punkastronomy

A producer for Wisconsin Public Radio’s program Here on Earth contacted Geneva13 yesterday looking for the guy that writes the astronomy column…that’s me. 24 hours later, and I’m scheduled to be their guest this Monday at 4pm EST. The show is broadcast all around Wisconsin and I guess in some contigious states, but you can listen live online. It’s a call-in show, so I’m most excited to hear about people’s own, unique, experiences of the night sky.

I.

Every time you drink a glass of water, or pause by a clear creek to breath and listen and feel the coolness of the water emanating up, you’re literally appreciating a gift from the sky.

Compared to the other planets, Earth has more water, a challenge scientists have been trying to explain for some time. It’s quite a complex problem, involving many theories and fields of science. The current narrative runs something like this. Earth formed from the sun’s accretion disk (basically a cloud of stuff left over from the sun’s own formation) around about 4.5 billion years ago. The heavier elements fell towards the sun, which is one reason the nearest planets (Mercury, Venus, Eartha and Mars) are rocky, the farther ones (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus) are gaseous. Very early on, it is believed that another planet, about the size of Mars, collided with the young earth.

The impact threw up a large amount of matter from both the earth and the other planet, which astronomers have named Theia, after a Greek Titan who birthed the Moon goddess, Selene. Thank the Greeks for such a diverse and confusing pantheon that almost any astronomical object can get a name that befits it.

This matter coalescend into the moon. It could have taken anywhere from a year to 100 years, a remarkably short amount of time when you consider geological or astronomical time scales. Had a person been there, they may have actually seen the debris filled sky clear over their lifetime as the moon slowly grew.

Of course that person would be breathing a very hot noxious mix of rock vapor created by the impact, so may have been too busy suffocating and burning up from the 500’ F atmosphere to really appreciate the sky much. And anyway, there were no people then so let’s move on. The impact of Theia, if that’s what really happened, was a gift in disguise, like a slap on the face that keeps you from doing something stupid. The rock vapor atmosphere that quickly killed our time-travelling human observer helped the early earth retain the water released by the Theia’s impact, and kept the pressure high enough on earth to allow for oceans of liquid water.

The Moon and the oceans still cavort in the form of the elegant dance of the tides.

The second theory to explain our lovely, wet planet is similarly violent: earth’s water supply was bolstered over prehistory by repeated impacts of comets, which of course are big dirty snowballs originating from the farther reaches of the solar system. It’s a controversial theory and the evidence keeps bouncing back and forth, but there is reason to believe that comets impacting earth repeatedly over its history. Other inner planets may have been similarly subject to impacts from comets (and the idea is that there were far more of them in the earlier epochs of the solar system) but Earth had the mechanisms to retain that water. Mars, for example, has been losing water and atmosphere for a very long time, blown away on the solar wind.

II.

In many ways, Punkastronomy has always been about the gift of the sky. Earth has an amazing window into the universe. A relatively transparent atmosphere in a relatively transparent part of the galaxy. Other locations (where rents are probably much cheaper) would not create a very interesting sky. Giant dust clouds, or the centers of dense star clusters where the sky would be very pretty, but not very diverse, just a field of blazingly bright jewels.

On earth, you can look up and see, with your own eyes and no telescope, another galaxy, millions of light-years away, the light your eyes are collecting having started its journey from that galaxy of stars the same number of years ago. Things near and far can delight; the other night I saw a shooting star, which of course is one of the nearest astronomical events we can observe, being a small piece of something falling into the earth’s atmosphere and burning up. Again, violence with a subtle gift.

Perseid meteor caught on film (ok, digital memory card)! Seen at the abandoned Mount Laguna Air Force Station, by SLworking2 on Flickr (Creative Commons)

I’ve seen thousands of shooting stars, which kind of boggles my mind when I meet people that haven’t seen a single one. I think it the night sky should be a human right. Anyway, in spite of all I’ve seen, that one little shooting star punctuated a brief and very cold observing session in my driveway. I can’t exactly describe the feeling of that. Many of the things we observe change not-at-all (in our limited earthling perception of time) or very subtly night to night. But a shooting star is a single moment in time, something humans have evolved to understand all too well.

The feeling was a cocktail of delight, peace, and joy, a sense that despite what the radio keeps trying to convince me every hour on the hour, the world is still a place where beautiful things happen. I suspect that if scientists studied the brain to see what was happening in the mind of an astronomical observer, they’d find similar results to people eating crème brulee, standing on top of a tall mountain, or holding their infant child for the first time. Endorfins all around.

III.

The sky holds the promise of other gifts as well, and ironically these gifts continue the theme of creative destruction that must be part of the universe’s code.

The atomic age and the space age share the same origin: the German V2 rocket crafted by Werner Von Braun as a weapon of vengeance to be used against Great Britain. Thus the British were the first to experience war from space, as the V2s arced into the upper atmosphere, touched space, and arced back down to rain random destruction on London. Von Braun had bigger plans for the rocket, but anyway I suppose the Nazis had the money and labor (in the form of Jewish prisoners) and the willingness to put these resources behind the project. After the war, the United States “acquired” Von Braun and brought him to the US along with dozens of captured V2 rockets. One of those rockets took the first photograph of earth from space in 1946 New Mexico. The photo is not very good, but humanity’s eyes were those of a newborn:

Space exploration has some very dark roots. Those first rockets held out both a threat—combined with the new power of the atomic bomb, of global destruction—and a promise—to free humanity from the bounds of earth’s atmosphere, to allow it to go where it has long tried to reach with its imagination. Space. Literally, the final frontier.

The idea of the frontier is likely deeply rooted in human prehistory. Our brains are hard-wired with the ability to project ourselves forward into new situations. Prehistoric human had to imagine her form on the other side of the river before wading in and figuring out how to swim. Our ability (or even tendency) to project ourselves into the future probably made the empty spaces where people weren’t, particularly attractive. Early human history is a tale of migration, and who knows what motivated the first migrants to leave the Great Rift Valley all those millennia ago.

Frontiers represent, among other things, a clean slate. Human civilizations have a tendency to stagnate, for power to both coagulate into the hands of a few and of course, corrupt, and history is replete with examples of groups going off on their own to try to get it right, this time. The promise of a frontier is in the challenges it poses to survival, a new set of parameters to adjust to. People actually eschew comfort for situations that place them in life and death situations. The value in that has to be in more than the thrill of the hunt or the chase.

The frontier of space held out a similar promise. There’s a long tradition of thinkers looking off-world for answers to central problems in the human condition. A common theme in science fiction is that, finally free of the Earth’s tangle of suffocating traditions, and faced with all those new challenges, people will be forced to innovate new ways of being and associating. It’s the next step in evolution, and these thinkers will be forgiven for thinking the earthbound humans are in too much of a mess to think straight. I go back to that momentary sensation of possibility and beauty when watching a shooting star.

To make up for its paucity of water, Mars has captured more than its share of utopian/dystopian speculation. Among the best of the Martian chronicles are the three books by Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars, the colors representing the phases of Mars’ transformation in human hands, as water is freed from below the planet onto the surface and atmosphere built up, to the spreading of plant life across its surface at the hands of latter-day Johnny Appleseeds. Robinson believes that humans on Mars will revisit the many political and economic arrangements of the past and develop new ones to suit their very new environment. And, while discussion on Earth gets mired down in ideology and paranoia, on Mars the necessity of the moment focuses and clarifies human motivations.

One of the many developments Robinson proposes is the formation of a “gift economy” that governs the distribution of non-necessities. The idea of a gift economy, which several Earth cultures have experimented with, is that social capital is gained not by how much you retain, but rather by how much you give away. Some of the indigenous groups of the American northwest practiced a gift economy in the form of pot-latch, ceremonies where wealthy families would gather friends and relations and give as much away as they can. Interestingly, pot-latch was deemed by the early white invaders of the area as public enemy number one. It sounds harmless enough, but for some reason it provoked a deep reaction, probably because it threw the Calvinist ideals of the “settlers” into such disarray, challenging the very basis for economics (accumulation) as well as the idea of private property. Anyway, they vigorously outlawed pot-latch ceremonies.

Robinson resuscitates them on Mars. Social capital as well as personal happiness is increased by trying to match the people around you with the things that they need to be creative and productive. To thrive, in other words. And the gift economy doesn’t get mired down in discussions about altruism vs. selfishness. The gift is both. Like a year’s enrollment in the Jelly of the Month Club, it keeps on giving.

Robinson’s books are a fascinating thought experiment, and highly recommended. But lest you think it’s all just fictional daydreaming, there are at least thousands of Americans who have already “gone” to Mars. Members of the Mars Society, for example, maintain “stations” in Mars-like places in Utah, and try to live as explorers would on Mars. They’re not (just) role-playing…their research is helping NASA work through real issues they anticipate on the Red Planet’s surface.

In Utah, but on Mars: The 2002 Crew of the Society's Mars Desert Research Station

The Society hosts a growing web community called New Mars, where people discuss—earnestly—every issue they could think of that might confront human settlers on Mars, from political organization to drinking water to educational systems to urban planning. The conversations are focused, creative and full of good ideas.

What strikes me also, venturing into the forum on political organization, is how free the conversation is. Free in terms of the horizons people are willing to consider and also free from acrimony you’d find on any other forum. Sure, there are trolls on New Mars, but very few. Participants bandy about all sorts of ideas drawn from anarchism on one end to libertarianism on the other, and everything in between.. They refer to Earth-bound examples but are quick to recognize the new context. There are frequent references to Mars as the “clean slate.”

This is the most fascinating thing about the final frontier—we don’t even have to go there for the one gift frontiers have always held out for us—an autonomous space to try again to get things right, a way to circumvent chronic problems and bad institutions by simply leaving them behind. I wonder if humanity’s ability to speculate and project itself forward into new ways of being is one of the keys of survival in the universe. I suspect it is.

Sometimes I get challenged for being an enthusiastic supporter of space exploration. There’s more pressing things to spend our money on, I guess the argument goes. And certainly there are higher priorities at the moment. But sell off an aircraft carrier, for god’s sake, and keep us pushing out into that frontier. The dividend is not in tech spin-offs or space tourism or national security—it’s in ideas and the autonomy to perfect ourselves.

IV.

What do you imagine is the potential for Mars? You can see Mars yourself, every clear night this fall and winter, rising in the east in the late evening now, though it will rise earlier and climb higher as the winter goes on. Mars is just off of Leo the Lion’s snout. It’s bright, and it’s obviously orange, and no, it isn’t every going to appear as large as the full Moon unless you’re on a space ship on an intercept orbit and you’re a few days away from landing. Through binoculars Mars will transform appearance from a bright star to a tiny orange disk. Through a modest telescope you can see the polar ice cap, and that large grand canyon I mentioned earlier, the Vallenaris.

Check it out for yourself, show your kids, and imagine a group of humans there, struggling to survive, to get along with each other, to live long and prosper on a precarious planet. It’s the same situation that we are in here on Earth, in fact, but there, in our minds and in our public speculations, our precariousness is laid bare, and we are truly free to chart our course.

Clare and the Reasons has a beautiful, witty and tender song about Pluto and it’s demotion to Dwarf Planet. Listen here. It’s a great bit of songwriting.

I’m not really particularly upset about the International Astronomical Union’s 2006 decision, though I see that many people still are. Our view of the universe, and of our solar system, is getting increasingly complex, which in turn is challenging our nomenclature. There are other Pluto-sized objects and is probably worth creating some new categories. There’s some good, too: Pluto now has a number as well as a name. 134340: the secret agent dwarf planet.

Anyway, people will argue and change their minds, and Pluto will still go on being what it is, a tiny satellite of the sun, “way the heck out there,” to quote a friend’s college astronomy teacher. I don’t think it was hurt in the least, so let’s save our pity for humanity, and, in terms of positive action, spend some time in wonder at the complexity of our solar system. A planet that’s almost a star (Jupiter) and a mini-solar system all it’s own, the Kuiper Belt of dwarf planets and other satellites, the Oort Cloud where ghostly comets come from. It’s huge, and it does not demonstrably care about us. The song, however, remains lovely poetry:

Now all the planets will gather around and have a thing for you
They’ll wrap their orbits warmly around you and send you off with love
Chin up pluto the stars still want you and we down here do too
you know what to do, just keep on keeping on

Ever drive out into the countryside and marveled at the big strip of the Milky Way arching across the sky and thousands of stars shining everywhere, then wondered why you couldn’t see that from downtown Geneva or from your own driveway? No, the air is not clearer. There’s simply less lights.

The Author, His Telescope and the Milky Way, Cherry Springs State Park, PA

The splendor of the night sky is all but invisible from most of the places we tend to live and congregate because of what’s called light pollution. Roughly defined, light pollution is too much light in general and light needlessly shining where it is not wanted.

The cause of light pollution is bad lighting design. For the most part, we put lights outdoors to illuminate what’s below them: walkways, parking lots, streets, driveways, and doors. Yet most outdoor lighting shines in every direction: out the sides and even up. The sideways light causes glare, which makes it harder to see anything at all at night, and light trespass, light that shines where it’s not wanted, like in your bedroom windows at night. The upwards light causes sky glow, an orange haze over heavily lit areas that hides the stars and Milky Way.

All these components of light pollution have real life consequences. That’s why we call it pollution. And it’s a global problem. In a November 2008 cover story, National Geographic reported that 1/5 of humanity (that’s over 1 billion people) live in skies so light polluted that they cannot see the stars and the Milky Way. 2/3 of humanity (that’s 3 billion people) suffers some kind of light pollution. It’s bound to get worse. Our race just recently turned a corner; just over 50% of all humans alive now live in cities. As these cities grow and develop, they’ll get brighter. And the night sky will cease to be a source of visible wonder for most humans.

According to the experts, here’s why light pollution is bad:

• It disrupts melatonin production in humans, which messes with our sleep cycles.
• It makes driving at night way more dangerous because of glare, which makes it harder to see anything but the bright lights. This problem is worse with older drivers.
• It disrupts the normal cycle of hormone production in women, which puts them at greater risk of breast and other cancers.
• It kills 100 million birds a year because they collide with lighted buildings and towers.
• It disturbs the reproductive cycles of frogs (kermitus interruptus) who are already dying off worldwide for unknown reasons.
• It hurts sea turtles, who can’t find dark beaches to lay their delicate eggs.

The American Medical Association (AMA) just declared light pollution a public safety and health hazard, citing the above reasons as well as the 2.2 billion dollars a year we waste on lighting things we don’t intend on lighting (like the night sky.)

The solution to the light pollution is unbelievably simple. It’s better lighting design. Most outdoor lighting (like the irritating “old fashioned looking” globes that line downtown Geneva or HWS campus) are non- or semi cut-off fixtures. Common streetlights are the latter. They don’t shine line up, but they do shine a lot of light sideways.

Full cut-off lighting only shines light down, where we really want it. You can’t see the bulb itself (unless you are under it) but you can see what it is supposed to light up. These lights don’t need to be as powerful since all the light is going where we want it, so that saves money over time. The city of Calgary, Canada, saved over 1.7 million dollars a year in energy costs when it switched its streetlights to lower-wattage, full cut-off designs.

One of the reasons often cited for not solving the light pollution problem is safety. The more lights, the better, and everywhere, the argument goes. Let’s not give crooks and rapists shadows to hide in, the argument goes. Let’s light up the roads so that drivers can see.

Bad lighting actually makes the situation worse. Take two flashlights and go outside. Shine one at your face and one at your car. Can you read your license plate number? Now shine both of them at your license plate. That’s better, right? That’s how full-cut off lighting works to make your nighttime safer and your night sky prettier.

You can help solve the problem yourself. Next time you’re changing or adding a light fixture outside, choose a full cut-off design. You’ll sleep better at night, perhaps literally.

The problem is also solvable at the municipal level as well. Many cities, like Calgary, Canada, and Flagstaff, Arizona, have enacted dark sky ordinances that essentially call for all newly installed outdoor fixtures to be low-wattage full cut-off designs. Some communities have grandfathered in existing fixtures but stipulated that when they are replaced, full cut-off designs are used.

Having visited Flagstaff this July, I can tell you that it’s a pleasure to drive there at night. You see the roads but not the glaring streetlights. And from the middle of the city, you can see the Milky Way!

There are a lot of reasons to solve the light pollution problem: economics, the environment, public health and safety. But let’s not overlook an important but immeasurable benefit of the night sky. Our window to the universe is critical to the development of the human mind and the cultivation of a far-seeing wisdom. I see the effect of it every time I let someone look through my telescope. I saw it this summer out west, in National Parks that have fought hard to preserve their dark skies. The starry night changes people’s behavior; it stops and makes them think, and we need more thinking. It gets people talking in wonder together, and we need more community. We need the natural world—and the night sky represents the part of that world that is most challenging to our understanding—to inspire us and humble us in a way that no computer generated graphic ever can.

You can learn more about light pollution…online, of course. Visit the International Dark Sky Association webpage for lots of infomration: www.ida.org

Last night I went to a lecture at HWS by Robert Bowman, a former Air Force colonel who was in charge of the “Star Wars” program under Reagan in the 1980s. He spoke about his road from warrior to peacenik. Very interesting talk. Anyway, I thought there might be a good crowd, and I figured that a little stargazing might go well with an exercise in imagining a very different world, so I packed up my small refractor telescope and mount into the car. I left during the start of Q&A, and Larry Campbell, who was hosting the speaker, announced that I’d be outside at the end of the talk.

I set the scope out under the glaring lights in front of the library. Before I tell the rest of my story, let’s talk about light pollution. As an astronomer, I hate light pollution, which is basically defined as light pointing wastefully into the sky instead of on the ground where we’d like it to be. There’s a growing world-wide movement against light pollution. It makes the sky ugly and orange. It hurts animals and trees. It hurts people. And keeps us ignorant of the existence of the rest of the universe, a necessary context without which we cannot make wise decisions for the future of a fragile, isolated planet. Light pollution is also bad for our immediate health and safety. The American Medical Association has just declared that glare from outside lighting is a public health hazard. Read why here.

Anyway, the lights around the library were glaringly bright. I could however see the two targets for the evening’s program–the almost full Moon and Jupiter. I started with Jupiter. I was interested to see how students would react. There’s a whole batch of new first years that just arrived on campus…would they be too cool for school? How would the experience compare to setting up the scope on the sidewalk downtown? I have to admit I assumed there would be a slightly more educated audience.

They weren’t too cool. Well, some boys in cars that zoomed by did shout a few things at us. But with the doppler shift, I couldn’t really tell what they said. I assumed it was complimentary. A guy with a telescope is really cool. And anyway, there was a respectable crowd around me, and they were just wishing there was someone in their car to impress. The stargazers that joined me were enthusiastic, some of them contagiously so. For some of the first years, I can see them thinking at the back of their minds: yeah, this is college!

But in terms of knowledge of the universe, they were like most people I meet. Which is to say, pretty unaware of what’s out there. It’s not a dig. It’s not their fault. There just isn’t enough amateur astronomers and earth science teachers with the desire to teach about the greater context of earth to go around. And I think there’s a resistance in humans to this. Some people don’t want to feel tiny and insignificant, and advertising agencies rush in to convince us it isn’t so (and feel better by buying our new hyperdoodadthingy!) Bill McKibben once watched all the programming available on every cable channel for a 24 hour period–it took him weeks. And what he found was a resounding and overwhelming message; the individual is the most important thing. Not family. Not community. Not world. He wrote a great book about the experience, called The Age of Missing Information:

We believe that we live in the “age of information,” that there has been an information “explosion,” an information “revolution.” While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information.

-Bill McKibben

But there’s a countervailing force, a desire or curiosity to see what’s out there. It drives people to the telescope. As if the thing itself excuses the basic curiosity, breaks the monotony of day to day living. There was some people at the telescope last night that were very excited to see Jupiter. Joe, for example, who was from New York City. He mentioned that looking at the night sky through a telescope had been a life-long dream. I was pleased to be able to oblige. (But Joe, please, don’t yet consider the dream fulfilled. There’s a whole sky up there that you could barely see because the colleges like to light up buildings and trees as if there was no such thing as night. Go out on one of the side roads around the college at night with a few buddies and look up. You’ll be started by what you can see.

Yang Hu and Joe at the telescope.

Jupiter is 11 times the diameter of earth. Cut Jupiter in half and scoop it out like a cantaloup and you can fit all the other planets inside it. It’s makes the solar-system a rather portable kit, just find another star. Jupiter is 500 million miles away. Get in your car and start driving, you’ll get there in about 900 years. Beware: cops love to use the asteroid belt between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter as a speed trap. Jupiter is a gas giant like Saturn, but bigger and different. It’s surface is characterized by beautiful belts and eddies of gas. Through the 3-inch refractor I had set up, you could clearly see the two darkest cloud bands across the planet.

Jupiter has four large moons, called collectively “The Galilean Moons”. They are: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. We named them after Galileo because he was the first human to see them, through an early telescope. He didn’t call them “Galilean Moons”–he called them “Medicean Stars” because 1) he didn’t know they were moons (they look like stars through small telescopes) and 2) because the de Medici family was sponsoring his research. You have to nod to your sponsors. Anyway, these four moons are really important to the development of human thought about the cosmos, because they helped Galileo realize that the earth might not be the center of the universe. The idea was that everything revolved around the earth. But night after night, Galileo watched these four “stars” dance around Jupiter. Even in one observing session, they can shift position. Basically, he concluded that if something could orbit Jupiter, then everything didn’t orbit the earth. Thus, a revolution in scientific thought and a very unpleasant run-in with the Roman Catholic Church that didn’t get resolved until 1992 when John Paul II stated that it was all a case of “tragic mutual incomprehension.” I’ll let that hang for a moment.

Cool College Kidz Hang Around My Telescope

The dance of the Galilean Moons was charming last night. At first only two were visible. I thought it was Calliso and Europa. Io, I knew, wasn’t visible through my scope because it was over Jupiter’s surface so it blended in. I also thought that Ganymede was transiting Jupiter, but I was wrong. Later, someone said “I see two stars above Jupiter and one below.”

“Two above?” I checked. He was right. Europa and Ganymede were so close they had appeared as one. Not an hour later, they were visibly separate. It’s amazing how quickly things can change in the cosmos. Just when I absorbed that, something else: Io’s shadow appeared on Jupiter’s surface. And unlike Io, which is about the same shade and color of Jupiter and so blends in as it transits, Io’s shadow appears as a sharp pin-prick of black. Most people could see it.

I stated a while back that my mission is to bring views of the universe to them who need seeing it. I have to remember that that means pretty much everybody, from working class blokes on the sidewalk downtown to fairly privileged college students.

Bonus Coda: I’ll close with a little piece of advice I gave to most of the people who stopped by to look through the scope. Most people close one eye shut tight when trying to look through the telescope. That works, but it’s not very comfortable and quickly becomes untenable. Instead of doing that, leave both eyes open, but cover the one that’s not at the eyepiece with your hand. It’s way more relaxing that way. Here, a student demonstrates the proper procedure:

Bonus Coda II: Yang Hu took a photo of the moon through the telescope with her digital camera. Check it out:

The mostly full moon. The top edge is eclipsed by the eyepiece lens.

Bonus Coda III: “Human beings–any one of us, and our species as a whole–are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.” -Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

Page, Arizona: It’s strange to see a town planned and built in the 1950s. There’s a turn in the road where every church is lined up in a row.The next turn, motels. I saw my friend Cristina’s band “Native Country” there. They’re a Navajo country and western band. That’s right, Indians have become cowboys, buried the hatchet and wallow together in the twangy blues. It was really wild, but I don’t have the time to write about it at length. In the meanwhile, here’s a story about Rez bands in general.

Lake Powell: (1957-2019) Failed attempt at hydroelectric and tourist development by damning (sic) the Colorado River at the south end of Glen Canyon. In spite of monumental efforts to redress the damage, the canyon ecosystem is not expected to reach its pre-dam state until early in the next century.

Valley of the Gods, Utah:  Valley of the Gods is BLM land, which means you can pretty much camp anywhere, although there are customary sites where people usually camp. It’s free. There’s usually nobody around. For miles. And miles. I looked out over the horizon and could see neither the glow of any nearby community’s light pollution, nor the tell-tale lights of isolated houses. I saw one campfire, far far in the distance. Much of the earth probably looked like this to people. It’s beautiful, but for an Easterner who’s never more than a stone’s throw from someone else, it’s disconcerting.

The No-Shoulder Phenomenon:  Quasi-Hallucinatory State. Here’re the symptoms: An Easterner spends his life driving through forests. The horizon is always shaped like the tops of deciduous and coniferous trees, and it’s always close at hand. If there are open spaces, there are inevitably the lights of houses to circumscribe the space. In the Southwest, more often than not, the horizon is flat, jagged or mesa-shaped, and usually far away. There’re no streetlights and there are large areas where nobody lives. When one drives at night on many roads, one only sees the short bit of road ahead; the rest is the encroaching Nothing.  My brain adjusts to this by manufacturing the feeling that, just outside of the cone of the headlights, there’s a forest on either side of me. I swear I can see wisps of forest shapes in the dark void. It’s very disconcerting.

I.

So here I am in Flagstaff, Arizona, birthplace of crazy Mars canals theories and the demoted planet Pluto. I like this city. Coming from the arid and bleakly beautiful San Juan Basin (the geological area Chaco Canyon is in), the San Francisco peaks that hover over the town to the North are like walking down the sidewalk on a hot day and getting hit by an errant sprinkler. I took a ride up that way this morning looking for a good camping site for tonight and I was alternately feeling giddy and moved by the landscape and the smell of pine forest.

II.

An Easterner is a bit crippled in understanding the land out the west, I have discovered. Back East, there are two kinds of land. Private and public, and public usually means long roads connecting tiny parks. In this part of the country, however, there’s all different kinds of land: BLM land, BIA land, Tribal land, Tribal-leased land, Private land, State land, Forest Service land, National Park land. The rules are different for each kind of land. BLM and Forest Service land is very interesting, because you can camp almost anywhere. This boggles the East-Coase-addled mind: wait, where’s the designated campsite? What do you mean, I don’t have to follow the trails?

III.

Add to this realization that I actually own massive tracts of public lands (for all practical applications) the fact that I have never camped alone, and I’m in for an interesting experience. I have to admit a certain bit of trepidation. To get to my chosen campsite (pointed out with a very dirty fingernail and recommended to me by the guy at Peace Surplus camping supplies) I have to take a long rocky forest service road, turn on another, and then another that’s closed about .7 miles on, and then pull off. It’s right under Shultz Peak, which is my kind of peak: not very tall and with an alpine glade on top, just calling for a short hike. (I’m not a very aggressive hiker. I’m more likely to say “Hey, there’s a trail that goes around that mountain!”) Anyway, I’ve never hiked alone in the woods. It’s kinda freaking me out, though I feel like it’s something I should learn how to do. I could write more about this feeling, but I don’t need to. The excellent Mary Kelly, who teaches in the education department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, made a great digital story about this. So, if you’re seeking to empathize, check out Mary’s story.

IV.

It seems a comet or asteroid struck Jupiter in the last few days. There’s a new giant black cloud in its southern hemisphere, like the ones formed when Comet Shumaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter in 1994. So sky-watchers with telescopes will be carefully watching Jupiter over the next few nights to see if they can spot the new blemish. You can keep up with the story at Spaceweather.com. Here’s a pic of the pimple, which is likely near half the size of our whole planet.

Anthony Wesley's photograph of the new impact. It's the dark cloud at the top (south is up) of the image.

I.

I came out here to help teach astronomy as part of the Night Sky program. Chaco Canyon pretty much started the Astronomy in Parks movement some years ago, and now many of the western parks have similar programs, helping interpret the incredible resource of the dark sky for park visitors. It gives campers staying in park grounds something to do in the evening, as well. They’re kind of a captive audience, why not help them to look up and wonder?

Last week, when I arrived, I was met with almost immediate disappointment. The campground was closed, and so the night sky program was seriously undermined; there was essentially no audience. Crestfallen, I stared out at the desolate landscape, imagined my wife and child in Slovakia where it’s green and lush, eating berries and cucumbers and peaches fresh from the garden, and wondered just what the heck I came out here for. I even wondered if I should stay. Sure, there were other ways I could help the park. I did some weeding, helped fix an errant wheel on the observatory dome. But my main goal was to work with the public.

Well, you do your best, I told myself, and you can’t control everything. I’m in a very special place, might as well make the best of it. Maybe the reason I thought I was coming here woudn’t be the reason, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t get something out of it. I just didn’t know what that was, and that was a bit disturbing.

My fears were mostly unjustified. We’ve had a few Night Sky programs and they have been attended…sparsely, but attended nonetheless. Jim, the other astronomy volunteer, spends time at Bryce Canyon doing outreach and he says they get sometimes 500 people a night. Personally I’d rather have 5 curious people and the time to really engage them in conversation than 500 elbowing each other for a glance into the telescope. Each night we’ve had people I’ve met very nice folks, and had a lot of time to tour the sky at a leisurely pace, explaining things as I go, taking detours to different topics.

Before last night’s program, I had GB, Jim and Amber over for dinner. All three of them work in one way or another with the dark sky program. We were talking movies, Star Wars vs. Star Trek, and I asked if any of them were Firefly fans. All of them were. That’s not such a common thing. It’s a trifling thing, affection for a somewhat obscure, prematurely truncated but completely excellent sci-fi TV series from auteur Joss Whedon, but it made me feel at home. Firefly is about people coming to a place together seemingly without reason, but finding that reason in an informal family and community. It’s a trifling thing, but I suddenly felt like I had come to the right place, and for the right reason, whether that was in focus or not.

Doot doot doot lookin' out my front door.

II.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a front-porch view like this, and I doubt I ever will again. I can hardly put it into words. Sometimes I lose track of it, take it for granted, and then look up from my book, computer, or food and go…wow. I live here. For a few weeks, at least.

Front and center is Fajada Butte, a shape that is hard for us Easterners to think of as natural. Mesas to the right and left outline the Butte’s stage, and the sky above is the other character, constantly changing itself and everything else. The hour around sunset is a show and a few nights already I’ve just stood at the railing of the long porch and just…watched.

The nature here is subtle, as I said. It grows on you. At first I felt it was empty, desolate. Then I started to see the changes the landscape takes on during the day. I started seeing more animals, more wildflowers. There are no big bursts of flowers or fields of color on the horizon like I remember from eastern Turkey. Just isolated bushes here and there, or plants low to the ground. You have to walk to see them.

Now, as I type, the clouds and star fields are taking turns. It’s the time of twilight when every moment brings newly-unveiled stars. High hum of crickets. The air is still. I’m overwhelmed by the subtle physical beauty of this place. In some ways, I wish I was camping here in a tent. The duplexes built by the Park Service are nice enough, lovely even and comfortable, but I enter the apartment and feel totally cut off from the nature outside. On the porch it’s better, but I can escape back inside whenever I want, plug in, check my email, watch a vid. Meanwhile there’s all this drama outside. I think people are funny; we’ve come a long way to be here but we huddle in a little compound at night, replicating the thick settlements we come from, united against the big dark empty.

III.
I’ve seen all manner of bird here, and I should learn the names of them and make my daughter, Zora, proud; she’s quite the bird-watcher. I saw a bull snake the other day, slithering up a tree. Later on, I was told, the snake ate two wren chics out of a nest. There are at least two different species of lizards. One fast, skinny, stripped and lives in the lowlands, the other shorter, slower, and mutable in color that lives on the mesa tops. Lots of rabbits, about 25 per acre, and coyotes, though I have yet to see them, I have seen lots of tracks and droppings, some fresh, others dried and filled with rodent bones. There are these odd chipmonk-looking creatures that kind of hop. I have to find out what that is called as well. It’s funny that the official names of things are so important. I guess I could call them what I wanted to. I’d call those chipmonk hoppers “Kangaroo Squirrels.” I wouldn’t be wrong; they wouldn’t take offence. But then I’m not sure anyone else would know what the heck I was talking about. So we need those official names to communicate with each other. They’re placeholders. Like the names of stars. The things dear to us can have public names for communicability, and private names for contemplation and appreciation.

IV.
A lot of people find this place spiritual. The mystery of the ancient Chacoans who built all these Great Houses and then left after a few hundred years holds many in its spell. I am not one of those. The old masonry walls are beautiful, but they don’t really speak to me. For me the “mystery” is an intellectual challenge, and it’s more fascinating to examine what people think happened here than to actually figure out what did. Chaco Canyon, in this respect, is a like a closed gift box…we can only conject what is inside, maybe rattle it around a bit. Mostly we see what we want to see, either our worse fears (at the moment, that seems to be civilizational collapse because of environmental degradation) or our highest hopes (a spiritually enlightened, egalitarian and peaceful meeting place for people of all tribes to come together in seeking to better ourselves and gain wisdom, either individually or as a group.) But it’s fascinating to watch the process of making meaning, the way everyone who comes here, be they workers or visitors, struggles to define the essence of the place, and not just internally by socially…exactly what happened at Chaco Canyon 1000 years ago is a very live topic today, which is not something I can say for the rest of US society, where events even 15 years ago are rejected as irrelevant in our “constantly changing” world.