The other day I was looking at some old pictures. They were from decades ago and many of them were in black and white. As I was looking at them, I thought of astronomy and how I am actually doing the same thing that astronomers do when they look into deep space and faraway galaxies! You are trying to make sense out of what I just wrote? Read on.
You see, in astronomy the light that our instruments capture is travelling at the speed of…. well ….light – that is 300 000 km per second! Furthermore, the universe is so vast that the distances are measured in light-years, meaning the light captured by our instrument emanated from an object so many light-years away. Consequently, the object as we see it, is what it was that ‘long ago.’ In other words, an object that was observed and measured to be 10 light-years away, is observed as it was 10 years earlier. The object’s light from more than ten years ago has gone past us, and light from earlier than 10 years ago has not reached us yet.
Now, the close objects are not expected to have changed in those short years. But what about the objects we observe that are estimated to be, for example, 7 billion light-years away? When you think that our solar system is ‘only’ 5 billion years old, we can imagine that what we observe from an object 7 billion light-years away is not what that object is currently in its ‘local’ time. We see that object the way it was when it was much much younger.
I think you may be seeing what I meant in the first paragraph; that is, when we look at old pictures of anyone or anything, ourselves included, we see what that person was at that time, and the universe he/she was living in. But here is the catch: this ‘nostalgia astronomy’, as I call looking and reflecting at old pictures of people, is really a privilege of a specific demographic generation. The tail end of the baby-boomers and the first half of the Gen X. You ask why?
Well, popular photography really started in early to mid 50s so if you were born earlier you don’t have too many photos, because it was a whole effort to have pictures before then. And the generations after early Gen X have been so inundated with pictures (instant cameras, digital cameras, smartphone cameras) that looking at old pictures has become mundane and devoid of ‘super excitement‘, so no thrill to look at the old ones and ponder upon them.
Paris, November 6, 2025
Zeejay