Stars, Planetariums, & Resident Field Trips

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"I have never looked up at the stars" so said one of the residents in my noon conference at the VA Hospital in Orlando where I use to head up the residency and fellowship programs. I use to throw some of my photographic work in between the other more conventional teaching slides to break the monotony of the conference. There also would be a Zen koan or interesting vocabulary word of the day on the whiteboard (like Tsundoku - all the books you've bought and haven't read) and conference would start with the ringing of a Buddhist singing bowl but that's a story for another day. The goal was to break up the ordinary and to remember the forest. That medicine is observation just as life is as well, or should be. But, too often, in medicine physicians lose the forest for the trees. In any case, that weekend I had the group accompany me on a field trip to the Emil Buehler Planetarium here in Orlando and we all learned again to look up at the night sky. To this day, my fellow from that year, tells me when he goes to a national park he attends a star gazing event and that reminds him of that field trip and the year we spent together.

I like looking at the stars. Because it's a lot like looking in to the eye. The further out there, or deeper in to the eye, you look the more the universe escapes from you. It as Alan Watts reminds us, the universe is always escaping from itself. In medicine and science we keep cutting the pie in to smaller and smaller bits looking for the final little bit but we'll never get there. The photo above was taken in Wyoming at about 3 in the morning while I was hiking through the Tetons using a portable trip and a long exposure wide aperture setting with my hand held Canon PowerShot Gx-9 Mark 10 camera. For those of you who recognize the subject, the constellation is the Pleiades and it, too, has a unique meaning for ophthalmologists. The Native Americans would look at the stars at night with their youngsters, and the ones who could draw out the pattern of the Pleaides on the ground would prove to have sufficiently good vision to become hunters. The rest became ophthalmologists like me. 

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