Enceladus, one of many
When I was close to my daughter’s age, I would often stop in at the school library at lunch time, to take out books. There were a few favorites. One was Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein: the story of a boy (very close to my age, so I imagined) living in the colonies on Mars, with his pet, unlike any pet found on Earth. It was an adventure that could have, but did not, take place on Earth, and I was able to read and reread that tale without losing either my sense of wonder or my ability to live the story as I sat comfortably on our living room couch. If you were to find the card from the back of that book (we filled out our names and checkout date on cards, no computers in libraries back then), you would see my name scratched in ever improving cursive, over and over again, with few readers able to get their moniker in edgewise.
Another book that I checked out religiously – and I would say that the exploration of this life and this planet has always been my true religion; that exploration just happened to cross lines that other people saw as boundaries, while I saw them as marks in the dirt – was a big, yellow, nonfiction hardcover, whose smooth and hatch-marked surface was raised like a tiny diamond-shaped honeycomb. The title was barely visible along the spine of the book, having been poorly inked, perhaps, or simply rubbed out through use. It didn’t matter: I knew it was The Sun, The Moon and The Planets, knew precisely where it stood in the stacks, and had my name on its card about as much as I had claimed the Red Planet as my own. I opened the pages of that book, which contained the best photographs and youth-sized theories of the cosmos, best at the time of its printing, some time around the year of my birth, and stepped right into a space suit, right into space, stared with wide eyes at wonders which could never be guessed from behind the protective blanket of the Earth’s atmosphere.
It was a year or two after Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon. Stepped right onto its snowdrift surface! With that one act, and the pages of this book riffling before my eyes, my green world was suddenly, well, terrestrial and pedestrian, while the planets and the stars helped my imagination fly to the far edges of everything.
All that is preamble to a simple explanation of the photo at left. In 1971, when I was eleven, Saturn was known to have a handful of moons. Pretty wild idea, that! Imagine sitting in your back yard and watching three moons spin around one another; now setting large, now setting small, now rising together, dancing around the night sky. And the Sun, by the way, dwarfed in size by those nearby stones. Using trigonometry (the angles my daughter is learning now, in fact), you can calculate how the Sun would diminish as you stopped like some planetary tourist at each of our outbound neighbors… from Mars, a bright disk; from Jupiter, a distant diamond… from Saturn, it would be a cool, whispering dot.
Today I saw this recent picture of Enceladus, and prepared a note for this daughter whose eyes also turn to the sky, at times. The internet keeps us up-to-date, and Saturn is now known to have more than 5 or 6 moons. It has 60! Many of them comet-sized ice-balls, perhaps temporary visitors, or soon to feed the changing rings of that immense planet. I suppose if you flew a little ship out there and took a survey, you’d find quite a few others, likely the size and sense of Asteroid B-612, home of Saint-Exupery’s Prince.
The world never shrinks. It keeps growing as our understanding of it grows. The sharper our eyes, the bigger the world. The bigger the world, the more human in size we find ourselves, intimate part of a Mystery so grand you cannot help but bow, and be lifted…