One of the best things about winter — yes, there are some — is how clear the sky gets at night.
I discovered that fact the first night I lived here, a cold, clear night that made the stars seem very close. In many parts of the world, there are so many lights on, all the time, that a clear view of the sky is never possible. I live on a ridge, but the surrounding ridges are a little taller, shielding me from the lights of nearby communities. (Alas, they also shield me from really nice sunrises and sunsets, but it’s a fair trade.)
There is, actually, a little more light pollution here in the winter, because the leaves are gone and the lights from the homes of neighbors on my side of those two tall ridges filter through. One, down the hill and across the creek, has a bright mercury light that is on whenever it’s dark. It’s not a real annoyance, though, and it is a good, quick, way of determining the extent of the problem when the electricity goes out. Another is new this year. A neighbor has fixed up the barn right across the road from me and, too, has installed one of those always-on lights. It blasts through my living room window, lights up the tops of trees all around, and, frankly, annoys the hell out of me. I plan to offer to pay for the hardware if he’ll change it to one of those which comes on when there’s movement nearby, which would give him the security of a light and me the darkness I’d like.
Going outside and looking at the sky is something I’ve loved ever since I was a tiny kid. It amazed me that going outside from a well-lit house I could at first see only a few stars and bright objects, but after a few minutes, as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, more and more of them would appear until the sky was nothing but stars. This was in the day when there was talk of our going into space, and to small children there was no doubt that we’d be zooming from solar system to solar system in no time. It was also an era in which science fiction tended to be hopeful, not apocalyptic.
Since then, of course, the space program has been throttled back; no one in 1960 would have supposed that 50 years later we would have gotten no farther than we have. And the space program has become somewhat geocentric: we launch our largely useless tin cans onto orbit so that we can look not out at the heavens but back at Earth. NASA for a time would say, as the space shuttle cleared the launch tower, that the shuttle was “on a mission to Planet Earth.” I think this was a publicity ploy during a time in which we had become so self-absorbed that the great, wide universe was thought to be insufficiently interesting.
On a dark, clear winter night in the country, the possibilities all come back again. One becomes a child again, full of wonder and hope. Imagination is reborn. The problems of the world, no matter how big they seem, acquire a certain perspective when floated amid the vastness of, well, vastness.
It’s not quite winter yet and the full celestial splendor is still muted a bit, but the other night I took the little telescope out in the yard for a few minutes.
We looked at Jupiter.
You’ve seen Jupiter, even from downtown metropolitan Athens. It’s bright, in the center of the sky but a little bit south, after sunset. With nothing more than strong binoculars one can detect its shape and, alongside it, other objects, all in a straight line. These are some of its eight regular moons (it’s got oodles of little, irregular ones). One can usually see four of them without too much telescopic help; the other night one might have been in front of or behind Jupiter itself, so we saw only three. With even a dinky telescope, on a cold, clear night one can make out some of the features of the biggest planet. The most thrilling of these to me is that it is in fact a globe.
The three-dimensional aspect brings real excitement. We’ve all seen pictures of the planets that illustrate them far better than any Earth-bound telescope ever could. Yet there is something special about peering into an eyepiece and seeing it, yes, right up there. It is the difference between seeing something in person and seeing it on television. The TV cameras probably get closer and get a clearer view, but they don’t provide the personal aspect.
Back in the olden days, we children were exposed to the excitement of things very large, as seen through a telescope, and very small, as seen through a microscope. I wonder if kids nowadays have an opportunity to experience the delight and possibility and joy that comes of rediscovering the universe.
I sure hope so.
Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.