Night Sky

Some day, commercial space travel will be available and I trust affordable to more than the 1%.  Out in New Mexico there is a significant effort to create a home for this effort:  Spaceport America.   The latest information from their website says this:

(In 2004) Richard Branson was approached by the New Mexico Spaceport Authority to become the anchor tenant of the new Spaceport. Construction began on the spaceport runway in August of 2009. The New Mexico Spaceport Authority broke ground on the large 110,000 sq. ft. Virgin Galactic terminal hangar facility in March of 2010 and it is now complete. Commercial flights aboard Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo are expected to commence from Spaceport in 2015, after testing at their Mojave, CA flight facility is complete (well, they’re a little behind schedule).  Over 650 passengers have already booked their seats, at over $200,000-$250,000 per flight, including many Hollywood celebrities. These Virgin astronauts will train for three to four days at Spaceport before their excursions, and their suborbital flights will last for two to three hours, with passengers experiencing zero gravity for 3-4 minutes.

Someday, when this happens, one of the questions that will be asked is:  Where do you think those passengers will first look when they’re up there?  Out into the stars?  Inside their cubicle as they float around?  Back to planet earth?   An astronomer friend who has worked with our NASA astronauts says that the astronauts report spending hours of their free time looking back to earth.  They see the earth as few people ever have, except in photos.

Makes me think about the mystery and majesty of what we earthlings see when we look upon the night sky.  It’s hard.  Most of us are city dwellers and from where we live the stars are simply not brilliant enough to make a dent on our brains.   But, get into the high country and spend an hour with the night sky.  When you are at 8,000 feet, say, the stars, the Milky Way, are incredibly brighter.  OR, get on the water somewhere in the middle of a sea or ocean where there isn’t much “light bleeding” from other ships, and on a cloudless night, the stars at sea level are equally stunning.

Before I started falling asleep at dusk, I had some pretty good nights with the stars.  As a child, I lay in a drainage ditch (perfect shape for an imaginary lawn chair) and looked at the stars.  As a parent of youngsters, we all bundled up most nights in the mountains of New Mexico, hoped for a cloudless sky, and stared.  The awe led to silence.  We’d look for the shooting stars and make quiet comments.  It is a wonderful memory.  I remember an evening ten years ago crossing the Gulf of Mexico where the stars were so clear.  And these days, I enjoy laying out on the trampoline of the boat (or the hammock) and looking…and looking.  You can imagine the ancients seeing the pictures we call constellations; you can begin to understand how important the stars were to the early mariners.  Amazing.  And if anything these days can keep me awake and alert into the evenings, it’s a starry night.

As dusk turns into evening turning into night, you go out on the bow and look up.  Get comfortable and watch…and wonder.  Step back from the day to day world, from the pickiness of details and the pettiness of human behavior, and remember where we live.  We live on a speck of dust in the universe.  We are drawn to the night sky to remind us that we live on a very special planet, a haven for life as we know it, and we live in the possibilities (more and more say likelihood) of someday meeting life in other parts of the galaxies. 

Maybe we human beings are God’s little experiment.  Maybe how we get along, cooperate, collaborate, settle our disagreements is more significant than a chapter in the book of human history.  Maybe what we say and do is a hell of a lot more important than being a Republican or a Democrat.  Maybe it makes a difference to the stars and planets and other developing or advanced life forms.  With our debates about global warming (can we still be debating this?), we are beginning to understand our place in this world and how… balance and humility and respect for all of creation and kindness and simple living makes a difference for the generations to come and the health of the planet on which they will live. 

But, we so seldom pause to wonder about these things writ large:  in God’s BIG picture of life and creation.

You don’t have to be on a boat to do this.  But, in a quiet harbor away from the main islands and all of their night lights, or out on the open waters…well, it’s a pretty good place to take a gander and wonder and give thanks.

Fair Winds

Calm Seas

Dave

PS.  And IF you are interested in seeing the earth they way those space travelers will and seeing how the movement of the latest storms, winds, currents are impacting our lives, even the shifting patterns of night lights on earth, find yourself a Science On a Sphere (SOS) center near you.  This is a project of our government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Information (NOAA), the people who collect all the data from the satellites and those floating weather stations in all the oceans and translate them into some incredible reports.    For example, you can see how the lights have gone out in Syria because of the war and turmoil there.  Brilliant cities are shadows of their former selves.   You can see the ocean currents and the shock waves from underwater earthquakes as they travel completely around the world in a matter of hours.  When I return home next month, I’ll be rejoining a team bringing a new SOS center to New Mexico, in Santa Fe.   The SOS website is:  SOS.NOAA.GOV

PSS.  And IF you’re really interested in seeing the world’s largest binocular telescope (most telescopes are monocular), a former parishioner of Marney’s in Tucson helped design and oversaw the construction and its installation on Mt. Graham in southern Arizona.  Pretty cool!  You can “google”  World’s Largest Binocular Telescope Mt. Graham Arizona.  That should get you there.

PICS  of LBTS