Star Wars novel where Han Solo uses an interstellar telescope?

December 21, 2012 10:32 AM

Which Star Wars novel features a scene where (I believe) Han Solo is using a telescope to look at a planet in another system, and can resolve it well enough to actually see what people on that planet are doing X years ago, where X is the number of light years that planet is away from the one he's on?
posted by cthuljew to media & arts (6 answers total)

I did an Amazon "search inside" for all the novels mentioned in the Telescope article on Wookiepedia and couldn't find it. Are you sure it was a Star Wars novel?
posted by kindall at 11:00 AM on December 21, 2012

Reasonably sure. I'd looked at that article, but hadn't thought to search inside. Maybe I should just start searching inside every SW novel....
posted by cthuljew at 11:01 AM on December 21, 2012

The concept is discussed on p288 of The Courtship of Princess Leia, but it's two minor characters, and the telescope doesn't actually exist.

"...with a telescope, you would be seeing light that reflected off their world hundreds of years ago. Since the light is just reaching us, you would be looking into their past."
"Oh," Teneniel said. "Do you have such a telescope?"
"No," Isolder laughed. "We don't make them that well."

posted by zamboni at 11:14 AM on December 21, 2012 [3 favorites]

It's not one of the original Brian Daley Han Solo Novels is it?

Han Solo at Stars' End (1979)
Han Solo's Revenge (1979)
Han Solo and the Lost Legacy (1980)

It sounds like something out of Stars' End to me.
posted by dgeiser13 at 11:15 AM on December 21, 2012

zamboni: Thank you! That is exactly it! I obviously ascribed a lot more importance to the characters, given how the concept has stuck with me for... well, I'm not going to depress myself by thinking about how long it's been since I've read The Courtship of Princess Leia.
posted by cthuljew at 11:20 AM on December 21, 2012

The question's been answered, but on a related note, there's a character in Jack Kirby's Captain Victory series whose extraterrestrial society patterned itself on Earth's Roman empire, discovered via super-telescope.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:50 AM on December 22, 2012