they’ll set up two Dobsonian telescopes and share the stars and moon with people on the street. The excitement is infectious. Young kids exclaim, “whoa!” when they see the four visible moons of Jupiter. Their parents can’t keep their cool. Jane shows a man about where the first landing on the moon happened. I peer into Mojo’s scope. Despite the bright city lights, I can see Jupiter clearly. I feel small. I think of the galaxies so far away and how it takes millions if not billions of years for that light to reach earth. It gives me great comfort to be so small in such immensity.
Posted by Julia Posey at 2:52 PM
Click here to leave a comment
One of my favorite sidewalk stories is about a young lady who was totally enthralled with Jupiter ("Oh my god that is SOO Jupiter!").
So she asked, "How many light years away is that?"
I said, "Actually it's about forty minutes away by light."
When we always hear about the millions and billions of light years to the latest Hubble discoveries, it's easy to forget that the brightest things in the sky are a lot closer. The light from the Moon takes about one second to reach your eyes, and the light from the brighter stars you can see usually takes between ten and a couple hundred years.
There's nothing like the view of a distant galaxy in my telescope, seeing the light of billions of stars, that traveled for millions of years to reach me.
Unfortunately to see those we need to travel well away from the city lights of Los Angeles.
Posted by: Morris Jones on July 26, 2005 5:44 PM
