Night Sky
Count me among the disappointed last week.
As the result of a solar storm, or what scientists more dryly refer to as a coronal mass ejection, large ribbons of plasma were being blasted toward the earth at 2.7 million miles per hour. But rather than flee in search of a bunker, many of us hauled out lawn chairs and rigged up cameras and tripods. We were ready for what happens when electrically-charged particles interact with Earth’s magnetic field – the rare and stunning appearance of Aurora Borealis, otherwise known as the Northern Lights.
Though expected to be visible in a nearly straight line from Montana to Maine, thick cloud cover and fog obscured our vision along the coast, unlike that of our luckier neighbors in far northern Maine and Canada. For night sky watchers here, this wasn’t just another fog-delayed 4th of July fireworks display over Stonington Harbor.
But, as if in compensation, astronomers immediately began touting the promise that this week offers – the Perseid meteor showers set to peak Thursday night. Though more familiar than the Northern Lights, a Perseid shower is certainly no slouch and in some circles warrants its own celebration – “star parties,” which it probably need not be noted bear little association to limos, red carpets and swag. To the extent that Mother Nature is at this point definitely cooperating, the moon will be waxing, making for, astronomers say, optimal viewing conditions. Hopefully so.
On a clear August night a couple of years ago, when Perseid was again roaming the neighborhood, my sister and I spread blankets on the lawn. Given its billing as a meteor shower, I expected an immediate show. And indeed, above us, the sky in its sheer staggering abundance stunned with all those seemingly uncountable stars the ancients believed were pinholes in the sky’s vault where light of another outer world shone through. But there was none of the movement or dazzle of what I’d read could be as many as 30 to 40 meteors per hour hurtling into view, of what I’d imagined as a storm of stars dropping from the sky. But we’d come out a little past 10 p.m., when in fact the show was just inching toward its warm-up matinee performance.
For a long time, struck silent in the best kind of way, we stared and searched. And then in that vastness, off to the right, a bright arc, so brief and quick we almost missed it. And then, a short time later, another, again almost missed, in another direction. I’d anticipated that anything referred to as falling star would surely announce its passing in a scream of glitter and light, a trail of fire. Which these were, each earning from us exclamations and pointing fingers, but with a fire so distant, a transit so brief, we had to search for them, train our eyes, look, be ready.
Since, I’ve learned these “shooting stars” are actually shucked bits of stone and grit linked to the Swift-Tuttle comet making its 130-year orbit around the sun. As the Earth plows through these trails of space debris, estimated at one million tons of particulate matter spread throughout the comet’s orbit, things heat up. In the friction of our planet’s atmosphere, the cometary particles sizzle, vaporize, and in a 150,000-mile-per-hour fiery plummet, seem to disappear. But according to astronomer-essayist Chet Raymo, such particulate matter is continually adding to the Earth’s bulk. Cosmic dust that survives a dive into our atmosphere settles onto the planet’s surface, so much so scientists can dig into Arctic and Antarctic ice and collect Perseid bits of dust that plummeted toward the Earth more than a thousand years ago. Sky dust from an August night is an indisputable part of our earth’s surface, its atmospheric mix. Particles smaller than ash.
Lying small and quiet beneath such a sky can overwhelm. So much about it is unfathomable, beyond reach. Though beneath me the granite bedrock of a small island in the Northeast Atlantic seems familiar and, most important, solid and steadfast, the earth as I lie there whirls on its axis, hurtles along its circular orbit. Even as we sleep, the earth races toward the sun at more than 10,000 miles per hour, travels half a million miles across the Perseids. Every moment, the earth moves at such a terrifying speed it’s surprising that as I sit writing this, I’m not flung from our planet’s surface.
That we’re not are questions, Raymo claims, the theologians never dared ask Galileo who declared the earth can’t be excluded from the “the dancing whirl of stars.” Who recognized earth’s whirling in a vast universe is seemingly chaotic or random, but with an order, a logic that we do not fully understand.
Certainly, in the years since Galileo, we’ve developed new ways of seeing. With its Deep Field capabilities, the Hubble has revealed vast empires of countless galaxies. It’s beamed back what look like grains of sand but are really individual points of light from a galaxy millions of light years away, or in images of expanding light haloes and illuminated interstellar dust bearing eerie resemblance to Van Gogh’s masterpiece, “Starry Nights.” Yet even the Hubble’s Deep Field can’t probe far enough. In the words of Hubble himself, with “increasing distance, our knowledge fades.” We glimpse “mere shadows.”
The cosmic galaxy, so vast, so far beyond the boundaries of Earth, is beyond comprehension. The scale of our hurtling planetary home, itself nothing more than a bit of dust in the galaxy makes one individual being on a small nubbin of rock in the ocean something so infinitesimal words can’t help but fail. But from a blanket on a clear August night, it's enough -- more than enough -- to look and point.
