The Telescope at Griffith Observatory

On a Friday evening in Los Angeles, a line of visitors snakes up the steps of Griffith Observatory to peer through the Zeiss telescope. A seven-year-old named Sofia presses her eye to the lens and gasps. She can see the rings of Saturn — actual rings, pale gold and impossibly thin, circling a planet seven hundred million miles away. Her father, a CalTech astrophysicist, has described those rings to her a hundred times.…