Manning the Media
Look at the Stars
"When Hubble Stated at Nothing for 100 Hours," Nadia Drake, National Geographic (April 24, 2015)
In December 1995, Bob Williams, the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, decided to aim the Hubble Space Telescope at nothing. He chose a speck of sky near the handle of the Big Dipper, about a thirtieth the width of the full moon, picked precisely because it appeared empty. Then he kept the telescope on it for a hundred hours over ten days. His colleagues thought it a waste of precious observing time. Hubble’s reputation was still recovering from its embarrassing early flaws, and a committee probably would never have approved the project. So Williams used the slice of telescope time a director controls on his own and said he would resign if it failed. When the 342 exposures were combined, that patch of darkness turned out to contain more than 3,000 galaxies, some of them about twelve billion years old. Estimates of how many galaxies exist jumped fivefold, and the Robert Kirshner who had called it a bad idea said simply, “Bob was right, I was wrong.” Avraham had his own night of looking at the sky. He was old and childless, and he had just told Hashem that his heir would be a servant. “Vayotzei oso hachutzah vayomer habet na hashamaymah u’sefor hakochavim im tuchal lispor osam… koh yihyeh zarecha” (15:5). A man whose own tent looked empty was asked to believe it would someday hold more than he could count, and the next pasuk tells us “v’he’emin baShem.” The Deep Field showed what Avraham believed that night: a place that looks empty may be full of things we haven’t seen yet, as long as we’re willing to keep looking.
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