109 thoughts on “not in our stars, but in ourselves”

1. I just was on a bike trip in Northeast corner of Oregon, and i got to look upon the Milky Way every night in low-light pollution areas. Even at home, i’ll give a head nod to Orion when i see him up there. You are definitely not alone in this. Keep looking up (stolen with pride from NDGT)

2. I have a telescope and stargaze all the time. If you don’t I highly recommend it

3. This past summer I took a dozen 12-13 year-olds to Scout Camp in the middle of nowhere Utah. I woke up in the middle of the night one day and stepped out of my tent. I couldn’t believe how bright the stars were and how many of them I could see. It was a fantastic, quiet moment that was one of highlights of the week for me.

4. I rarely sleep without waking at some point in the night and when I do, I look out the windows to see if the usual marine layer has come in. If not, and the stars are visible, I put my glasses on (and nothing else) and go to the backyard and look up. Then I wait. I wait for the aliens who never come but I wait anyway. When I begin to shiver, I go back to bed. The marine layer is in all summer long so the Perseids never show up here.

   As a kid, you couldn’t wake me during the night. Now at the other end of the tunnel, I look forward to seeing the stars.

5. I’ll probably be watching for the stars as I wait for the bus after work tonight. I always look for Orion’s Belt, because when I was young, Orion’s Belt would be on my side of the car when we drove home from my grandparents’ house. So, to me, Orion’s Belt is a sign that I’m going home.

6. I look up to the skies and stars every night. After I put my kiddo to bed, and tidy up a bit, and head outside to smoke a bowl by myself, and just stare upwards. I find solace in the stars and sky, and it feels my being with a sincere calmness. Sometimes it’s too cloudy, but I can still make out trees in the skyline against the clouds and enjoy that. When I was a kid, I’d climb on top of the roof and make myself a comfy area with a sleeping blanket, cookies and soda, and my dad’s wind-up flashlight. From up there, I cloud see for miles the starry night. This was was when I lived in Arizona and there was no light pollution in my immediate area. Even during the monsoons, I’d be up there watching the lightning storms and feeling the winds pick up as the storms moved closer. I live in Seattle now. I moved here over 21 years ago to be with my mom, and for the weather. I miss Arizona monsoons, but that’s about it. Oh and carne asada burritos! But that’s another post for another day. 😉

7. Remember to wrap up warm !

   Whilst I’ve got a few years on you the last time our nerd-herd decamped out into the sticks for the Perseid Meteor shower it would have been much improved by a big coat, admittedly the Bourbon and Rum helped (least in the short-term!)

8. Thanks for the reminder! There’s nothing like it, gazing up at the stars. It really puts things in perspective. I really need to do it tonight so I can reconnect with, well, everything. This week has been rough, and today really sucked.

   When I was a kid back in the 80s, my mother used to wake me up in the middle of the night sometimes to go out and lie on the hood of our 1976 Plymouth Fury with her just to look at the stars.

   We were really poor, but she had a little telescope that she got for free when someone got her a gift subscription to Discover magazine for Christmas, and we would pass it back and forth while she would tell me about each of the stars and planets we looked at. I have two older siblings, and they were pretty awful bullies to both of us, and stargazing was a thing just for the two of us. They still don’t know about it, and we’re all in our 40s now! Those nights are my favorite childhood memories.

9. I wasn’t into stars/planets when I was young but my son was and he had a spiffy telescope. When we lived in Phoenix and would be driving back down from the Grand Canyon and Flagstaff there was a good portion of the starry sky that was below our headlights and we thought it was the coolest thing ever!
   About problems with Earth: sometimes I do wonder how so so many species of animals became extinct before humans were on the Earth. I admittedly know almost nothing about it but I think we learned a long time ago in school that scientists think a meteor hit Earth and wiped out a lot. I’m committing to learn more about this in the coming months. Is there anything we can do to avoid the annihilation of so much like the dinosaurs?

   1. @Tiff:

      The study of extinctions and especially mass extinctions is fascinating and worthwhile. The causes are always more complicated than you might expect and the work to understand what happened from an imperfect and ocean-biased fossil record makes a really good story. There are quite a few good pop-sci books on the subject to get you started (When Life Nearly Died, The Sixth Extinction come to mind, but there are lots more). A meteor hit almost certainly did for the dinosaurs, which is probably what you learned about at school. But it was a lot more complicated than that and there’s still a lot we don’t know. There have been at least five mass extinctions (some scientists count more, some fewer) in Earth’s history and most researchers agree that – statistically if nothing else – we’re in the middle of a sixth. They are all stories of multiple environmental stresses (bolide hits, increased/decreased sea level and/or salt levels, massive volcanic activity……) which undermine some key aspects of usually relatively robust ecosystems, ending with a rapid (on a geological scale) collapse.

      Every species becomes extinct sooner or later and it’s looking an awful lot like we’re about to fall into the ‘sooner’ category. We seem to be making a concerted effort to take out as many other species as possible on our way out.

      I find that understanding some of the interplay between function, fragility and robustness of ecosystems makes me value everything all the more. Whereas some people take away a message of futility, I take a fighting – if probably quixotic – stance. Things shouldn’t be going extinct on my watch, particularly not for reasons we can avoid.

      Look up some of those pop-sci books and you’ll learn a vast amount about life, extinction, how science is done and the extent of the mess we’re all very definitely in. I hope it inspires you.

10. Yes, I do remember … my husband and I sat in lawn chairs at dusk in a new neighborhood under construction that isn’t flooded by streetlights. We were looking at the crescent moon and a line up of 4 planets: Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and Venus. Here in NE Ohio almost on Lake Erie they formed an arc in the southern sky just before dark. Pretty cool. My husband is an astronomy buff so he knows all about what is above. It’s hard if you are in the city or ‘burbs to find a place where the sky isn’t blown out by too many lights. Glad you have discovered an old love.

11. It’s been a very long time since I’ve done any star-gazing, other than looking up when I happened to be outside at night. To really appreciate the night sky it’s helpful to get away from the city lights and be in the dark. It’s amazing then. Do you remember going to the Griffith Park Observatory with your class from school?? I also went with my boyfriend (future husband) for one of their night shows and it was awe-inspiring and romantic. It is sad that it’s been so long. That kind of meditation is really soul touching……

12. I remember. Today we live in a very well lit city, so its hard to see stars. My husband’s hobby is astral photography, so we do end up outside the city limits whenever we can, but not often enough to look at the stars. One of our favorite things is to spend time in a dark skies park, especially on a night with a new moon. The stars look amazing.

    Nikoah

13. Living in Anaheim, I can get up about 0300 and still make out the Horsehead Nebula through a 3-inch Celestron. It’s dim, but I can still make out the outline. Orion is almost directly overhead by 0500 this time of year. The last time I saw Sagan’s Backbone of the Night was in the Philippines, near the Taal volcano. No such luck in south Cali.

14. Haven’t seen the stars since I moved to London five years ago… except for when I was on holiday in Thailand, and possibly on a road trip round Scotland, and then there was that time at my parents place up North – so it feels like I do check in with the night sky from time to time. Won’t ever forget being a young man and sharing awestruck moments under the night time canopy of stars with a teenage crush, so thank you for bringing that memory back

15. I have an app (SkyGuide) that notifies me for ISS flyovers and Iridium flares. So a few times a week I take my sons out into the yard and we See the Thing, then spend a few minutes looking at the Moon or planets. Too much light pollution here to see much else, but it’s enough.

16. reminds me of this time with mt daughter. https://wordpress.com/post/ianoone.com/198

17. I was in Canada this summer, on a lake in the middle of the woods, and the stars were magnificent. My daughter went out in a kayak in the middle of the lake to stargaze, and I was slightly terrified that she was out on the water alone, but I knew she needed and would always remember that moment, the silence and the stars.

    Next summer, I’ll be out there in the dark on the water. I promise myself.

18. Loved seeing you at the Doctor Who Premier

19. Light pollution.

    And air pollution.

    Most of us live in places where we just can’t see the sky anymore and this is getting worse.

    I’m in China. They don’t have stars here.

    Twenty years from now, grandparents will tell their grandkids about the sky. And their grandkids will say: “like in video games?”

    I like to hike out in the sticks. I’ll blearily wander out of my tent at 3:00 AM to take a leak and just freeze (almost literally) at the site of the dark, starry night. Standing there in awe, I will have two thoughts: 1) “Wow.”, 2) “I hope a fox doesn’t gobble my dong while I’m enjoying this view.”

20. Last year, there was a total eclipse that happened in my state. I was at work when it happened, but our manager was kind enough to let us go outside to see it because we weren’t busy anyway. It’s something I know I’ll always remember because it’s going to be a long time before we have something like that here again.

21. My mom used to take me away from the city, out into the country, just to star gaze. She bought me that big black stargazing (hardback) book with the double-sided paper jacket that came off, where the inside was black with the glow-in-the-dark star maps drawn on. Times moved on, we didn’t do that as much, and now she and I are estranged. I do my own stargazing from time time. It’s a humbling, quiet, and magnificent experience! I probably don’t have that book anymore. I’ve moved too many times and still have unopened boxes, so who knows. But those are childhood memories I’ll always remember fondly. It was probably the one thing my mom did that didn’t “need” my Dad’s permission nor his presence, where she could just be her real self, before she just kinda slowly broke (he was abusive). Sometimes I wish she’d just taken me and my brother and kept on driving. Anyway, those were still good times. I’ll always cherish them.

22. I’ve been… stoked? Not stoked. Definitely highly interested, though… of the fact that Mars has been visible in our sky for months now, and I look at it in wonder that I’m actually looking at another planet, and that we have stuff on that other planet. I’m also awed whenever it’s clear enough to see the Milky Way, and that whenever we see stars, we’re actually looking at the distant past.

23. Beautiful sentiment, Wil! I actually bought my twin girls a telescope for this reason a year ago, but we have yet to use it, and this made me think of it. We will soon. Thanks for the reminder of the beauty just above us.

24. Am a bit of an amateur futurist, and I get sorrows about future generations seeing stars. The growing light pollution is bad enough.

    I remember years ago when mt .Pinatubo erupted, it turned sunsets purple, but it bleached the sky and his most of the stars even in the boonies for a year.

    When the politicians figure out solving global warming by putting volcanoes of sulfur in the sky instead of clean energy, cobalt blue skies and seeing the milky way and thousands of stars will be old folklore.

25. Sadly, I now live in a place where the amount of light makes this pretty impossible. But I think I can still stargaze with my eyes shut.

    Thanks for the post.

26. Thank you for this post. I have been weighed down by stressful, emotional events the last few months, all the stories women are sharing of their trauma, and I’m just getting over an extremely painful ear infection which was made more painful by an inflammatory reaction from the antibiotic (I went through five days before the switch out). I haven’t been a reader of your blog, but I came across this post and all your words hit me and I cried. I miss the stars too.

27. I do this every night before bed. This time of year I’m watching for the Pleiades to return. There’s something so magical about the seven sisters. Peace, Wil.

28. How are you doing today? Did you get away from the city and take in some sky watching time?

29. On canoe trips with my husband in northern Ontario, he would haul me out of the tent at midnight and paddle me to the middle of the lake to view the stars.

    In 2003 our area was effected by the ‘great power outage’ (Ontario, New England). I live in suburban Toronto. I remember my family and a bunch of neighbors went out to the park behind our houses that night and marveled at not just the stars… but the northern lights!! At no other time would this have been possible. It was a great moment to share.

30. The next time you are in Scotland Wil, give me a shout. I live in the Galloway Dark Sky area, named by Astronomers as one of the world’s best places to look at the stars. I am knocking on the door of 60 and still love just looking up. I don’t know many of the constellations but I can find my way about. I know you’re not tasting a lot of beer just now but we do have a nice small local craft beer place as well for a small drop at the end of the night. 🙂

31. I love the sentiment, and I always look up whenever I leave a building. But I smiled at the remark that suggested CS’s Cosmos is from a “time when it didn’t seem like our improbably perfect planet was teetering on the brink of catastrophe” – The show was produced at a time when Cold War tensions were high, and the subject of our annihilation comes up a few times in the series. As a kid, I remember thinking that nuclear war was a very real possibility.

32. Wil, I get out of work at 1:30am or 3:30am. On the way to the my car, as soon as I’m away from the lights of the building, I’m looking up, counting on my feet to keep me on the sidewalk. The first star I see usually gets the wish to see more stars. When I can see more than five stars in Orion, it’s a good night. Last month, from the south side of my work building, I saw Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. Not at once, because of the layout, but once I saw Venus early I moved around to catch them all. Very special. Thank you and keep us on our toes. ~ Wally

33. I can not remember the last time I looked up and saw a sky full of stars. The past few year (or decades) I’ve only been places where the light of our modern urban world have block out all but the brightest of stars. either that or its been to cloudy.

34. Wil – something for your bucket list – it relates to looking up at the stars.

    When I was in college, I was driving from Sheridan Wyoming to Denver Colorado – maybe an hour or so after midnight. There are areas along the I-25 that are void of light pollution. The sky cloudless and so overwhelmingly beautiful that I got out of the car and stood there looking up. After a few minutes — my perspective flipped and I felt like I was floating in space. The sky was so big and the ground so insignificant that suddenly instead of standing on solid ground, I became aware that we are all clinging tenuously to the side of a tiny little rock hurtling through the impossible vastness of space. It was a startling experience and one that I will never forget. The past 100 years of progress has been filled with wondrous advances, but unfortunately it has muted the night sky. Our ancestors, for the first 49,900 years, had that profound experience often – of being simultaneously insignificant and yet one with everything and filled with awe in an intimate way by the night sky. Why are nearly all primitive religions celestial? Anyone who gazes up in an area utterly free of light pollution will understand. When your perspective flips, it all becomes clear. Imagine living a dirty, dangerous, uncertain life and then looking upward at night and falling into that clean fresh infinite sparkling expanse… How could one reach any other conclusion than to see it as the home of gods.

35. Our societal landscape is a lot like star gazing. There are billions of stars wanting to be seen and being drowned out by the lights, the smog, the distractions. Trying to stop the distractions on social media is like a star, already dead trying to fight through the landscape of city lights to be seen. When you only focus on the city lights, they get more power and are brighter. But when you focus on those that want to see the star’s light, they will find a place to let it shine and be there together. They will want to reduce the street lights to see the stars better. In my mind that is what we need to do with social media. We need to find a way to turn off the street lights preventing us from enjoying the stars.

36. I make it a habit to check out the International Space Station when it flies overhead. It is so cool to keep track of it.

37. This brings back a great memory. I’ve been an astronomy fan since I was a kid. Always had a cheap telescope, and a decent pair of binoculars. In Jr High I discovered that you could go outside and SEE METEORS…so one night during the Perseids I had a friend sleep over, and we dragged a couple of lounge chairs out onto my parent’s front lawn and lay back to watch the sky. A streetlight nearby killed a portion of the viewable sky, but it was pretty much in the extreme suburbs in the northeast, so no big city Boston spew of light. So my buddy Rob and I are laying out there, gazing up at the stars and talking about infinity and “maybe there’s some twelve-legged dude looking at US right now from across the heavens and what are THEY like??” etc… and the first few meteors come streaking in. We got really quiet. Suddenly, space wasn’t so wicked far away anymore. It looked right now like it might be pretty damn close. Freaky close. I know remember I felt the hairs on my neck stand up, that weird tingling that makes you stop moving and evaluate your existence ha ha. We watched a few more come in, then sort of hastily (no fear, hell no, totally manly!) made our way back into the house to watch an episode of Monty Python or something on BBC and then go to bed.
    Thanks Wil, for reminding me of that memory.

38. I recently listened to LeVar Burton read Cosmos on audiobook – what an amazing and moving experience! Carl Sagan had such prescience, and such a generous, questing spirit. At a time when we seem to have retreated from his vision instead of embracing it and even transcending it, thank you for reminding us to take time to look at the stars, and to get some perspective, and to be kind to all the others in this vast universe.

39. Remember when I was in grade school used to see the stars out at night of my home….After several large housing developments and a few shopping malls over the years… No longer able to see the stars clearly at night,

40. If it makes you feel any better, there’s the Orionids meteor shower 10/21, and the moon should be almost new, so it should be pretty easy to check out!

    I’ve found it really difficult to take time to do simple things that should bring enjoyment. Gardening, hiking, stargazing… it’s easy to live in a city and forget that nature holds such wonders. <3 I wish you luck reconnecting with that.

41. I really enjoy your posts. Thanks for writing.

42. We don’t do that often enough! Last time I went stargazing with my SO and a couple of friends was this year in August. We went out to watch the Perseids. We layed down on blankets, had some tea and snacks.
    Stargazing is so timeless. And grounding. And off-lifting at the same time.
    When I started understanding how big the universe is I couldn’t wrap my head around the question where the universe is. I still can’t.

43. As a SoCal resident, I’m sure you’re already aware, but Griffith Observatory does monthly public star parties at which a couple of local amateur astronomy groups set up their portable scopes on the lawn and look at cool stuff. The next one is November 17, when Saturn should still be very visible and Orion will be in a good position. Both are breathtaking through even a small telescope.

44. I hauled a bunch of the in-laws outside one Thanksgiving before dinner, maybe 10 years ago, to watch the ISS fly over. The Shuttle might have been up at the same time – I know I saw both of them at one time, but I don’t remember if it was Thanksgiving or not. Anyway, my in-laws are probably very convinced that I’m weird now. 🙂

    Orion’s my favorite constellation – easy to spot, and I always see it in the winter evenings on the way home. I need to find the next good meteor shower this fall or winter, when it’s cold enough that mosquitos won’t be an issue.

45. Hey Wil,
    We at the Minnesota Astronomical Society have several view sites with some amazing equipment. If you ever make to our neck of the woods, look us up. I would be happy to show you a thing or two.
    -Dave J
    http://www.mnastro.org

46. Wil,
    Not sure if you will get this or not…..not sure how to “blog” you?….Anyway I would hope your Table Top days are not over….I really enjoyed those videos…..very well polished presentations! I like the little touches like the antimated pop ups shedding greater light on the game components during your gameplay……there are a number of video reviewers but they all suck compared to yours…..yours is THE tops!…..if your done with Table Top I hope you continue with it in like fashion doing your own thing.
    Best of wishes,
    Darryl from Palmdale California

47. I do remember that quite well. I grew up just outside a small town in Nebraska and the night skies had little light pollution, so the stars were amazing to behold. My love of science fiction and NASA fact were fueled by those stargazing moments. I still frequently go outside on purpose to look up at the stars. This has become even more fun recently using the Sky Guide app, which notifies me every time the ISS is passing overhead. It is thrilling to go outside and watch that light speed by overhead, knowing that brave women and men are up there doing really cool work.

48. You never realise time passing by when you gaze at the sky. Amazing post..

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