S P A C E

One night each month, Penn's Flower and Cook Observatory hosts a public night. Anyone can come to hear the informal talk and get a peek through the big instruments housed under the facility's domed roof. In September, observatory coordinator Deb Goldader lectured on how to spot the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle, and Iridium flares, brief bursts of sunlight in the night sky reflected from a satellite's solar panels.

After her presentation, it was time to use the telescopes. The roof over the observatory's 15-inch Siderostat was rolled back to reveal a sky of ragged clouds sliding on the wind over stars and a gibbous moon. "I believe our Siderostat is the largest operating one in North America," Goldader told the group. It uses a pivoting mirror to bounce moonbeams through a stationary lens, which focuses the light down a barrel and into an eyepiece that magnifies the image.

An eight-year-old boy, clasping a half-eaten chocolate donut, climbed a stepladder to take his first close-up look at the moon. In the darkened room, you could see the moonlight falling on his opened eye as he moved timidly toward the eyepiece. His customary Richter-Scale kid energy was all at once arrested as he explored the desolate beauty of shadowed craters and mountains, and the great lunar plains. The grownups stood around the perimeter of the room-silent, expectant, remembering. You could hear the clouds sliding against the sky and the fall of starlight through the opened roof.

"Wow!" the boy finally murmured. Everyone smiled. "I wonder if that's what Galileo said when he first peered through his telescope," one of the adults whispered.

"It's magic, and it happens all the time," says Goldader, who also teaches observational astronomy at Penn. "That's what it's all about. That's when you know they've got it. That's when they start asking the technical questions and the science questions."

Some people, like astrophysicist Charles Alcock, never stop asking the questions and go on to become scientists. Others, like alumna Aliy Zirkle, C'92, understand the science but fall in love with the wonder and follow where that leads. Still others, like NASA bioethicist Paul Wolpe, C'78, try to parse the uniquely human concerns that arise when we venture into space.

Space may be the final frontier, but it wears a lot of other faces too. In this issue, we boldly go where many have gone before and take a look at a few of them. May the Force be with you.