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Projects: Space InformationThe Planetary ReportVolume XXVIII, Number 6, November/December 2008
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Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / L. Allen & X. Koenig (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) |
Generations of stars glow in this infrared stellar “family tree” image
taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. This wispy, star-forming region, called
W5, is about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. Here,
the oldest stars are the blue dots in the hollow cavities (other blue dots
are background and foreground stars not associated with the region). Younger
stars line the cavity rims and show as pink at the ends of the pillars at upper
right. White indicates star-forming areas, red shows heated dust that pervades
the cavities, and green highlights dense clouds.
From The Editor
What will be lost?
How often have you asked yourself that question? Such thinking is not an exercise in nostalgia; the question is fundamentally about the future. The past will survive in memory; what will be lost concerns what will cease to exist in the future—and what will leave an empty space in your heart.
Consider how you feel when old, familiar buildings, perhaps from your childhood, are slated for demolition in the name of progress. Or when a beloved landscape, one that never lost its power to lift your heart, is blighted by thoughtless development or careless utilization. Or when a cherished old tradition vanishes from a culture, never again to bring families together.
I feel such losses more acutely, now that I am a mother, because I know that in my child’s life, she will be denied the comfort, peace, or inspiration that I once found in vanished things. It’s a soft sorrow, not a piercing grief, but it’s a loss all the same.
I ask you now to remember the elation you once felt at seeing the first footsteps placed on the Moon, or watching the first launch of the space shuttle, or holding in your hand the first picture of a distant planet. Remember the vision of Apollo, the uplifting belief that our species was destined to travel to other worlds, to build a spacefaring civilization.
Could all that be lost? If we do not commit, during these difficult times, to working together to build that spacefaring civilization, that vision will vanish. The future will be diminished—for you and me, and for our children and their children.
We can preserve that bright, remembered future— if we unite and act
together today through The Planetary Society.
—Charlene M. Anderson
Features
The Planetary Society’s All-Sky Optical SETI: Where Are We Now?
by Paul Horowitz and his research group, Harvard University Optical SETI
2008—The Year in Pictures
by Emily Stewart Lakdawalla
Help Us Celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope
by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Departments
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