Getting lost in the stars

On the last night of November, when the sky was clear and the land was still, we drove up Cooper Hill on a pilgrimage to the stars.  A sliver of new moon slipped behind the hills, letting the stars emerge in all their splendor. We don’t often have cloudless, moonless nights here on the cusp of winter, and the four of us were nearing the end of our time together before my daughter headed back to college the following day. Such moments are rare, so letting carpe noctem be the watchword, we bundled up and headed out to experience the stars together.

Cooper Hill offers nearly 360 degree views, and most of the cluster of houses at the summit were dark, so we pulled over at the edge of a field and stepped out into a starlit world. 

I learned the winter stars as a small boy on nights like this, but with a cold and silent bay stretching to the southern horizon instead of these silent hills. My grandfather, who taught himself celestial navigation on a Liberty Ship in the middle of the Pacific, was my first guide to the brightest of these stars and their familiar constellations. 

My father on warmer nights showed me how to find my way from the asterism of the Big Dipper in an arc to Arcturus and then by a spike to Spica. We sometimes used a flashlight beam as a pointer, though I have come to value my night-adjusted vision, and so on this chilly night on Cooper Hill I tried to lead my family to the most distant object the unaided eye can see.

The Milky Way is almost directly overhead at this time of year, and I remembered that to the indigenous hunter-gathering peoples of the Kalahari these were not milk but wood ash stars. 

A bit below this visible edge of our galaxy we found the Great Square that conjoins the outstretched wing of Pegasus and the head of chained Andromeda. It took a bit of searching to spot a smudge of light near the faint binary star that forms one of her knees, but my binoculars helped to reveal its true nature. 

This was the Andromeda Galaxy, an island universe 2.5 million light years from Earth and the nearest major galaxy to our own. First described as a “small cloud” or “nebulous smear” in “The Book of the Fixed Stars” written by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi in 964 CE, it was known for many centuries as the Andromeda Nebula and was finally shown by Edwin Hubble in 1925 to be an external spiral galaxy rather than a cluster of stars and gas within our own. 

The Andromeda Galaxy contains roughly twice the number of stars as our own, and we are on a collision course that in about 4 billion years could result in the merger and formation of one vast, elliptical galaxy. 

As we took in the rest of the night sky, a lone meteor burned toward the west. The brightest stars around us revealed their distinctive colors: blue-white Vega, the diamond heart of the Lyre; fiery Aldebaran, the orange eye of the bull; the red-orange super giant Betalgeuse in Orion that in a few tens of thousands of years may explode as a supernova, the light from which will take half a millenium to reach whomever or whatever gazes skyward from Earth.

There is plenty of room for awe and wonder in science. The intake of breath as each of my family members sought and then found the image of another universe in the sky overhead affirms that there are still mysteries available to us that can draw us out of our selves and reawaken a sense of humility and reverence. 

When we return to the night sky, whether on the shores of the bay or the crest of Cooper Hill, we follow our own elliptic journey through time and space. We reconnect to each other and to the enormity of the outer limits of our perception and all that may lie beyond.

Tim Abbott is program director of HVA’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at www.greensleeves.typepad.com.