Welcome To My Blaugust Posted on August 3, 2026 by gaudetetheology As you can probably guess by the date on this very first Blaugust 2026 post, I am not intending to shoot for the post-every-day-of-the-month goal this year. As in previous years, my goal is to blog more often than “oh every once in a while, when I get around to it.” Having a focused period of time and a community is always helpful in that regard. I enjoy the group projects and shared themes, so will likely try to do some of that. But, I have more going on this year than usual, so…. we shall see what we shall see. This is my third Blaugust. I found out about my first one on July 31st, just _after_ I had posted something for the first time in months, darnit! I was happy to find a group of folks interested in reviving blogging as a community activity — I learned so much from other bloggers before I started my own, while I was in theology grad school. And as I sit here gazing at the starry-sky graphic for this year, I am delighted by this choice, because… the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is due to launch on the penultimate day of August this year! As usual with space telescopes, it won’t start taking pictures the day after launch — it has to get where it’s going (same general neighborhood as the James Webb Space Telescope), and then go through a period of turning on and calibrating all its various component parts (aka “commissioning period”). But when it does, wow! It’s got a huge field of view, because it was designed as a survey telescope: taking data from large swaths of sky to be analyzed, but still at quite high resolution… so its images will be enormous. Who knows what it will discover?! Which reminds me of the quote attributed to Edwin Hubble, after whom the Hubble Space Telescope was named. When he wanted to build the then-largest telescope in the world, with a mirror 100 inches in diamater, one of the newspapermen asked him, “What will you see through this enormous telescope?” To which he replied, approximately, “We don’t know! That’s the point! If we knew what we would see, we wouldn’t need to build it.” What will you see on my blog this Blaugust? I don’t know. That’s not the point… or maybe it is: because as I’ve often found when writing essays, it’s in the writing that I discover what I am trying to say. This entry was posted in Meta and tagged #blaugust, #blaugust2026, blogging, science, writing. Bookmark the permalink.