By Larry Berz
To steal moments out of a busy day to gaze and reflect upon the sky seems, to me at least, a vital and necessary element of good, civilized living as any other. I personally would prefer to transact my emotions with the atmospheric elements than indulge them within the silly games of local traffic and the consumer zone. After all, our range and breadth and depth of emotions distinguish us as humans from the balance of Earth’s living population. The sky, the leaves and the chill, tell me to rewire my mind and heart to the rhythms of the Fall. My telescope points nightly toward the constellation of Andromeda in the early hours. There, I see this ghostly assemblage of three nebulous cocoons in stasis. This Great Andromeda Galaxy challenges my reality. Its unique companions do the same. One is a tiny ball of fluff; the other companion is the thinnest gossamer of visibility. They frighten me. Somehow, I am absorbing the energy of 300 billion suns, uncountable planets and a zone of some cosmic otherness.
If the morning bell tolls, commanding me out of my own blanketed cocoon, I am also telescoping before dawn. Target: Jupiter. It offers a never-ending display of satellite circling, drawn by the creamy, yellow orange King ball itself. Target: the Great Orion Nebula.
And there are sky mysteries. Last night, through a faint haze of typical constellations, I saw emerging a strange illuminated cord rising through the sky with a bubble-like object attached. Within moments, I realized I was observing a weather balloon launch from Caribou in unaccustomed darkness. It was a strange sight, indeed. And I felt left with a strange uneasiness that we truly live in a technological age whose impact we may all too easily take for granted. Would a time traveler from the 16th or 17th century even begin to comprehend such a world as ours. And fast forward ourselves to the 26th century and tackle our own incredulity to digest the sky routines of that yet undisclosed era.
It’s darker isn’t it. We broached the autumnal equinox and saw our summer exit stage left. And I saw almost peripherally at the work place a symbol of the new season. It was a night light, one of those reminders of childhood’s rainbow. That little plug-in of plastic and glass betokens our childhood security. Our parents faithfully purchased the appliance to artificially help us kids to banish the dark and the fearsome apparitions it may or may not brandish.
I challenge each of us to consider whether we still view the night in need of a night-light. When do we enjoy that subtle emancipation when we embrace our own understanding to the mature adult, the night and the day are both the same expressions of a exquisitely tender planet dancing about an orbital platter 24/7, 365.4 days a year? Perhaps given the horrifying encroachment of a light polluted landscape, we should hearken under a more sophisticated concept of the night, banish the night-light, and finally learn to see in the dark, unafraid.
I remind all of us that the wonders of seeing in the dark offer us a canvass for assessing our own experiences as civilized inhabitants of this living planet. For good or for ill, we are engaged in a fantastic voyage through space and time. The antecedents and the possibilities now lay before us. In the words of statesman Adlai Stevenson: “We’ve travelled together. Passengers on a little space ship. Dependent upon its vulnerable reserve of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and peace. We cannot maintain half-fortunate, half miserable-half, confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man-half free, in a liberation of resources. No craft no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. Upon that resolution, therefore, depends the survival of us all.”
I can only encourage each of us to spend special and precious time outdoors at night in Fall, 2012. May we each find a tender target up there for our examination and attention. And no matter to what extent any of us may find our lives under conflict or conflagration, may we see the sky and its astronomical wonders as a benchmark for better understanding ourselves and our own unique time on this good Earth.
Larry Berz of Caribou is director of Easton’s Francis Malcolm Planetarium and astronomy instructor at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics.
