The Night Sky

When I was fourteen, just before I moved away from Northern Virginia, I went by bus with a group of Boyscouts out to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. It was an eye-opener in many ways. The first time I saw, in fact felt literally in the seat of my pants, just how big our country is. I had never seen territory like New Mexico. I remember the evening sunsets best, with mesas looming up against the fading colors. I saw my first Hispanics, and I fell in love with the culture of the old west.

One night in the Sangre de Cristo mountains a park ranger, an astronomer, took us all out to set quietly on the mountain slope. While he explained the stars as best he could, we looked up at a night sky that was very nearly clear of all man made light pollution. Even coming from a farm I had never seen anything like it.

So this post quoted on Andrew Sullivan's page really meant something to me.

In his book "Nightwatch," the well-known Canadian astronomer Terrence Dickinson comments that in the aftermath of the predawn 1994 Northridge, California earthquake, electrical power was knocked out over a wide area. Tens of thousands of people in southern California rushed out of their homes looked up and perhaps for the first time in their lives saw a dark, starry sky. In the days and weeks that followed, radio stations and observatories in the Los Angeles area received countless numbers of phone calls from concerned people who wondered whether the sudden brightening of the stars and the appearance of an eerie silvery cloud (the Milky Way) might have caused the quake.

"Such reaction," notes Dickinson, "can come only from people who have never seen the night sky away from city light

The other thing that sticks in my mind after all these years is the astronomer's accent: it was an American accent alright, but unlike any I'd ever heard before.

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