During the winter solstice, a miracle happens at the Mission San
Juan Bautista. Light from dawn’s rising sun passes through a church
window and streams down the aisle to fall upon the altar at the far
end of the church. This astronomical phenomenon isn’t an accident
of architecture.
During the winter solstice, a miracle happens at the Mission San Juan Bautista. Light from dawn’s rising sun passes through a church window and streams down the aisle to fall upon the altar at the far end of the church. This astronomical phenomenon isn’t an accident of architecture. The Franciscan padres who designed the church intentionally aligned the front of the building so that the winter morning sun would cast its rays in this seemingly magical manner.
It amazes me how much the Christmas holiday and astronomy are connected. It goes beyond the Gospel of Matthew’s Nativity star. In Roman times, the winter solstice was celebrated in pagan feasts observing the death of an old solar year and the birth of a new one. The early Christian church officials thus saw an excellent marketing opportunity to convert pagans by tying the old Roman winter sun-god festival to the new Christmas festival celebrating the birth of “son-God” Jesus.
But the religion of Christianity and the science of astronomy have also been at odds. We’re now coming to the end of the International Year of Astronomy. The year 2009 marked the 400th anniversary of Italian scientist Galileo Galilea turning his homemade telescope (inspired by a Dutch spyglass) at the heavens and becoming the first human to view the universe in an extraordinary new way.
From what he saw through the lens of his telescope, Galileo realized that, contrary to Church doctrine, the heavens were not perfect. The moon was a pock-marked world. The sun had spots. Four previously unknown moons accompanied Jupiter, suggesting that there might be other celestial discoveries to behold with the new optical technology. If the Christian view of the structure of the universe was wrong, might other church proclamations also be questionable? The Vatican saw danger to its political authority from Galileo’s unauthorized voyeurism of the heavens.
Telescopes irrefutably changed humanity’s paradigm of the universe and of religious belief. These scientific instruments – these wonderful windows to the heavens – enlightened people to astronomical facts that crumbled centuries of Judeo-Christian dogma.
Inspired by Galileo and other astronomers, our South Valley region has a fine tradition of telescope technology. I’ve attended star-gazing nights on Fremont Peak to view wonders through these cylinders of science. On one of these occasions, I studied the fuzzy sphere image of the Andromeda Galaxy. I felt a religious-like awe viewing this wonder.
From various locations in Morgan Hill, Gilroy and San Benito County, we can also see the white domes protecting the advanced telescope instruments of the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton. The Lick is the world’s very first mountain-top telescope, a marvel of Victorian Age scientific achievement when it opened in 1887.
In 1892, astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard used the Lick’s telescope to find a fifth moon of Jupiter – the first one discovered since Galileo. Astronomers such as James Keller also performed pioneering work on spectroscopy at the Lick Observatory. This scientific field analyzes the spectra of stars to better understand which chemical elements compose them. Fifty years ago this year, the Lick Observatory opened up the advanced Shane telescope. In the 1990s, it played an important role in finding the first-discovered “extrasolar planets,” or worlds that orbit other stars.
Earlier this year, NASA completed its fourth and final mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This marvel of modern astronomy has orbited Earth since April 1990. It expanded our view of the universe by bringing us astounding images of star formations and galaxies many billions of light years away. Hubble even has a South Bay Area connection. It was designed and built at the Lockheed factory in Sunnyvale. Some of the engineers and developers who created it make their home in the South Valley region. They can be proud they helped make this window to the heavens that enlightens humanity with knowledge of our truly modest dimension in an enormous universe.
No doubt in the near future, we’ll be amazed by even more astounding images from telescopes now being designed and built. Four years from now, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Hubble’s successor, is scheduled to be launched into Earth orbit. This highly advanced infrared space observatory will let astronomers observe the most distant objects in the universe – objects which ground-based telescopes and Hubble can’t see. With the JWST, humans will see the earliest era of the universe. Who knows? Maybe we’ll take a snapshot of the dawn of Creation itself.
This Monday’s winter solstice event of dawn’s sunlight passing through a San Juan Bautista mission church window will inspire religious awe. This awe is matched by images produced by telescope technology. These amazingly-engineered optical windows to a heavenly realm remind us how truly vast is the Cosmos we all inhabit – and how truly humble we should feel in all its immensity.
