Inside their giant domes, the telescopes Lucy Rutherford worked with were nocturnal creatures with their eyes on other worlds.
She spent as much of her life as she could looking upwards. Once she held her daughter, Gabby, a squirming toddler, up to a small telescope at her bedroom window. They were visiting Bowness in the Yarra Valley, where Lucy grew up. The sky was darker here, over an hour from Melbourne, and the stars shone brighter than fairy lights. Gabby, chubby legs dangling into empty space, peeked into the eyepiece and gasped.
She shoved the telescope out of the way and pressed her face against the window. Then she cried; her two human eyes could not equal the simple mechanical one. She fiddled desperately with the window catch, as if all that stopped her from reaching Saturn’s rings was a sheet of glass.
Lucy closed her hand over her daughter’s fingers. ‘Not safe,’ she admonished. Hardy Street, a very faintly lit reflection of the Milky Way, ran past at the end of their long drive. ‘You don’t want to fall.’
Gabby pointed at the sky. ‘Pity,’ she lisped, for pretty, probably. ‘They’re a long way off,’ Lucy replied. ‘Far further than you can reach.’
Gabby looked disconsolate.
‘But you can see them. Look.’ Lucy refocussed and held Gabby close, reliving the joy of seeing it all for the first time. Through the lens, Jupiter’s moons surrounded their mother like kittens, some nuzzling for milk, others wandering out to explore.
‘Our sun is one of billions of stars in our galaxy. And we’re in one of billions of galaxies.’
She showed Gabby how to measure the distance visible between stars using her pinkie fingertip. Gabby’s own curiosity grew with her. ‘Why isn’t the moon always round?’ she’d asked more recently.
‘It always is. Even when you can’t see all of it. Planets and moons and stars spin, their gravity turns them all into spheres, the most compact shape.’ Like the human mind, like Gabby’s brain, restricted by the size of her skull, by the function of blood vessels, by the birth canal.
There was so much to share. Later, in books, Lucy showed Gabby photos of constellations that had been discovered in cave art. Star maps. Awe-inspiring ‘I exist’ messages in rock from many, many generations ago. Those ancient paintings of the Pleiades and Taurus only appeared inaccurate now because stars have moved relative to each other over thousands of years. Everything in the universe exists in a state of change and movement…
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