not in our stars, but in ourselves

Remember, when you were younger, all the times you would go outside at night, just to look up at the stars? Remember how happy it made you feel? Remember taking out a star chart, so you could find a constellation or a galaxy? Remember how cool it felt to know that, even if you couldn’t see the visible light from a Messier Object, you at least knew you were looking at it? Remember putting down a blanket and watching meteor showers all night long? Remember the first time you saw a satellite flare and convinced yourself you’d seen a flying saucer?

Remember how magical and humbling and inspiring it felt to just go outside specifically to look at the stars and planets, sometimes with a telescope, other times with binoculars, most times with just your eyes? Remember the first time you really thought about the reality of our existence? That we’re tiny little specks of life on an improbably perfect planet, speeding through space at incomprehensible speeds, protected by a thin layer of atmosphere from specks of dust and rock that are also speeding around in space, just like we are?

Does anyone else remember that? Or is it just me, getting older, rewatching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and desperately wanting to revisit a time when it didn’t seem like our improbably perfect planet was teetering on the brink of catastrophe?

When’s the last time you got away from your phone or tablet or TV or whatever, pulled your head out of the garbage fire we’re living in, and went outside, just to look at the stars, pick out some constellations, and feel the size and magnitude of our universe?

I can’t remember the last time I did. I can’t even tell you how long it’s been. That makes me feel profoundly sad.

So tonight, I’m going to do a some stargazing. If I’m lucky, I may even find what I’m looking for.

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

  1. It’s been far too long since the last time I went outside just to look at the stars and get lost in them. I should do it tonight. I do have a tendency to look up at the night sky and get distracted by the moon and stars. I just stop and keep staring for a while. This really is a wondrous universe and I hate that I’ve let recent current events distract me from that (even if the current events are definitely worth getting upset about).

    Thank you, Wil.

    1. I look up at the stars almost every night. The whisper of possibility in the stars is magical.

    2. I live in a big city so it’s hard to see stars. I do look at the moon every night. And once at Polaris a Panel Leader brought his amazing Telescope and allowed us Attendees to look at the moon through it. It was so amazing. Polaris was a Sci Fi Convention held here near Toronto. Sadly they stopped doing it. I do on summer days like to Cloud Watch

    3. So I went outside last night, looked up at the sky…and it was so overcast, I could see the moon or any stars. Just a dark mauve-ish tint to the sky. Which was beautiful in its own way.

      But it did occur to me that this post is the thematic counterpoint to the Cure song “To Wish Impossible Things.”

  2. If you want to entertain that sentiment before the sun sets, right now on Instagram the various National Park social media accounts are involved in a friendly rivalry over the best night sky under #parkstarwars: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/parkstarwars/

    A lot of inspiration to get out away from the city and appreciate the sky. My kiddos an I were lucky enough to attend one of the night sky programs at Great Basin NP this year, and the park service does a great job wowing people. They have a number of telescopes they role out so that everyone attending can see things like the moons of Jupiter, or 250 million star group in the Hercules cluster, and it seemed to have a profound impact on my kids

  3. Sagan’s Cosmos is my comfort show when the world gets too depressing. It really helps put things in perspective.

    Also, just got in from my semi-regular evening walk with my mom, and the stars were indeed lovely tonight up here in Northern Ontario.

    Enjoy the stargazing, Wil.

  4. Every full moon my daughter dashes outside to look about. Thanks for writing – I should join in more often.

  5. I would intensely appreciate the time to go stargazing when I get the chance– there’s too much light pollution, here, to get a good view.

    1. May I respectfully suggest at least finding the Moon? She’s up there, and even in the most light polluted places I’ve ever been, I can always see her.

  6. I remember back in 2012 when Curiosity landed on Mars being jealous when you, Seth Green and my wife all went outside at JPL to watch the space station go over while I was stuck inside with mission ops. You all had much more fun

      1. Indeed.
        Being at JPL for Curiosity’s landing was pretty awesome.

        I study the seafloor, so I tend to look down, not up. Watching the video feed as our remotely operated vehicle descends a couple kilometers down into the abyss can be just as awe-inspiring as star gazing.

        1. Wow! I am endlessly fascinated by the ocean, and I am amazed that so much of it isn’t explored. I really admire what you do.

  7. In 2015 I transitioned from running on roads, to trail running. It gets me out in the woods, away from everything. I feel my mind cleansed by simply existing with nature. It brings me back to those times as a kid when I would look up at the stars, just as you described.

  9. There are some great apps that can replace the old-skool star charts. I use Star Walk. It’s direction-aware and super useful for figuring out whether that bright thing you’re looking at is Venus or Jupiter or Sirius.

    1. I know Wil’s post was talking about getting away from technology but I also use Star Walk. We also use Darksitefinder.com to help find places to get out of the light pollution and see more. Just got back from a weekend at a provincial park where the milky way was just gorgeous!

  10. You should have a good night for looking up…At least it will be nice and cool and I hope the sky gives you a good show.

  11. I live in Winnipeg and, when it’s not winter, we do this often, escaping the city to go camping where the lights of the city are not. I am so thankful for this readily available option. I may even tell you the best places to go if you ask nicely ( for next season of course 🙁

    I tried this last winter in California, it’s not nearly as easy.

  12. We just got back from a trip up to Niagara Falls for our anniversary and I made it a point to be present at all times. I was looking at a natural wonder that had been here thousands of years before me and would be here long afterwards. I was there with my husband of three years and just appreciating the time we have together.

    It is far too easy to disappear into our phones, the temptation always there. But we managed to enjoy four days only using it as a glorified atlas to find our way to the park and go for a nice hike next to the rushing river and just watch it as it flowed past.

    Yeah, I totally get ya.

  13. About three weeks ago…piled my crap in my car and drove north…ended up in Duluth…then kept driving until I hit the Canadian border. Put my toes in the sand, felt the waves of Lake Superior, connected with the earth, nature, the universe…it was glorious and transformative and put perspective back in my life. You do that, Wil…it’s pure magic.

  16. I loved the stars, the sky, and space when I was a kid. Reading this brought those memories back. Thank you. As well as the sadness you feel about the time that has passed since you gazed at the stars. And thank you for that feeling as well. It’s good to feel and embrace those types of sorrows, as long as we don’t get stuck in them. I believe I stopped being interested in what was beyond our world because as I grew up hearing how “you can’t do this”, “you can’t be that”, “you can’t go there” – I started believing it. Therefore, the sky, the beyond – it felt out of reach. So why dream of it? Thank you. I needed to realize this, so I can dream of it again. There is a beyond where I am.

  17. So much that I mentioned it in my poem, In The Time Of Sandcastles. Night was still dark. About 5 years ago I was in Minnesota out in the farmland and saw the Milky Way for the first time in maybe 20 years. I cried. So now I’m trying to find a place to live where night is dark, and the stars are so bright they reflect on the water. I mourn for their loss as much as I do the love the poem was about.

  18. I LOVE stargazing Wil! Maybe that is why I was given Wabun anung as an Indian name which means Morning Star.

    I grew up hearing about people that live on Earth that come from the Star Nation in the Lakota tradition. That people from the Star Nation are some native people’s ancestors and they live among us. That there are more than just Eve’s descendants living on Mother Earth.

    I dream you receiving an Indian name Wil. Perhaps a Star related name. Maybe it will come through me for you. Traditionally you are supposed to ask for an Indian name with asking using tobacco.

    Blessed Be!
    Wenona Lee Gardner
    White Turtle Rainbow

  20. I did that just this summer. Leaning back in a zero gravity chair, by the campfire, my family watched meteors and satellites. Thanks for calling it to mind! Happy watching!

  21. Last year, after Irma, before the power was restored. I looked up at the sky, took a DEEP breath, & found a silver lining in the struggle that is the aftermath of a Category 4 storm. For the first time in I couldn’t remember, I could see so many stars. I gave thanks & enjoyed it.

  22. I spent 5 days in a shelter after Katrina. When they said they were sending me to Houston I grabbed my bags and started walking home. A ride got me back to my trailer. All I had left was a bedroom, bathroom, porch and one of my cats was missing. We stayed there for 6 weeks like that. The worst day of that was when that lights came back. I lost the stars. Stars I knew and those I’d never seen before. They kept me full of hope. My family was safe and I have a new home. But I miss my stars.

  24. We’re out with friends at a cabin in north GA this weekend and I pulled out the binoculars this very evening and showed some things to the kids and they were loving it. Never gets old.

    1. I just saw Orion myself very early Monday morning when I had to get up to go to the airport. I can’t remember the last time I’d stopped to look at the stars like that.

  26. Wil, you should remember this particular morning – I will never forget how bright the stars were in Los Angeles after the Northridge earthquake, before the sun came up that morning. We had to go to a neighbor’s house until our gas was turned off (some guys were going around the neighborhood doing that for everybody, they were fantastic) and crossing the street I. Looked. Up. It was amazing.

    Now I lived in a small ski town in the Rockies and we have fabulous skies, except for tonight, because it’s all cloudy and rainy. Yay, fall! But you need to come here on a clear winter night with a full moon. It is, as my younger coworker would say, amazeballs.

  27. It’s well worth remembering that at the time Cosmos first aired, Cold War tensions were high and the Earth was at serious risk of nuclear annihilation. When Sagan spoke about us eventually exploring other planets “if we do not destroy ourselves”, he had good cause for mentioning that as a real possibility.

    There’s always room to be optimistic about the future of humanity, no matter how troubled our world is. Please do keep looking at the stars, and don’t let the struggles of our own generation stop you, as Carl didn’t let the struggles of his time stop him!

  28. Yeah, I remember all that. I also remember how reassuring it has been, to be in a strange place and look up to see a familiar sky. And how alien it felt, in another hemisphere, to see such an unfamiliar sky; but also the excitement of getting to know the Southern Hemisphere sky.

  29. Eight years I moved from out in the country to where I now live in town. I miss the stars so badly! I could even see part of the Milky Way, always knew what phase the moon was in, and when the best times to watch for meteors were. I long to get back to that and one day I will. They’re not going anywhere and will be there when we’re ready!

  30. Yes, I remember all those things and more. And then passing those things onto my children. Camping out in a field near the house roasting hot dogs and marshmallows letting the fire die down to Embers. Then waking the kids in the early early morning hours to watch a meteor shower.

  31. ‘COSMOS’ first aired in 1980, when our planet had been teetering on the brink of WW3 for decades and nearly everybody was a lot poorer than they are today, among other things. Health, nutrition, longevity, freedoms etc. have all vastly improved since 1980. Of course, good news is no news for most media. I find the Human Progress website provides historical perspective and a counterweight to the dismal pessimism so popular these days.

  32. I do recall, when I was a wee lad back in the mid sixties, how rich and dense the stars appeared in the night sky.
    It sometimes seems like the stars and the moon and the sun are being replaced by light-emitting diodes :/

  33. We live in the city, so it isn’t always easy to see the stars but when my kids were young, we would stand on the back porch each night to find a star and make a wish.

  34. My grown kids have a second home on 20 acres out in the woods in a remote area of Washington State (where I live). We don’t have cable there, and we love to sit around the fire pit at night and watch the stars and visit–it is amazing what you can see, even with the naked eye, when you move away from city lights.

  35. Woah – you really got my attention with the 1st paragraph. When I was a preteen I used to spend hours outside at night with my crappy little Sears telescope and a star chart in the freezing cold, not minding the cold at all. Wanted to be an astronomer for awhile but horrible at math. Now I have a 8″ telescope sitting upstairs that hasn’t been outside in several years. I would have killed for a scope like that as a little kid. Thank you for reminding me so vividly. Looking at the night sky is a simple thing that used to bring me incredible joy. I’ll be dusting the scope off shortly.

  36. I think it was just you, Wil. Where I lived, you couldn’t see the stars because of all the lights around you and you didn’t go outside at night anyway, unless you were in a car, because it was too dangerous. Too many junkies and drunks and god knows who else roaming around in the dark. Besides, if you went out in the dark (ESPECIALLY if you went out alone), you might get grabbed up by a Satanic baby-eating cult or something and then where would you be?

    My parents instilled a lot of fear in us..you don’t go out because OUT THERE it’s dangerous. You’ll get raped or kidnapped or some guy with a mouth sore will kiss you and you’ll get AIDS. Or at the very least, mono.

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen the stars when I wasn’t in a planetarium, to be honest.

  37. I grew up on a farm in NW Iowa, literal “middle of nowhere.” The nearest tiny town was >12 miles away, and we had no yard light. Nights were pitch black, and if you stumbled through the blackness far enough to get out of lights from the house windows, eventually the night vision would come, and the sky would light up with a dense blanket of millions upon millions of stars. They made you feel so very small.

    Just as an added touch, it was also perfectly silent, except for the occasional screech owl and feral cat fight to scare the shit out of you. That part was a bit Blair Witch Projecty, but I’ll take it– a small price to pay for the reward of that wonderful huge sky.

    I just realized I haven’t seen the night sky in probably more than 20 years. You can’t see it in the suburbs of Chicago.

    When I was a kid (I am 8 months younger than you, Wil), my brother was studying Computer Science at U of Iowa, with a minor in Astronomy. Christmas break, 1987 he came home and brought his Tandy 1000 computer and a brand-spanking-new 16-inch reflecting telescope.

    He was still learning how to use the thing, so he set it up during the day and practiced. He pointed it at the horizon, fiddled for a bit, then asked me to look. I saw a bird sitting on a wire, clear as day. I looked around the telescope to see where it was pointed, and realized it was pointed at a power line half a mile away. Could barely see the poles, let alone the wires or the bird.

    At night, we went out into a nearby field beyond the outbuildings, with several hundred feet of extension cord and put his computer on a card table next to the telescope. He showed me a program he’d written for class which showed star maps. (Remember, 1987: no internet.) He typed in our latitude & longitude, then surfed thru lists of stars. It did complex math and displayed altitude and azimuth. He’d turn the telescope until the scale on it matched the numbers on the computer screen, and we looked at rings of Saturn, and all manner of wonders of the sky.

    This is one of my fondest memories of the farm…. along with sitting on the front porch in late summer doing nothing for hours, just listening to a cacophony of a dozen bird species, fighting squirrels, buzzing cicadas, and watching the leaves on the trees blow in the wind.

    A few years ago, Dad died, the farm was sold, and the new owner tore down all the buildings, the entire grove of trees, plowed it under, and planted rows of corn. Or so I am told, I have never seen it. I refuse to go back. I don’t want to see what it looks like now. I want to remember it the way I remember it now: trees, birds, squirrels, and the pitch black of night with a perfect blanket of stars in the sky. Even the screech owls and feral cat fights are welcome in my memory.

  38. Yes to all of that. My teen years were spent in Colorado’s mountains and star watching was a communal experience there. I recently watched a storm roll in while standing on a Florida pier in the middle of the night. That was an incredible moment of knowing my place in the universe.

  39. Take hold of your hand as a child, and never let go. Such an important reminder. Thank you, Wil!

  40. U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” shoots out into the night sky from the cracked window of a passing car as Wil stands, pajama-bottomed, in his front yard, head tilted back like a telescope. The constellations are like a knowing smile: he couldn’t stay away.

  41. Thanks for reminding me! My Gilbert reflecting telescope from my childhood was gathering too much dust on a shelf in the garage! Kind of cloudy here tonight, but fun.

  42. Yes, Will Wheaton, I remember those days, and I’m a lot older than you are. I’m my husband’s caregiver, so my life is even more limited than it used to be. Now, when I go outside, it’s because I am taking a dog out to potty. And as soon as I look up at the beautiful dark, twinkling sky I break out in a grin. I feel my heart getting lighter. It’s like when I hear Christmas music. It makes me happy! Thank you for writing.

  44. I did just this, with my kids (11 & 9), in august of this year. We lay on a quay in the archipelago and watched quite a few Perseids burn up in the atmosphere. Whilst lying there, ’til the late hours, we talked about the universe and our place in it but also the more everyday “trivial” aspects of life. I highly recommend it. It was a moment I will always remember and cherish.

  45. ah Wil.. thank you for the memories. When I was young I would sneak out of the house just to look at the stars. We lived in a wonderful area with low light pollution. And I would try to find all the constellations. And I would tell stories to myself about the lion and the bear and the hunter. One night I got busted by my dad. I was sure i was in big trouble. Instead we sat and watched the stars together. He passed away years ago. Thanks for the memory.

  46. You should try and watch the SpaceX launch from Vandenburg Sunday evening. They’re going to land the booster there as well should be cool.

  48. I REMEMBER!!! I’m lucky enough to still look up! I took geology and looked down a lot then I took astronomy, and now I look UP! I recently went to an evening potluck. As it wound down about 10 PM, a couple men got out their phones. They had Apps on their phone so when they pointed them at the night sky, it told them what we were looking at. Mars was in the sky that night and of course much more. Thanks for the post, Wil. Have a GREAT day and a better night! 🙂

  49. I remember such moments, too, Wil. Watching the moon turn a blood-red during an eclipse, spotting the rings of Saturn with my very own (Sears brand) telescope… I recall the conversations they inspired with my best childhood friend, musings about alien lifeforms and their intentions, questions of time travel and immortality and what did it all mean (and would we ever, ever get laid!)…

    Now my daughter is gazing into the night sky on a trip to Australia, searching for the constellations she’s never seen in the northern hemisphere.

    Thank you for a lovely essay and for fighting for what’s good and fair and kind.

  50. It’s been a while for me, but this winter I’ll be going outside to look at the stars with my 4 year old son.

    He wants to see Mars, he’s planning to build a satellite and he wants to move to Pluto.

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