The Perseid meteor shower is coming up on the evening/morning of Aug. 12/13. I’ll add details in the coming weeks, but first, let me state this sad fact: Most people seeking the Perseids don’t see many meteors.
They stay out a few hours, see a few shooting stars, leave early, and are generally satisfied. Instead, consider the meteors a bonus to what can be a life-changing experience.
Instead, stay the night and experience, directly and profoundly, the texture of the universe.
Take a brief cosmic vacation — out past the blinding streetlights of the city to a place where the stars still shine with awe-inspiring abundance. Board Carl Sagan’s “spacecraft of your imagination” and journey to the Milky Way and beyond.
So set up your lawn chair and explore, as I first did over 50 years ago, your immense galactic neighborhood.
Because we live on the edge of the Milky Way, we see it around midnight right now as a convoluted band of silvery light that stretches across the sky from the south to the northeast. Its hazy nature is, of course, an illusion based on the inability of your eyes to see. Inexpensive binoculars break up any part of it into innumerable stars.
Along the southern horizon, our galaxy bulges out at its center in the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius. Here, binoculars or a small telescope will reveal the fuzzy patches that are dense clusters of stars and the giant clouds of glowing hydrogen from which those star clusters are born.
Almost straight overhead is the cross-shaped constellation Cygnus, the Swan. Sweep through this region with binoculars, and you will see uncountable stars.
Next, scan the region between Sagittarius and Cygnus with just your eyes. A jet-black swath, the Great Rift, cuts the Milky Way in half lengthwise. You are seeing (or, rather, not seeing) the dark clouds of dust and gas that will eventually be the raw materials for new stars and planets in eons yet unborn.
To the northeast, look for the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia and the great hero Perseus as he rises. There, you will see dozens of star clusters in binoculars or a telescope.
To the right is the constellation Andromeda. Just outside the Milky Way’s glow, look for a small, cigar-shaped patch of light. It’s the Andromeda Galaxy, much like our Milky Way seen at a distance of 2.5 million light years.
If I had bothered to get up and moved a few feet to the telescope 50 years ago, I could have observed hundreds of the thousands of galaxies visible in it. I could have measured a billion light years and seen a billion years into the past.
But the 2.5 million light-years of nothingness between Andromeda and us was emptiness enough for my heart that night, almost more than my heart could take.
Here, then, is the texture of your universe — a vast darkness dotted almost forlornly with tiny collections of 300 billion stars each. And within those galaxies, vast, incomprehensible distances separate the stars from each other. And enfolding me that night was one of those galaxies. I felt a part of the Milky Way, which, come to think of it, I am, as are you, dear reader.
Your star, the sun, your planet, Earth, every star and planet you see, every rock, every tree, every hair on your head, every cell of your body, every thought, every whisper of glory, every sigh of sadness, every personal triumph, every abject failure are all part of the Milky Way, which in turn is part of the more general universe.
We all share in its substance, but we also share in the emptiness, the vast and glorious darkness that enfolded me like a warm blanket that night long ago.
Granted, my ultimate destination that night was a warm bed and much-needed rest. But I took the long way home, around the Milky Way, across the universe. It is a journey — a vacation from want and care — that I have taken many times since but never tire of. I sincerely wish for you, gentle reader, that just once in your life, you experience the quiet joy of such a journey.
Tom Burns is the former director of the Perkins Observatory in Delaware.
