telescopes

12:4.14Al­though your spec­tro­scopic es­ti­ma­tions of as­tro­nomic ve­loc­i­ties are fairly re­li­able when ap­plied to the starry realms be­long­ing to your super­uni­verse and its as­so­ciate super­uni­verses, such reck­on­ings with ref­er­ence to the realms of outer space are wholly un­re­li­able. Spec­tral lines are dis­placed from the nor­mal to­wards the vi­o­let by an ap­proach­ing star; like­wise these lines are dis­placed to­wards the red by a re­ced­ing star. Many in­flu­ences in­ter­pose to make it ap­pear that the re­ces­sional ve­loc­ity of the ex­ter­nal uni­verses in­creases at the rate of more than one hun­dred miles a sec­ond for ev­ery mil­lion light-years in­crease in dis­tance. By this method of reck­on­ing, sub­se­quent to the per­fec­tion of more pow­er­ful tele­scopes, it will ap­pear that these far-dis­tant sys­tems are in flight from this part of the uni­verse at the un­be­liev­able rate of more than thirty thou­sand miles a sec­ond. But this ap­par­ent speed of re­ces­sion is not real; it re­sults from nu­mer­ous fac­tors of er­ror em­brac­ing an­gles of ob­ser­va­tion and other time-space dis­tor­tions.

12:2.2Al­though the un­aided hu­man eye can see only two or three neb­u­lae out­side the bor­ders of the super­uni­verse of Or­von­ton, your tele­scopes lit­er­ally re­veal mil­lions upon mil­lions of these phys­i­cal uni­verses in pro­cess of for­ma­tion. Most of the starry realms vi­su­ally ex­posed to the search of your pres­ent-day tele­scopes are in Or­von­ton, but with pho­to­graphic tech­nique the larger tele­scopes pen­e­trate far be­yond the bor­ders of the grand uni­verse into the do­mains of outer space, where un­told uni­verses are in pro­cess of or­ga­ni­za­tion. And there are yet other mil­lions of uni­verses be­yond the range of your pres­ent in­stru­ments.

12:2.3In the not-dis­tant fu­ture, new tele­scopes will re­veal to the won­der­ing gaze of Uran­tian as­tron­o­mers no less than 375 mil­lion new galax­ies in the re­mote stretches of outer space. At the same time these more pow­er­ful tele­scopes will dis­close that many is­land uni­verses for­merly be­lieved to be in outer space are re­ally a part of the galac­tic sys­tem of Or­von­ton. The seven super­uni­verses are still grow­ing; the pe­riph­ery of each is grad­u­ally ex­pand­ing; new neb­u­lae are con­stantly be­ing sta­bi­lized and or­ga­nized; and some of the neb­u­lae which Uran­tian as­tron­o­mers re­gard as ex­tra­galac­tic are ac­tu­ally on the fringe of Or­von­ton and are trav­el­ing along with us.