I read these poems over and over, more awestruck every time. Astronomy, especially, never ceases to amaze and excite me. In its amazing complexity and simplistic beauty it effects how I think about many things, including poetry. At the same time poetry influences how I see and think about astronomy. In fact, the similarities between how I view the two outweigh the differences.
Astronomy is beautiful in so many ways.
It is based almost entirely on questions, on questioning, and to me these questions are far more important than the answers we find. In fact, when discoveries are made, when we learn something new, it invariably leads to more questions than it answers. The closer we can look at something, the more we realize how much there is that we don t know. The image is of just a point in the night sky, an area virtually dimensionless. However, the picture is filled with hundreds of galaxies.