By Jove...

I saw Jupiter for the first time recently.

My old elementary school, that I happen to live just a few blocks away from now, has a pretty famous science center attached to it, called the Earth and Space Science Lab.  When I was a kid, they had the only planetarium in the state.  Now they've moved to their own building on campus, that feels almost as big as the rest of the school all by itself, and they've added an observatory, among other educational attractions.  They have shows at the planetarium on a fairly regular basis, and they're cheap, and I'm into astronomy, and it's only a couple blocks from my house, so I sometimes go to these shows, even though the median age in the room is usually about nine.

I don't know what the fuck I expected - it's an elementary school, for fuck's sake.  But, for some reason, I assumed that the shows they put on outside of school hours would attract an older crowd, or at least feature content aimed above a fifth-grade level.  And when I went to my first show, and realized I was the only adult there who hadn't brought a child with them, I felt, once again, like a complete fucking weirdo.  And the whole time, I felt like all the parents were looking at me sideways, like I was standing outside a windowless white van in a clown costume with one hand full of balloons and the other full of roofies.  It was mortifying.  But then I thought, fuck them, I'm hear for the Science!  Then the show turned out to contain about as much educational science information as an episode of Ancient Aliens, and I was back to feeling like the clown with the van and the collection of baby teeth again.  But, still, I continue to go to these things.  I think just because I still geek out about being in the planetarium, just like I did when I was in school there.  And so I still have fun, even if I don't learn very much; and I try to ignore the parents, and their screaming kids.

Anyways, I enjoy it so much (despite myself) that I decided to volunteer there.  They're always advertising that they need volunteers, and it's so nearby, and I could convince myself I was doing a good deed, and it beats washing dishes at the soup kitchen across the street.  Plus, I thought it'd be a good way to get to see the shows without having to buy a ticket.  (It's not like I'm a cheapskate or anything; tickets are only $5.  It's just that their process for purchasing tickets was a bit of a wonky pain-in-the-ass, and I thought it'd be better to do it this way, by doing a good deed, and earning my way into the show, rather than just handing over $5.  And also, not for nothing, but now I don't have to feel like Beelzebozo the Hellclown anymore, because I'm not just the creepy guy hanging out by himself with all the families and children - I work there, so it's okay.)

And it turns out that my favorite perk of volunteering there, is that I get to go out to the observatory and look through their incredibly powerful telescope.

Jupiter has been plainly visible to the naked eye for a couple of months now.  (It's nearly impossible to miss - it's the brightest object in the night sky that isn't the Moon.)  And, as is usually the case during these times when it is visible, I've often found myself standing outside, staring up at it.  This image of Jupiter as a bright, white point in the night sky is therefore very familiar to me.  I often wonder at just how huge that object must be, to be that far away and still be that bright!  (Answer:  Jupiter is the 2nd most massive object in the solar system, next to the Sun.  In fact, if you took every other object in the solar system - every planet, every comet, every asteroid, every Kuiper Belt object - and crushed them all together into one giant ball of stuff, that giant ball would still be less massive than Jupiter!  It is literally more massive than the rest of the solar system, combined.  That is fucking HUGE.)  And I've seen countless pictures of Jupiter before.  We all have.  The various colored layers of swirling gas, the giant red spot.  It's an iconic image.

But this time was different.

I was working in Critter Cove, explaining the weird lives of sea urchins and brittle starfish to six-year-old's, when an intern came in and told me that they had the observatory trained on Jupiter.  I almost dropped the urchin I'd been holding.  Seeing my reaction, the intern laughed and told me that she'd mind the exhibits while I ran out to have a look.  I tried not to knock down any children on my way out of the building, but looking back, I can't guarantee to a certainty that I succeeded in that endeavor.

Shivering in the cold, I leaned into the eyepiece, and saw Jupiter, really saw it, for the first time.

It was as big as a half-dollar.  And I could see all of the stripes of layered gas swirling across it.  (The red spot was apparently on the far side, out of view.)  I could see the four Galilean moons - Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto - lined up in a perfectly straight line to the right of it, on Jupiter's orbital plane.  It was a bit blurry, but still, there was no mistaking it:  that was clearly Jupiter.  And not just an image of Jupiter, but the real thing!  Live and in-person!  I was seeing it, for real, as it was right then, in real-time!  (Or, at least, as it was about forty minutes earlier.  As I said, it's really far away, and so it takes the light a while to reach us.  Which only made the fact that it was the size of a half-dollar and that I could make out so much detail as to actually see each individual layered stripe just that much more impressive!)

It was like meeting a celebrity in-person; you're so intimately familiar with them as this 2-D image inside the box in your living room, that when you suddenly find yourself face-to-face with them as a living, three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood person, there's this strange disconnect in your brain, and things feel just slightly un-real.  And that's how I felt peering through that telescope at the 40-minute-old sight of the greatest planet in our system, the planet that more than any other outside of our own is responsible for our existence.  (Without Jupiter's massive gravity-well situated smack-dab in the middle of the solar system, Earth would be constantly bombarded by comets and asteroids, making it a relatively unstable environment, and therefore a very unlikely place for life to have been able to evolve.)

I lifted my head away from the telescope, and looked out the hole in the roof at the bright point of light in the sky that I had always believed was Jupiter.  I had believed that because the Astronomers told me that was the case, and I chose to believe them; I had no reason not to.  But now, I could see the telescope pointed straight at that point of light.  And I looked back through the eyepiece, and I could see it, plain-as-day, in all of its massive, iconic glory, spinning there in outer space.  It was real.  From that moment on, it was real to me.

Before, I had only believed in Jupiter.  But now I knew it.

Because I had seen it with my own eyes.