From: rigler@galileo.ifa.hawaii.edu (Killing Pace)
Subject: I can hear them...
Organization: Institute for Astronomy, Hawaii
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 08:36:17 GMT

I'm currently observing at the VLA.  It's a blast!  Twenty-some-odd giant 
antennae stretched across several kilometers of desert floor in a 'Y' 
shaped pattern, are all slewing in perfect synch to track my objects as I 
sit here sipping bad coffee and catching up on t.b.

I would like to have a time-lapse video recording of the array elements 
being moved along their railroad tracks, from the smaller 'B' configuration
to the larger 'A' configuration that I needed for my project.  If this event 
were filmed from the heights of the nearby mountains, it might resemble the 
eye of some huge metallic insect reacting some new stimuli.  Dilating, fo-
cussing, resolving...

But I feel so detached.  I wish I could 'see' what it sees right now...

The metallic eye is currently looking in two colors:  3.5 cm and 20 cm.  
The software required to sort out the correlations between the light seen 
by each telescope as the Earth rotates, and to correct for the distortions 
caused by structural sagging, atmospheric diffraction, crustal tides, solar 
gravitation and so forth, is mind-bogglingly complex.  Even if I were 
equipped with a set of goggles wired to the computer correlators through 
which I could see the patterns of light (after the radio wavelengths had 
been artificially blue-shifted to optical wavelengths), I fear that the 
view would be incomprehensible to my limited brain.  The patterns would 
probably just trigger a migraine.

But maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way.  What if, instead, I tried to 
'listen' to the raw data stream?  What if I rigged up some equipment to 
shift and stretch the frequency range of the radiation to the 20 - 20,000 
Hz range, converted it to sound, and piped it it through 200 watt speakers 
directly into this control room?

Take a few moments to try to imagine what that might sound like...  I think 
it would sound glorious.  A cosmic sitar raga!  If only I had thought of 
this earlier and made the preparations I could be *hearing* these radio 
galaxies right now, singing to me from across the void from a time when 
the Universe was young and fresh, and galaxies were in the full flush of 
youth...

*sigh*

Eventually, in some sense, I *will* see what the VLA is seeing -- after I 
have painstakingly 'reduced' the data for each object so that I can print 
it out as a black and white contour map of surface brightness and have it 
published alongside some dry commentary in some dull journal on page 249, 
there to gather dust in 1000 obscure libraries on this planet...and even-
tually all but forgotten...totally forgotten in one-hundred years...maybe 
one-thousand years tops...

And after a few million years, even these particular galaxies will have 
stopped singing.  They only sing while they are being fed, you see.  They 
feed through the massive black holes in their centers, and when the food -- 
another passing galaxy -- is gone, then they are quiet once more.  Like 
baby chicks after feeding...

But tonight...tonight, they are singing!  And I can hear them...

I can hear them...

  c n  ea  th   .
 
    n      t    

--
-= Michael Rigler =-