No matter what level, from backyard stargazer to the greatest of astronomers, the more light we can gather from the heavens the better.

Until a way is found to travel past the speed of light, which the great Albert Einstein pretty much declared impossible, people from Earth aren't going to be able to travel to the stars anytime soon, if ever.

Einstein basically said that as you get closer to traveling at the speed of light your mass increases infinitely, forcing you to require infinite amounts of energy.

Now at a huge expense we might be able to send people to Mars and maybe some of the other planets in our solar system, but beyond that it may be impossible. You have to leave the door open a crack, though, because as little as 100 years ago the same thing was said about going to the moon.

So how do astronomers know what they do about the stars and how do we expect to learn more? The answer is light.

From the backyard stargazer to the hard-core amateur astronomer, the more light you're able to gather in your telescope, the better you'll see the universe.

When it comes to telescopes, most people new at stargazing figure that the more you can magnify something through a scope, the more “powerful” a telescope is.

That's just not true.

Telescopes are really more light intensifiers than they are magnifiers. Even though the human eye is a wonderfully efficient light-gathering tool, it can't match the light gathering ability of telescopes.

No matter what kind of telescope you have, either a refractor, reflector, or a Schmidt-Cassegrain, the wider the scope is the more light it can gather and the clearer the image of whatever you're observing will be. Telescopes are like giant eyes, and the wider they are, the better.

Professional astronomers, and even some amateurs, don't just settle for looking visually through the telescope. They take pictures through telescopes so they can gather light for a longer time and record the accumulated light to get an even clearer image. The best thing that's happened to astrophotography in the last 30 years was the development of CCDs (charged coupled devices) that can electronically detect and collect 80 percent of the light coming in from a celestial object.

Our human eyes, believe it or not, only detect and collect about 2 percent of incoming light. CCD chips also are used in everyday video cameras to gather light from family events and growing 2-year-olds.

In the last few years, I've certainly come to love imaging with a CCD camera telescope setup. The way the technology is progressing it won't be long until just about anybody can take great astro-photos without mortgaging your house.

Another thing astronomers can do to gather light is to take big optical telescopes to high places like mountaintops, where skies are darker and the air is thinner, allowing even more light to enter the scopes.

One of the best, if not the best, observatories in the world is the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea mountain in Hawaii, where some wonderful things are being done by astronomers. One of the latest techniques being developed to gather more light is to electronically combine the light gathering abilities of multiple telescopes to get an even clearer image. This is called interferometry and shows a lot of promise for the future.

And then there's the Hubble telescope. It's not as big as many ground-based telescopes, but it can gather a lot of light with the help of CCDs and with none of Earth's atmosphere in the way. In fact, some of the most amazing photographs from the Hubble telescope were its Ultra Deep Field photos, some of the deepest looks ever made into our universe. In the combined images, made up of 800 individual exposures taken in 2003-2004, it's estimated that more than 10,000 galaxies are in view, some possibly over 12 billion light years away. The truly amazing thing about this picture is that the amount of sky seen in this image is no bigger than a tenth of the size of the moon.

Light not only provides clarity to all astronomical images, but light also can be broken down into separate components, or wavelengths. This can act as a fingerprint of elements in and around a star, nebula, galaxy or whatever.

This is called the spectrum of a star. You can do the same thing, only on a smaller scale, with a prism or a fine water spray to get a rainbow spectrum of the sun. This is how we get rainbows in our skies after a storm in the early morning or early evening.

Not only can astronomers deduce what elements are out there in the universe, but stellar spectrums can also directly or indirectly reveal the absolute light output of a star, its temperature, its distance, and many other characteristics. You get your money's worth with starlight.

Celestial hugging this week

The waxing crescent will have a close encounter with the bright planet Saturn as it passes from the constellations Scorpius to Sagittarius. Catch it low in the southwestern evening sky after twilight.

Make the stars your old friends

If you have any astronomical questions or want me to write about something you're seeing in the night sky, drop me a line at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul and is author of the book, “Stars: A Month by Month Tour of the Constellations” published by Adventure Publications available at bookstores at www.adventurepublications.net.