One of those long Winter nights on the way to Ypsilanti, at cruise at 41000 feet, S_____ asked me how many constellations I could name. I told him well, there’s Orion right in front of us, and there is one of his dogs, Canis Major. I admitted I knew he had two dogs but did not know where his other one was. I followed the path of Orion’s would be arrow to the Pleaides, the seven sisters. Off to our left the Big Dipper and Little Dipper (Ursae Major and Minor) and I think oh yes Cassiopeia, the big ‘W’. And that was about it, right then. Little did I know that this was his coy introduction to sharing what he knew about the night sky, which suffice to say utterly dwarfed my knowledge.
My first stargazing was during moonless Summer nights spent in northern Minnesota on the end of a long red dock jutting out into the lake, our (my brother and Dad and me) backs to the still a little warm wood and marveling at the riot of starlight that reached us from so very far away. It was Dad that taught me how to find the Little Dipper from the Big one, following the end of the ladle sort of straight ‘up’ or north, and there was Polaris, which formed part of the latter’s handle. He showed us the couch that Cassiopeia reclined on, but most breathtaking of all was the soft glow that crossed the whole dome of the sky, this river of milk-white that was hundreds of thousands, millions of stars too small (either too far away or too dim) to perceive, the near arm of the galaxy in which we live.
I think Dad brought his telescope up a time or three, and set it up looking out where the ambient light was least. I saw Jupiter through it for the first time, and Mars: the former a fuzzy pink-and-orange circle, the latter definitively reddish.
That night S_____ taught me to find Taurus, just off Orion’s shoulder there, and Gemini: Castor and Pollux. He taught me names of stars and how to find them: you could “follow the arc” (of the Big Dipper) to Arcturus, then “drive a spike” to Spica (which had set already that night). Aldebaran in Taurus, Betelgeuse and Rigel in Orion, the double star Mizar and fainter Alcor in Ursa Major. I was brimming with new knowledge that flight.
Another night when neither of us were flying (had we just landed?) S_____ invited me over to his house to look at Luna through his reflecting telescope, one of those nights where she just drowns out the rest of the night sky in her fullness. We could see crisp edges of craters millions of years old, both small and vast in size.
Counting meteors during meteor showers; looking for the elusive green flash or zodiacal light; the dawn of my interest in astronavigation (if everything else fails I have a sextant and a clock) — all these things I have learned to appreciate in the deep night where it is clear above the clouds.
Peregrinations 