The Professor's Telescope

Excerpts - Chapter 9

There was much more to the observatory than what Eric had been able to see on his first visit. This evening, with the dome closed the room was warmer and its white expanse reflected the bright light back into the room. One entire side of the circular space was devoted to a long worktable that cleverly conformed to the curvature of the wall it was attached to. The shelves above the work area were filled with hundreds of books of various sizes and shapes. There were portfolios as well, with enlarged photographs carefully pressed between their covers, probably some of the same pictures the Professor had used in the classroom that day.

The table itself was covered with every kind of long distance viewing device that Eric had ever heard of, and a few that he hadn't, from the smallest set of binoculars to something that looked like it might be a telescope but appeared to be made out of a box. Several of these items seemed to be in various stages of assembly and disassembly. Interspersed amongst them were also a microscope, a View-Master toy, and several pairs of reading glasses.

Turning toward the light, Eric picked up the toy and held it to his eyes. What he saw through the View-Master startled him, for it was a brilliant spiral suspended in velvety blackness. The image looked exactly like the galaxy that he had gotten an uncomfortably close glimpse of through the telescope last week. He looked for the picture's caption which appeared in the rectangular space between the lenses. It read: 'The Andromeda Galaxy - 2.26 million light years from Earth.' That was the name I couldn't remember, he thought.

Pleased that he had discovered that little tidbit of information without anyone's help, Eric carefully placed the child's toy back where he had found it. He wondered if the Professor had used just such a picture to trick him into thinking that he had been transported light years across space. Was it possible to project an image like this one into the eyepiece of a telescope? Perhaps there was a simple explanation for what he had seen, but it would take someone a lot smarter than himself to figure it out. Someone like Meredith.

"What's this, Professor?" He pointed to one of the strange combinations of photographs and lenses that he had not been able to identify.

"That is one of my prize possessions; a stereoscopic viewer." The Professor crossed the room with long strides and picked up the object carefully holding it out to the boy. "It was invented in 1838 by Sir Charles Wheatstone. Would you like to try it?"

"What does it do?" With exaggerated care, Eric lifted the heavy viewer. "Wait! I know. It makes a 3-D picture."

"Quite right, Eric. Like the toy you were just holding, it combines two slightly different images into one, creating a 3 dimensional image. Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first scientists to experiment with this technology, back in the 16th century."

"I thought da Vinci was an artist. Didn't he paint the Mona Lisa?"

"Yes, he did." The Professor sounded surprised. "But he was also a doctor, a sculptor, an aeronautical engineer, a scientist, and an astronomer."

"Wow! He was a whole lot of people!"

"Exactly why he was considered to be a Renaissance man; a master of any trade he put his hand to. The Renaissance was the beginning of an entirely new age in history, a time when man replaced ignorance with knowledge and pessimism with hope."

Eric tried to pay close attention to everything the Professor said, but the conversation had begun to wander into that foggy, gray area between being interesting and being way over his head.