A night at the observatory

Text 1: Light from Before Us, by Tomasz Brennan

An original contemporary article.

The dome opens at sunset with a groan like a ship’s hull settling, and a slice of violet sky appears above us, widening as the shutters roll back. Below it the telescope waits: forty tonnes of steel and glass balanced so finely that I could, if I were allowed, push it round with one finger. I am not allowed. I am a visiting writer, which here means a person who must not touch anything.

Up here, on a mountain four thousand metres above a sea I cannot see, the air is so thin that climbing a flight of stairs leaves me dizzy, and so dry that my lips have split. The astronomers do not seem to notice. They drink coffee from enormous mugs and talk in a language of magnitudes and arcseconds, glancing now and then at the bank of screens where the night is arriving in numbers.

Because that is the strange thing. Nobody looks through the telescope. There is no eyepiece. The light that has crossed the universe to reach this mirror, light that set out before there were human beings to receive it, falls on a sensor the size of a postage stamp and becomes a column of data scrolling up a monitor in a warm room that smells of instant noodles.

At two in the morning, Dr Okonjo calls me over. On her screen is a smudge, faint and greyish, like a thumbprint on a window. It is a galaxy, she says. It is so far away that the light we are catching left it ten billion years ago. Most of the stars in it have probably died since. We are looking at a ghost.

I go outside to clear my head. The cold hits like a slap. And there, above the domes, is the sky itself, the real one, so crowded with stars that the familiar constellations are lost among strangers, the Milky Way arched over the mountain like smoke from an enormous fire. I stand there until I cannot feel my hands. Inside, the machine goes on listening.

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