Starry Messenger

A fascination with the stars will lead you to strange places. Astronomers, star-chasers, astrophotographers—all are a solitary lot. Our interest in the cosmos leads us to the darkest places we can find which also means to places that are as far away from other people as possible. With people comes light, and light is the enemy of clearly seeing the night sky.

Local astronomy clubs organize star-parties and astronomers mill around together at the world’s great observatories, but for the most part, stargazers will spend their time alone, in a darkened field, far from city lights, with their heads craned skyward.

It was in just such a situation that I recently found myself on a warm summer evening. I had followed dirt road after dirt road south from the crossroads of Newlight, Louisiana in central Tensas Parish. My quest for a solitary, ink-black spot proved harder than I had imagined as trucks kept coming down the same bumpy path I had followed, their high beams leading them to who knows where.

Once I had found a dark enough spot, I began to set up my camera gear. I was trying to take some photographs of the Milky Way. In deep summer, this sideways view through our galaxy is vivid and striking. On the rare occasion when a friend accompanies me on one of my nocturnal rambles, they never fail to remark on how big and bright the Milky Way seems. There isn’t much else in the summer sky that is more impressive to the naked eye.

Long periods of time spent alone in the dark will play tricks on your mind. The distant yelp of a coyote or the rustling of a pair of raccoons pawing across some river flotsam are magnified by the solitude. Darkness is a friend to the stargazer, but it has a way of unnerving the solitary man. So as the warm breeze rustled the tightly planted corn stalks around me and my vision began to adjust to the night, I was surprised by a sudden, bright burst of blue light from behind me.

My initial, completely mistaken and wholly implausible thought was that someone was taking pictures of me using a flash, but the frustration I felt as my night vision slipped away evaporated as I turned to face the light’s source. Crossing the sky in a magnificent arc of blue then orange then red flashes was an enormous meteor entering the atmosphere.

I have sought out and viewed many meteor showers but I had never seen anything like this, and if statistics are any guide, I am unlikely to again. This was a big one, burning a slow arc toward our planet and firing off jagged, brightly colored, searing bits as it went. It can’t have taken more than a few seconds for the gigantic meteor to put on its fiery show and burn out but it seemed to hang across the horizon in that protracted way a car-crash or a dropped glass seems to unfold in slow motion.

Later that night I would look up meteor sightings on the Internet and see that other people had witnessed my meteor from Texas to Tennessee and Louisiana to Missouri. Its timeless life spent wandering the solar system flaming out in a few seconds over half the country. I was exhilarated. I was amazed. I was humbled.

People have looked towards the night sky and seen the story of their gods drawn out on a vast canvas; they have pointed at starry phenomena as bringers of good fortune and bad. By the sixteenth century the art of glass grinding to manufacture lenses enabled a few patient souls to begin mapping the heavens, but it has only been in the past half-century or so that we have begun to grasp just how truly vast space is. These revelations have unseated some of humanity’s privileged view of itself, pointing to the fact that not only was the astronomer alone in a very dark field—but that the whole planet was spinning around a huge expanse of nothing with very little around it for company.

Some people find this observation unsettling or even abhorrent, much the way coming upon a dozen pairs of eyes in the night reflecting the beam of your flashlight can be to a lonely man with a telescope. But to me, it is a great source of comfort and even joy. How fortunate we are to have this little corner in the great darkness, how privileged that the symphony of dust, time and gravity has made us a home from which to look skyward. When that meteor flared itself out before me on a solitary dirt road in north Louisiana, it occurred to me that I might have just seen the most spectacular sight of my life. It was a rare, flaming reminder of how extraordinary our existence is and how everyday we should be grateful for all the unparalleled beauty it displays for us, even if sometimes being alone in the dark feels a little scary.

There are two large, annual meteor showers in North America. In peak viewing conditions these showers can put on a spectacular show. Sadly, last December’s Geminids and this summer’s Perseids fell during a full moon which made the sky too bright to see most of the meteors. But, mark down a few days in the middle of December and August next year when both showers are likely to be impressive. More information is available at: stardate.org/nightsky/meteors.