# Review: The Cape Town Observatory

**i.**

Did you know there’s an observatory in Cape Town that you can visit for like $2?

Personally, I vaguely knew, but didn’t understand that it was like an actual observatory. My reference point for actual observatory is 80% from [Myst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst) and 20% from the [Blue Prince](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Prince). For some reason they’re just strewn across video games like Lime Bikes in Brussels. But that’s beside the point. The point is that I recommend everyone go, even though I left really mad and confused.

To get in you have to attend a 1-hour lecture. This is no problem for me since I graduated university, where attending 1-hour lectures to get to do something is a skill I mastered by the 2nd semester. In fact, this was a lot better than university because you actually get to do something fun afterwards.

I do find it strange that they make this a requirement. Despite being an event for normies, you basically had to have a PhD in astrophysics to understand any of it.

After the lecture though, much like university, you get to go outside and look through dozens of telescopes. There was a weird vibe the night I went. Apparently Saturn had something astrological happening and so tons of Libras flocked to see it. You could tell the astronomers wanted to help people see Saturn but you could also tell that the astronomers knew most people here didn’t know the difference between astrology and astronomy.

The line for seeing Saturn was genuinely very long. Luckily I just wanted to see anything cool so my options were wide open. Then I walked past a dome shaped building with a mysterious blue light inside, pointed at the sky.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DKUp!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fff715674-1031-4f79-af01-2c980fa15d0b_1456x1092.jpeg)

I stood there, just looking. I knew that they had an observatory here, but I thought that meant they had a computer with Google Chrome connected to [https://nasa.gov](https://nasa.gov/) or maybe some cute little telescopes. I didn’t realize it was an Observatory observatory.

Smash cut to: 4 hours later. I am back from a tour of the library and finally go inside.

I’ve never been to Disneyland but when I watch [Jenny E. Nicholson’s videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYy6V_ZVSU8) it seems like the point of theme parks aren’t the rides, but the vibes. There’s a reason theme parks are considered their own medium on [TV Tropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ride/SpaceshipEarth) alongside movies, video games and comics and it’s because they also tell stories, only ambiently. This, like movies and books, is an art form. When done well, people seem embodied in another world. Walking around the observatory in the wee hours of the night with a cool breeze and this beautiful blue glow, i felt embodied in another world.

I felt even more embodied in this world, once I got inside. Looking up at the telescope, hearing the motor running, standing there under this artifact pointed at the stars. These feelings were easily worth the price of admission multiplied by 100.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EqOl!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd402f306-c622-40f6-8ee7-6091e6cef0c6_1600x1200.jpeg)

If you’re thinking that this somehow made me biased, that I had decided I was going to like what I saw before I even looked through the telescope inside the observatory, then you’re 100% correct.

Yet, it still surprised me when the people ahead of me didn’t seem impressed or changed or healed after looking through it. I was sure this would be different for me though, because I had already decided it would be. When it was my turn I climbed the ladder and saw this bright ball with a hint of orange, and 4 or 5 tiny dots inline with it. I said “Oh my god”, but that was just performative astronomy. Despite my best intentions, I was kind of unimpressed.

Then, while I was standing on the ladder, trying my best not to fall, the astronomer who was with us mentioned that the little dots weren’t just any dots, they were the moons of Jupiter.

My awe was no longer performative. I wasn’t expecting to see the moons of Jupiter with my own eyes… ever. I honestly had no idea you could. So I just stood there looking at these dots and they were beautiful. I felt the solar system in a way I never have before. I could feel the photons travelling 43 light minutes all to hit a pale blue dot, then South Africa on that dot, then Cape Town, then this observatory, then the telescope in that observatory, all to be perfectly focused into my little retina at exactly that moment in time.

**ii.**

Suddenly it was over and I found myself back outside, invigorated, slightly healed, mostly awestruck and most importantly, ready to go home. That is, until I walked past one of the few cute little telescopes still open on the observatory lawn. Of course, I had to look through it.

My expectations were pretty low given the building-sized telescope behind me, but I was curious what it was pointed at, and thought I’d maybe see the moon. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw... spiraling galaxies? Also nebulae and what I can best describe as the astronomy photo of the day landing page.

This was weird. But first of all, it was cloudy. I looked up again just to make sure — there were a lot of clouds. So where are the clouds? I mean, what are we to believe, this is some sort of a uhm magic telescope or something?

I looked through the telescope again and indeed saw the same galaxies and nebulae floating around with their Lightroom vibrancy on 100. But this time I noticed the pixels. Not good pixels either; they looked like the ones you’d see on a 1366 x 768 monitor in the year 2012.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EzuV!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd2a7d977-2f2b-41ec-81bb-424e420fc9ba_484x498.jpeg)

This is compared to the pixels on my mac, which I literally can’t see.

Good or bad pixels, they were the pixels on the screen of a computer, not the glass on the lens of a telescope. This was a computer with a camera, just like your phone or your laptop with a webcam. The only difference is that this one decided to dress up in the shape of a telescope.

I kind of felt like I had been tricked. When I saw something in the shape of a telescope I assumed this meant live and unaltered. I think other people also assumed this too, because the people that looked through just before me were blown away by this telescope.

It’s possible they had never seen pictures of deep space before, yet I got the feeling that they were not blown away because this was the first time they were seeing an image of a spiraling galaxy. Instead, it felt like they were blown away since they were seeing a real spiraling galaxy in the wild, as opposed to the PNG of one on nasa.gov.

Of course this was not a real spiraling galaxy. Depending on your theory of perception, it’s either a hallucination or illusion or actually, never mind. I hope we can agree that at the very least it was only as real as the spiraling galaxies in the PNGs we get back from the James Webb Space Telescope. In principle, the act of looking through this telescope was no different from looking at a PNG on your phone, except it would actually look good on your phone and would also come from a $9.7 billion telescope.

I got this weird feeling when I noticed person after person take a look through it, get blown away, and the astronomer next to them mention nothing about how this was closer to your iPhone than the huge observatory behind us.

**iii.**

The first thing I said after I lifted my head away from the eyepiece was: that’s not real. I said it pretty loudly too.

The astronomer told me, as I stood up, this was a real image. It was a stacked image taken right here over 30 minutes or so.

It’s great they hadn’t just downloaded an image. But even though the image was created with this telescope, I still don’t feel like what I was seeing through that telescope was real. I stood there struggling to express this to the astronomer for 5 minutes, before I gave up and went home, where I struggled to express this to a Google Doc for 12 months.

I tried to figure out what was going on here, that the answer to my intuitive distaste for the digital image would be in some theory of perception that accounted for optics.

Now though, I think it’s less the philosophy of perception that matters and more ethics. In that, it’s not so much how real the image is compared to an optical telescope but that (1) it’s dressed up to seem like an optical telescope and that (2) none of the astronomers (proactively) said anything about them being different.

I really want to be able to express this feeling clearly and fairly because the people around me thought they were seeing the real thing. And it would be wrong to say that what they saw was fake, but it would be just as wrong to let them go home thinking they’ve seen a galaxy in the same way as we saw Jupiter earlier.

When you look through the small digital telescope you are seeing something real-ish — it’s real in the sense that looking at a long-exposure image of a highway after it’s been edited in Photoshop is real.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!iKW_!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a6cd1b6-0fd1-41f9-898e-1427c9191b63_1600x526.png)

When you look through the huge optical telescope at Jupiter you are also seeing something real, something as real as when you use binoculars to look at a bird far away.

The problem is that both use the same form to present different kinds of realities. It would be fine to present a digital image from the digital telescope on a screen or phone because it’s presenting a photo as a photo. But when you put a screen in a telescope, you’re purposefully presenting a photo as a window, which is why people walk away thinking they’d seen a galaxy the way they saw Jupiter.

**iv.**

Astronomers aren’t confused about the difference.

I emailed them a few weeks later and they said “Seeing with your own eyes through an optical telescope offers a kind of direct connection—what you’re seeing is literally the light that traveled across space and into your eye. With digital telescopes, while you’re still seeing real photons captured live, the experience is more like a bridge between amateur observing and professional imaging—giving you deeper views but mediated by technology. Both are valuable, but they engage slightly different aspects of the experience: one more immediate and raw, the other more detailed and enhanced.”

They also agreed that they should have told people about these differences. The reason they didn’t is because turning a blind eye to these kinds of misunderstandings is beneficial to astronomers both on the night and at scale.

In 1985, there was an incredible article published in the NYT. In it, Malcolm W. Browne writes how space images are ruining what kids expect to be able to see in the sky.

> “Johnny points his pricey toy at \[...\] the Orion nebula, an object the textbooks describe as a brilliant gas cloud from which millions of infant stars are condensing. Photographs in slick magazines show this nebula as splashed with salmon-colored flame, but what does Johnny see? Just another smudge of white light - faintly tinged with green” - [https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/18/science/guilty-of-disappointment.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/18/science/guilty-of-disappointment.html)

Well, it’s 41 years later. Browne was right, so right that people’s expectations didn’t stay the same they got even higher, and instead of adjusting the public’s expectations and understanding of how interstellar and intergalactic objects are photographed, astronomers have continued to allow our incorrect intuitions to embellish space pictures. And also it’s much more effective now because we all have incredible screens to consume endless amounts of brilliant gas clouds and on the odd occasions when a member of the public does come into contact with and use a telescope, well there conveniently are telescopes that have screens to fulfill those expectations. Of course digital telescopes aren’t soley created to mislead everyone. Yet it’s still good for the observatory that they do.

If people came expecting Pillars of Creation and left seeing smudges, not many would leave happy, and it’s easy to understand why astronomers would make the tradeoff of more people being excited about space if it means omitting certain details.

Though this is about a tiny observatory visit, this is also not about a tiny observatory visit. This practice of convenient omission extends into general photographs astronomers publish in the media. Though calling them photographs is maybe too generous. As Kate Crawford says:

> “Every photograph from an Apple iPhone is fundamentally an AI image. Every photograph taken by an iPhone camera is actually many frames with different exposure levels melded together as a composite. And each image is broken apart semantically, so that elements like skies, trees, and faces are each treated differently. They are machine learning mosaics, not photographs in the traditional sense. We have moved to a post-optical period of photography, beyond photos and the transmission of light through lenses toward statistical paradigms of image making.” - [https://www.are.na/block/40131791](https://www.are.na/block/40131791)

If that’s true of an iPhone taking pictures of visible light on earth, I’d argue it’s even more true of the James Webb Space Telescope taking pictures of galaxies with infrared and then being edited to look an arbitrary color, and then enhanced by multiple groups of people before you see the result on your phone.

For example, it was only while writing this article that I learned that if you were floating in the middle of the Pillars of Creation it would look the same as if you were floating basically anywhere else in interstellar space. Structures like the pillars of creation are objects which exist in a completely different way to the objects we are accustomed to on Earth. It’s not wrong to feel a deep sense of awe from the Pillars of Creation, but perhaps it shouldn’t be too deep.

**v.**

What made the moment of looking through the huge telescope at Jupiter and the moons of Jupiter special wasn’t the image quality or level of detail I could see. It was the connection I felt with another planet and it was a connection I’ve never felt from looking at pictures on my phone.

We don’t yet have a good name for what these digital artifacts are. That they’re not exactly photographs is clear, but astronomers don’t seem to be in a hurry to correct anyone’s understanding of what they actually are.

* * *

7/10 - includes free parking.

Tickets are R40 at [https://www.quicket.co.za/events/357682-cape-town-open-nights](https://www.quicket.co.za/events/357682-cape-town-open-nights) or email [cptbookings@saao.ac.za](http://cptbookings@saao.ac.za/) for more info