Looking back in the past

When I actually looked back sixteen hundred years, it didn't seem much different; it was just the feeling. The Orion Nebula is 1600 light years away and is 24 light years across. And I saw all that through my eye of just 35 millimeters! That 18 inches diameter telescope also presented those craters on moon with such detail that for a moment I thought I was on moon. I forgot the craters that I had seen earlier through my Dad's binoculars. Don't know why but I find moon very beautiful, even through a telescope. It sometimes seems mysterious. The elevations, the depressions, the shadows, the dark and the bright areas, the plain surface. I want to visit moon some day. When I came back and told Mom what I saw, she said, 'And did you see that old lady spinning thread on her wheel? :-)' I've decided that I'l definitely meet her when I go on the moon.

I thought that this Astronomy Festival would be a big one, with representatives from different institutions, having different stalls etc. But in that big ground of Punjab University there were three telescopes, a projector-screen and about twenty people. And man it was cold there. I certainly miscalculated the temperature. Earlier that day when I went to the Sunday market and I couldn't bear the sun's heat, I thought winters are over. So I wore light clothes and sandals to go to the Festival at night. Perhaps it was due the vastness of space and the grass that almost froze my feet. Nevertheless what they had to present was more interesting. It must have been the first one of its kind and I was happy that we are finally waking up from our slumber.

Looking at the nebula I thought that if man could travel very much faster than the speed of light (which is actually impossible as they say) and go to a distance like 1600 light years away from earth in an instant, and if our earth could transmit so much light to reach that distance, it would be possible to look back 1600 years on earth. I know there are so many 'ifs' in this assumption, but it could solve so many mysteries :-)