Stars are Out - Observatory Night

Tonight (Friday night) is observatory night, so we all huddled up to the McCormick Observatory to observe something that hopefully looked like a Hubble (telescope).

Now I've had the good fortune to have seen some many splendid astronomical things in my lifetime. I've witnessed:

• A total eclipse of the sun
• A total eclipse of the moon
• Mars when it was closest to Earth (once in some ridiculously high number of years)
• A meteor shower
• The full Orion's Belt with the nebula near Orion's trousers
• Many shooting stars (too many and too quickly to have made any wishes that would come true)
• The Southern Cross
• The full set of stars in my own star sign (try that one, I swear it's not that easy)

So this one was - I thought - going to be nothing too special but one more to add to my collection. But it was amazing.

What I saw through the telescope was not visible through the naked eye. It was a cluster of stars 25,000 light years away. The cluster swirled around the middle, with sprinkles of stars around the edges in a very clear, swirling spiral. At its heart was what appeared to be one very very bright star but which we knew were actually a collection of stars so close together they looked like one.

But what was really fascinating was the observatory. I don't think I'd ever been in a full observatory before, facing a telescope that is more than 120 years old (inaugurated on Thomas Jefferson's birthday on April 13th, 18-something). The telescope shifted slightly in the domed room as the day passed (a fact which totally fascinated me) and in conversation with the astronomers there, I've finally learnt how they measure distances from the earth (firstly as how the units of light years are calculated, and second, how they essentially do an equivalent of taking a very very long measuring tape between earth and the star in mention).

It was a good trip. And brought to mind one Hamlet phrase that I shall shamelessly quote here:

Doubt that the stars are fire,
doubt that the earth doth move
...
But never doubt I love (thee).

Not that I am declaring any endless affection here but what I'd really like to know is... how the heck would Shakespeare know what he's talking about?