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Denny Henke, Founder of the Eastern Ozarks Astronomical Society (EOAS);
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I've often wanted to write down the words of Denny Henke as they've gently tumbled from
his lips. Yesterday, I indulged my inclination.
I asked Denny why it mattered
to him so very much that our elements of life derive from the stars…?
Denny Henke: Because our human culture is off-track. We’re overly focused on the self, especially as it has come to be defined, self as each individual person.
Its conceptual roots are in Christianity, the soul inside a self, defined by the body. As
a consequence, our lifeway has come to be based on private gain. And fear.
We got off-track in the 1950’s when we created the physical environment centered on the nuclear family. In suburbanization we built the physical
system to put people off on themselves. Old people are warehoused and kids who
don’t manage to leave their parents’ homes are considered failures. Our lifeway has become one of fear and alienation.
FM: Is your own passion for stargazing fueled in some sense by social alienation?
Denny Henke: For me it’s a few different things.
To remember the context of life on planet earth, that it’s
fragile and special. I’ve lived my life trying to respect that, on balance.
And we know the end of the story for our planet, that one
day it will be consumed by the sun. And when you recognize that we come from
stardust—literally the carbon in our bodies—and that’s where it goes back to,
then one is no longer limited by mortality. When you make peace with mortality
and if you’re curious about the universe, what better way to spend your time on
the planet than looking up? It’s absolutely amazing.
FM: Can you describe your sense of amazement?
Denny Henke: I have a moment of giving up—wowed—allowing
for the mystery of something. Not that I own it, or even that I understand it. Just
that this thing in front of me is…awe inspiring!
This is not to say that you won’t try to understand it, but
not in that first moment of encounter.
FM: How do you, Denny, try and understand the galaxies?
DH: You mean my approach?
FM: Yes.
DH: I combine the beauty of looking through the telescope at
objects, which is enjoyable in a physical way, with research. Wikipedia covers
anything you can think of in astronomy, and is almost always a good starting
point. But there’s so much available on the Internet, high-level astronomers
offering up free podcasts—284 of them so far. When you combine the
audio with the research, it’s not exactly like going to a university but you
can pick up everything except for the math. And anyone can do it.
If you don’t have a telescope, even looking up at the sky
with the naked eye, you can still see a lot.
Which brings me back to your first question about matter; because
it’s through matter that we’re connected to each other, and to the universe.
It’s sad that many of us never learn the truth about the
origins of the universe, very simply, that we all literally come out of the
stars at the moment of the Big Bang. In the first few moments of the universe
there were only two elements: hydrogen and helium, and maybe a trace element of
something else. They clumped up, by accretion—think of a dust bunny on the
floor gathering material to itself, getting bigger, collecting a gravity.
The
first generation of stars had to produce carbon, iron, lithium and beryllium, etc.; they cooked up all
the elements and then they blew up. Then the second generation had more to work
with, and so on. All the elements of life came from the stars, we are literally
star stuff.
Because of that you are never alone. You can get locked in
emotionally into a bad place, but physically, you’re never alone.
FM: Then the attempt to understand the stars also becomes a way
of gaining a deeper self-knowledge?
DH: Yeah, without a doubt, yes! We’re just another part of
it, hydrogen studying hydrogen. We are the universe studying itself. We are
nature studying nature. Humans get caught up...we forget we're just part of it. It’s why we do damage, that forgetting; why we’re alienated
from each other, isolated from the life force around us.
Studying astronomy is definitely an attempt to understand where we come from,
and where we might be going.
FM: At the level of affect. How does it make you feel to
know that your humanity is literally supported by the stars, that humanity itself
was born in the cradle of the stars?
DH: When you connect with that, you live like I have been doing—in
a constant state of bliss. The universe is fascinating; it doesn’t get more
fascinating than looking up, and more so within this extreme limit, knowing
this is all I have, a very brief time on the planet. That’s the beauty of it, I’m
good with that—the briefness of it. But it’s a comfort to me to know my atoms
will never cease to exist, I’ll always be a part of it.
The day I die, I want them to throw me to the coyotes. Don’t
put me in a box. I don’t know if it’s legal, but what I want is for my body to
be thrown into the woods for the coyotes to eat me. Let them rip me to shreds into
tiny bits and pieces. That’s life! That’s what I have right now.
FM: Even without consciousness, you feel that it’s as much
life as—?
DH: —Feeding the worms, who feed the birds…? Yeah!
FM: I’m wondering if stargazing has given you some
hyperawareness of light—all those hours and hours of basking in starlight, that’s got to be
affecting you?
DH: After half-an-hour, or so, your eyes adjust. The more you
look, the more you see. When I’m looking at a galaxy, I’m looking at something
that’s ten million light years away. It’s incredibly dim. The photons have
traveled trillions of miles. We’re looking into deep history, deep dark space.
You have to be patient and spend time picking up the details.
FM: What is the quality of that time? Does time slow down? Is
that another reason why you stargaze so avidly?
DH: Absolutely! But sometimes you can spend a lot of time
outside at the scope, and it feels like it went very quickly. The experience of
astronomy is not just what you see through the scope; it’s also the knowledge
and thoughts you have fermenting in your brain.
FM: For example…?
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| A globular cluster |
DH: Globular clusters are one object people really enjoy
looking at. A globular cluster is a tightly-grouped ball of stars. On a good
dark night with a good telescope, if you’re looking at, say, the Hercules
cluster, you’ll see just that, a ball of stars. But if you keep looking, your eye will
start to be able to pick out individual stars.
Eventually your eye will be able to pick out about a
hundred stars.
Globular clusters aren't on the
same plane with the majority of the stars in our galaxy, so I think about
where we are in relation to the universe, issues of
placement posed by that particular object.
Plus they’re old stars, among the oldest. At one time they
were calculated to be older than the universe, which is impossible. And Science
had to confront its miscalculation and correct for it,
refining its own scientific method.
And that’s what ferments in your mind, those kinds of things.
For more information about opportunities for amateur astronomy in southeastern Missouri, please visit the Eastern Ozarks Astronomical Society's Facebook Page and Website.
