CLEAR SKIES

My! The sky was beautifully clear the other night as the cosmos danced its graceful dance against a sea of deepest indigo, without a cloud to block the view. Sadly, the limitations of my photographic skills and equipment are always most demonstrated by my attempts at taking pictures of the stars, so instead I’ve done you a quick drawing on the computer of what I saw. A bright new moon hung above the horizon towards the south-west with its crescent pointing towards the sun which picked out the features on its surface making them ironically possibly more visible than they are during a full moon.

Below it, the bright discs of two of our nearby planets could be seen so clearly even with the naked eye. They’re the ones that look like very bright stars but don’t seem to be doing any “twinkling” if you decide to go and take a look. The one that appears larger is the smaller of the two but, as Father Ted might have put it “Venus is small, but Jupiter is far away…”

If you look in the other direction, the bright reddish dot that you might see in the sky is Mars and I’ve been told that, if you’re very quick (which I seldom am these days) you can even spot the frantic little planet that we call Mercury hanging around near to the sun just after it sets.

Beyond all that, the constellations of the stars were about as clear as they are possible to be and as we arrived home after another late-evening run to the station for me (after having been abandoned again in favour of more interesting social interaction…), we simply had to stop and stare at how beautiful it all was. So much so, in fact, that it seemed a shame to go indoors.

This, of course, is at a time when the evening sunshine has already left and the sun-worshippers have packed up their barbecues and only the most determined (or maybe the most drunk) remain outdoors chatting away. There’s also the added advantage that a clear night at this time of year doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be scraping the ice off the car’s windscreen in the morning, so it’s a bit of a “win-win” if you like such things.

I’m always surprised about the relative position of the moon in the sky. Here where I grew up, the lunar cycle from  “new” to “full” and beyond goes from right to left, but in other parts of the world you grow up with it seeming perfectly “normal” for that sequence to go from top to bottom, right to left, or bottom to top. This all seems perfectly normal if it’s just the way you’ve always seen the moon, but doesn’t half seem odd to any visitors who pay attention to such things.

This, I suppose, was some of the “evidence” that finally convinced the early astronomers about how the Earth moved through space once we started moving about on this planet instead of living our entire lives in one little village, which probably helps to prove the old adage that travel really does broaden the mind.

As the planets get closer and closer to the much-talked about (and feared?) alignment, they are giving us a stunning display as they sit there, shining brightly in the evening skies. Granted they’re not hanging there quite like the huge (and gravitationally improbable) discs that are painted in the sky in film and TV science fiction, so it might be a slight problem to persuade any children that you might be eager to inspire that this is quite such a fantastic thing.

Well, not unless you get the telescope out.

We were recently in a nature reserve looking out towards the ocean and doing a bit of whale-watching, and both got terribly excited at seeing momentary water-spouts erupt on the distant horizon. Sadly, however, one of the Park Rangers was chatting to us later and said that it’s very difficult to persuade their younger visitors about how wonderful this actually is. She blamed the “Discovery” Channel for having raised their expectations when it comes to seeing whales. Somehow a distant spurt of water doesn’t impress when they want full hi-definition slo-mo of the whale-tails rearing up as they dive, and, I suspect it’s a similar problem with stargazing.

Somehow, the back garden astronomer is never going to compete with the images taken by the Hubble space telescope, but that’s not really the point. If it’s dark enough and clear enough, the night sky is just a thing of beauty in itself.