HOME | DD

Description
The passage of time is fun some times.

Light travels at a speed of 30000 kilometres per second.
This is the limit.
Nothing is quicker.
Not even vision, which is by all intends and purposes just an attribute of this same light.

Now, this might seem interesting enough.
A neat little factoid.
But not much more.

Until you realise that it makes any astronomer a de facto time traveller:
Take the Eagle Nebula for instance.
The iconic “Pillars of Creation” mixed with the human proclivity for pattern recognition has made this very cradle of stars into a coveted photographical motive. (Surely that is the head of an eagle, no?)
So the photographs of the eagle nebula generally turns out to be popular, be it through the lens of. Hubble or James Webb, or anything else.
Of course one of the celebrated things about these images, is that one has managed to take them at all. For most of humanity this has simply not been possible.

The Eagle Nebula lies about 6500 light years away.
Looking at it is to look 6500 years back in time.

Kepler, Huygens, Galileo Galilei, not to speak of Tycho Brahe and Copernicus… The fathers of astronomy as we know it…
They all worked on the cusp of the invention of the telescope.
That was less than half a millennium ago.

Now, lets go back to the Eagle Nebula, and the Pillars of Creation.
And the 6500 light years.
If the fathers of modern astronomy had been able to see it with their telescopes, they would have observed the night sky as it looked around the year 4900 BC.
(With some generous margins of half centuries here, and whole centuries there.)
Truth be told it is not important.
The fact remains that this was firmly within the Neolithic era
The large river basin civilisations (Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley and the like) had yet to establish for well over a millennium still. .

It is said that the pillars are probably destroyed as of today.
That they were washed over by the shock wave of a supernova around 6000 years ago.
For longer than the existence of the bigger civilisations, they have probably been gone.
Since the Stone Age they have most likely not been there.
And still.
There they remain.
Still in the night sky.

The first telescopes came into creation less than half a millennium ago, and yet we are using their latest iterations to observe this nebula, that probably disappeared during the Stone Age.
And we will for 500 more years.

The passage of time is fun some times.

Description
The passage of time is fun some times.

Light travels at a speed of 30000 kilometres per second.
This is the limit.
Nothing is quicker.
Not even vision, which is by all intends and purposes just an attribute of this same light.

Now, this might seem interesting enough.
A neat little factoid.
But not much more.

Until you realise that it makes any astronomer a de facto time traveller:
Take the Eagle Nebula for instance.
The iconic “Pillars of Creation” mixed with the human proclivity for pattern recognition has made this very cradle of stars into a coveted photographical motive. (Surely that is the head of an eagle, no?)
So the photographs of the eagle nebula generally turns out to be popular, be it through the lens of. Hubble or James Webb, or anything else.
Of course one of the celebrated things about these images, is that one has managed to take them at all. For most of humanity this has simply not been possible.

The Eagle Nebula lies about 6500 light years away.
Looking at it is to look 6500 years back in time.

Kepler, Huygens, Galileo Galilei, not to speak of Tycho Brahe and Copernicus… The fathers of astronomy as we know it…
They all worked on the cusp of the invention of the telescope.
That was less than half a millennium ago.

Now, lets go back to the Eagle Nebula, and the Pillars of Creation.
And the 6500 light years.
If the fathers of modern astronomy had been able to see it with their telescopes, they would have observed the night sky as it looked around the year 4900 BC.
(With some generous margins of half centuries here, and whole centuries there.)
Truth be told it is not important.
The fact remains that this was firmly within the Neolithic era
The large river basin civilisations (Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley and the like) had yet to establish for well over a millennium still. .

It is said that the pillars are probably destroyed as of today.
That they were washed over by the shock wave of a supernova around 6000 years ago.
For longer than the existence of the bigger civilisations, they have probably been gone.
Since the Stone Age they have most likely not been there.
And still.
There they remain.
Still in the night sky.

The first telescopes came into creation less than half a millennium ago, and yet we are using their latest iterations to observe this nebula, that probably disappeared during the Stone Age.
And we will for 500 more years.

The passage of time is fun some times.