Charles Laird Calia - The Stargazing Year: A Backyard Astronomers Journey Through the Seasons of the Night Sky

THE STARGAZING YEAR

A Backyard Astronomers Journey

Through the Seasons of the Night Sky

CHARLES LAIRD CALIA

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THE STARGAZING YEAR. Electronic Edition. Copyright 2005 by Charles Laird Calia. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Reputation Books, ReputationBooks@gmail.com.

Cover Design: Lisa Abellera

ISBN: 978-0-9913635-3-7

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan

God has arranged everything in the universe in consideration of everything else.

Meister Eckhart

For my father.

CONTENTS

There is no peace like the peace of a starlit evening.

In the cool stillness of my backyard observatory the quiet has a signature. A mechanical hum, faint and guttural, like a swarm of unhappy bees, drifts from the telescope, as the motor drive locates a new star. But the hum is not all that I hear. Dried leaves rustle, yet there is no wind. The woods are alive with creatures of the nightmouse and deer, raccoon and skunk, fox and owl. I have seen them all. Hours spent in the dark have made my eyes sensitive to every movement, and my nose, weaned on clear, country air, pulls in the slightest hint of odor.

Above me are stars. Thousands of them. The evening is clear and it is late. All my neighbors are asleep and all the lights are extinguished, caging the dark like an animal. A few hours earlier the sky had a faint white glow near the southern horizon, light pollution, spillover from local houses, outdoor lights, cities, but now even the light pollution surrenders. All that I am left with is the night and the terrible weight of the universe with its mysteries. But the real mystery, Im slowly discovering, is inside of me.

I first looked through a telescope when I was eight years old. Astronomy sustained me through a turbulent adolescence that I shared with many of my generation. In America we are all children of change, technological and social, and I wasnt any different from most of my peers except for what I did at night. I looked at the stars. A telescope was as common to me as a pair of shoes, and just as functional. Something necessary. I lived this way all through high school, when it wasnt always easy to justify my passion, and into college.

Then suddenly I gave it up.

For most of my adult life I simply ignored the call to look skyward; instead I looked only straight ahead. The gravitational pull was a natural one, and the trajectory cleancareer, family, children, a mortgage. The orbit of small lives, Ive found, is as dramatic as the motion of great celestial bodies, and the same laws apply. Motion tends to remain constant until halted in midcourse.

What stopped me was something that I saw on television. I couldnt explain the events of that September morning but I knew one thing: I felt solace when I looked at the stars.

The stars have changed little since the dawn of human history. But then, we are looking at the stars of our past, not the present. The light that it took for these objects to reach us varies, a snapshot in time that has already unfolded except that we havent witnessed it yet. This constant, the idea that nothing ever changes, is an illusion, of course, like the illusion of safety or the feeling that a life measured and carefully planned turns out as expected. It doesnt always. The stars do change, in small measures, as we change in larger ones.

In the autumn of 2001, I beat a circuitous route back to the love of my youth. It began with a tour of the night sky with my two daughters, both young, with the freshness that only comes with new eyes. My oldest daughter got the ball rolling.

See how clear it is, Daddy.

We were pulling into the garage, our car full of heavy shopping bags from evening errands, and as usual I drove in fast without bothering to look up. Why look up? But for some reason I slowed the car, cracked the window. Fresh air overtook me and I felt it. Absolute clarity.

I spent that evening lying on the grass with my two daughters, pointing out the constellations, whose outlines and names, oddly enough, I still remembered. Like everyone that autumn, I was feeling confused and angry, afraid for my children and my nation and disoriented by the stories that I was hearing in my own community, from friends and neighbors who worked in Manhattan. But that night, gazing at clumps of broken Milky Way, a thought washed over me, one that I have yet to surrender. We all belong to the sky.

October is usually the clearest month in Connecticut, where I live, and the night darkens with the fainter stars of autumn. The heat of the summer gives way to cool, Canadian air that slips down on my state like a cold splash of mountain water on the skin, cleansing everything and making senses tingle. Leaves turn, clouds fatten into white balls, and at night the constellations appear above me, sentinels of change.

It was Cygnus, the great Northern Cross, that welcomed me back that night with my children. High overhead, at the head and foot of the cross, are two starsDeneb, the bright supergiant, and Albireo, one of the finest binaries, or double stars, in the heavens, and they framed the entry of my return to astronomy. To the south of Deneb, the brightest star in the cross and the nineteenth-brightest star in the night sky, gave me Altair in the constellation of Aquila. A poor mans version of Cygnus, Aquila, the eagle, spreads out its wings reluctantly, and if not for the majesty of Altair herself, which is brighter even than Deneb, the constellation might hardly be noticed at all except for one thing. Altair is the pointer for Vega.

Vega, the brightest star of the summer and autumn skies, lords over its recessional in the west. It is also part of a great and yawning V of stars, a triumvirate, with Deneb and Vega at the base and Altair manning the point, alone, a cop on a stakeout.

This is the famous summer triangle of my youth.

As a teenager growing up in the early 70s, I used this familiar marker as a road map to navigate the sky at night. From Vega I could march, as a general taking strategic towns and bridges would, right to the small parallelogram of stars in Lyra where two objects lay in wait: the Ring Nebula and the famous double-double.

The Ring Nebula remains a testament to the violence of the cosmos. Violence has shaped much of what surrounds us on earth, and the heavens are no different. A blasted shell, the nebulas small, transparent ring haunts the surrounding star field with the memory of what was. Long ago, the central star within the Ring Nebula began to shed its luminescence. Gasping for breath, the star burned more hydrogen, the loss of which made the exterior swell up, heaving off layers of gas like so many clothes on a Florida vacation, until all the layers and all the hydrogen were gone. What remains is frightening: a circle, not unlike the ghostly puff from a dying cigar, where eons ago a star must have shined brightly.

But not all is gloomy in Lyra. Just north of the Ring Nebula a cosmic dance takes place nightly every summer and fall in telescopes all over the world. This is the famous double-double, a multiple star system that tricks the eye not once or twice but three times. Visually the star looks like any other moderately faint star. But with a pair of binoculars one notices a celestial twin. Increase the magnification and the punch line of the joke is revealed: two star systems, each one a small pair, pose for the observer like diamonds on a jewelers black velvet cushion. These are binaries, double stars orbiting around one another in a vast and intricate waltz that is best seen with binoculars or a telescope. But looking up that October night I realized this: I had neither.