Andromeda Reloaded
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Background Voices
Our Galactic Embrace
I was her background voice.
She my epiphany.
I got it. This was love!
It has been said, and I cannot verify it, that the German
philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), while looking
through a telescope with some astronomer friend, said that
Andromeda was not a star but some sort of faint and distant
disk observed from the side at a slant. I wish I could been
there when he said that.
It is important because over a hundred years later in the
1920's, Sir Edwin Hubble using a more powerful telescope
confirmed the observation. The disk that they saw was in fact
a Galaxy like our own, with untold billions of stars, and it was
way beyond our Galaxy. .
Today, we know there are billions of such galaxies and many
are mistaken for stars.
When we try physically to embrace things like Andromeda,
we do this through a gift, a power within us that allows to
understand something that perhaps no other creature in the
universe can even begin to understand.
Joseph Campbell referred to this gift as perception through
"the obscure subliminal abysm out of which dreams arise." In
other words, the gift of our imagination.
In another sense, we understand it because we are part of it,
and it is a part of us.
I was her background voice.
She my epiphany.
I got it. This was love!
It has been said, and I cannot verify it, that the German
philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), while looking
through a telescope with some astronomer friend, said that
Andromeda was not a star but some sort of faint and distant
disk observed from the side at a slant. I wish I could been
there when he said that.
It is important because over a hundred years later in the
1920's, Sir Edwin Hubble using a more powerful telescope
confirmed the observation. The disk that they saw was in fact
a Galaxy like our own, with untold billions of stars, and it was
way beyond our Galaxy. .
Today, we know there are billions of such galaxies and many
are mistaken for stars.
When we try physically to embrace things like Andromeda,
we do this through a gift, a power within us that allows to
understand something that perhaps no other creature in the
universe can even begin to understand.
Joseph Campbell referred to this gift as perception through
"the obscure subliminal abysm out of which dreams arise." In
other words, the gift of our imagination.
In another sense, we understand it because we are part of it,
and it is a part of us.
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Andromeda(or M31),
the nearest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way,
resembles our galaxy.
Of course, we cannot view our galaxy since we are buried within it,
but we can assume there is a similarity. .
The distance to M31 is a mere 2,500,000 light years,
And yet it can be seen by the naked eye..