Zenologue

Last night I stepped outside at around 8:40pm to watch the International Space Station (ISS) make a pass over the area, something I like to do whenever the opportunity presents itself and the sky is clear. I took my stepdaughter, Amy, outside with me to see the event, and we stood there waiting as a crescent moon floated high overhead in a starry sky.

Right on time, the ISS became visible in the distance. Although the sun had set some time ago, the ISS is so high that it reflects the dull red glow of the sun’s light filtered through the atmosphere (much like the color of a sunset). The moving point of light grew brighter and became more yellow as it climbed higher in the sky, until it was the brightest object in the sky, other than the moon itself.

As I stood there, quietly marveling at the fact that six people were hurtling through space at 18,000 mph in a large tin can, 220 miles above my head, Amy calmly says, “I’m cold,” shrugged and disappeared inside.

Over the next minute, the ISS silently glided across the sky until it entered the Earth’s shadow and faded from view, but I was lost in thought about how things have changed in the world since I was Amy’s age.

When I was 12 years old, in 1974, the Apollo moon program was in full swing (although sadly about to be cancelled), and astronauts were frequently in the news as they bounded about on the lunar surface, collecting samples and singing about the merry month of May. In Europe, Concorde had just started to grace the skies in her supersonic glory, and the whole world seemed full of promise and hope for the future, even despite events like the Vietnam War.

I became seriously interested in astronomy at about that time and remember the excitement we felt watching satellites and Skylab float overhead. At that time, there were no CD players, DVD players, Internet, email, iPhones, iPods, digital cameras, Xbox’s or PS3s. Tweeting was a noise our pet budgie made when it was happy, a PC was a policeman, while a MAC was something you wore to go outside in the rain. There was no worldwide web, surfing was what people in California did, and space stations in the sky were the product of sci-fi writers.

When I was Amy’s age, I could only imagine what it might be like to see an actual space station like the ISS glide across the sky. But now, it seems, it’s just a commonplace event, nothing to be marveled over.

In fact, if someone had told me at the age of 12 that I would someday be able to stand in my own garden, photograph a space station with a camera that didn’t even use film, and then potentially send the image to anyone else in the world from my own computer within minutes, I don’t think I would have believed them.

For all the technological achievements we’ve made over the last 35 years, we appear to have lost at least one thing: wonder.

In the time it took me to ponder all this and step back inside, maybe five minutes, the ISS had traveled over 1500 miles. How many more eyes like ours had peered up from the ground to observe it, I wonder?

Then, this morning, I read an interesting news article from the BBC News site regarding the ISS and how the US and Russia are quarreling over the use of the toilet facilities and an exercise bike on the ISS (click here for the news story). It seems that even those up in the sky might have lost something too…

What has all this to do with being a professional photographer? Not much you might think. But then I thought of it like this: Imagine what we can do with our craft if we can only rekindle the spark of wonder in the eye of humanity. What we see with our eyes and feel with our hearts can truly be felt in those who treasure our work…

Motivation encouragement, inspiration, ISS, Motivation