I'm Major Jackson and this is The Slow Down.

As a kid, my best friend's older brother Lonnie was the smartest dude I knew.

I mean smarter than our teachers.

He once explained Einstein's theory of relativity to me in such a way that for a flash of a second,

I actually understood.

He was like my neighborhood's Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

So when he came home from school one day and pronounced that if we looked into the sky

and concentrated hard enough that we could see right through the blue firmament and into

deep space, no one challenged him.

We all just went outside and stared up for a long while, squinting while visoring

our foreheads until our necks hurt, then silently one by one went back inside to watch MTV.

I have no idea where he got such a notion or his source.

I only know this.

That day Lonnie instigated my sense of wonder and that evening when I should have been sleeping

like millions, maybe even billions before me for the first time I felt compelled to look

up at the stars.

I have been examining the cosmos ever since.

Is there any other mystery that has ignited our imaginations that has launched questions

about our origins or the possibilities of interstellar phenomena like the Milky Way?

In China, it's called the Silver River in Japan, River of Heaven.

About five years ago, I purchased a pair of high-powered binoculars.

The sci-fi sounding celestial skymaster 2500 that allows me to see the moon's basins

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