Once a month, the Swarthmore astronomy department hosts an “open telescope” night—they fire up their telescope and let anyone look through it.

The first night I went, it was overcast, but enough blue sky was peeking out that it made going worth it. I had just finished rehearsal, and, upon hearing that I had never been to the telescope, the soprano I was working with firmly insisted that I take this opportunity and go with her. Climbing the steps of Swarthmore’s Science Center, we emerged onto the roof.  This was the first time I had seen the campus from a high vantage point, looking like a city made of light.

We went inside a small dome and climbed an amazingly loud metal staircase until we reached the observation room. A crowd of a dozen or so people (two of whom were very kind and knowledgeable astronomy professors) were milling about and discussing undiscovered planetary objects. They immediately called us over to look through the telescope, which was, I was informed, pointed at Jupiter.

It’s hard to think about very large things very far away. We inhabit a realm that is, for all practical purposes, flat and boundless. That makes these brief moments of realization about our physical universe all the more jarring.

Through the telescope, the planet was roughly the size of a quarter held at arm’s length. It was a startling experience to realize that the pictures had not been lying to me. I had imagined I would see it as a faraway point of light, but I was happy to be wrong. Rust red and ivory white striped its surface. Amusingly, there was something about it I had not even considered—it was sideways! Instead of the “normal” orientation of horizontal stripes, they were nearly vertical. It obviously makes sense as to why (the planet’s axis is not fixed in one position), but seeing it in person, seeing it as more than a picture on planetary charts, and realizing it really is a massive sphere floating in space is a different kind of experience.

We were even fortunate enough to see some of the gas giant’s moons—three to be exact—hanging in place around the planet, like stalactites in a cave, moving both so inconceivably fast in reality and so agonizingly slow from where we stood.

I eventually left the telescope and put out a stool so that a child could look at the planet. She looked and just said “wooahhhhh….”

Recently, the eclipse passed through Swarthmore. We achieved 89-91% coverage of the sun.

Our senses are logarithmic (I am informed by people much better at biology than I that this is described in something called the Weber-Fechner laws.) Even if ninety percent of the sun is covered, we will not perceive it as being ninety percent darker, just like how even when the sun is halfway down the horizon, we can still see just as well.

It was not good weather for viewing cosmic phenomena. Cloud coverage was high, with the obscured sun only visible for snatches of moments. Despite this, despite it not seeming much darker, despite the work everyone surely had to do, I have never seen so many students gathered in the same place, everyone with their special sunglasses, staring into the sky, wildly cheering when the veiled sun emerged.