Arturo Pérez-Reverte: "The Seville Communion" (excerpt)

 . . . 

"He looked through the eyepiece. He turned the wheels, and slowly the tube of the telescope moved up and left. "When you look at the sky", he (Father Ferro) said, "things occupy a different place in the universe. Did you know that our little Earth is only a hundred and fifty million kilometers from the Sun, whereas Pluto is almost six billion kilometers away? And that the Sun is a tiny dot compared to an average star like Arcturus? Not to mention Aldebaran, which is thirty-six million kilometers across, or Betelgeuse, which is ten times the size of that."  He moved the telescope to the right.  He pointed out a star to Quart. "Look. That's Altair. At three hundred thousand kilometers per second, its light takes sixteen years to reach us. It might have exploded in the meantime, and we could be seeing light from a star that no longer exists. Sometimes, when I look toward Rome, I feel as if I'm looking at Altair. Are you sure everything will be there when you get back?"

  At Father Ferro's invitation, Quart looked through the eyepiece. As he moved away from the brightness of the moon, between the stars appeared myriad points of light, clusters and nebulae that were red, blue, white, flickering or still. One of them gradually moved and then disappeared in the glare of another - a shooting star or maybe a man-made satellite. Quart looked for the Great Bear following the line through Merak and Dubhe upward, four times the distance, if he remembered correctly.  There was the Pole Star, large, bright, confident.

   "That's Polaris",  said Father Ferro, who had followed the movement of the telescope. "The tip of the Little Bear, which always indicates the Earth's zero latitude. Always but not immutably."  He told Quart to point the telescope to his left. "Five thousand years ago the Egyptians venerated another one, the Dragon, as the guardian of the north. It has a 25,800-year cycle, of which only three thousand have passed. So in another two hundred and twenty-eight centuries the Dragon will be the pole star again." He drummed his fingers on the brass tube. "I wonder if there will be anyone on Earth then to notice."

Arturo Perez-Reverte, "The Seville Communion" 

Translation by Sonia Soto, 

Harcourt Brace & Co. 1998 

Arturo Perez-Reverte, "La Piel del Tambor" 1995,  Ed. Alfaguara

Astronomy Picture of the Day