Note: I wrote this paper in 2013 for my first-year English class, on my experience attending my first ever star party in Merritt, BC. To this day, I have not seen skies that dark, or views that magical. I still to this day remember being rendered utterly breathless by the greatest show on earth.
As the sun retires it paints the drifting clouds pink. I wait in silence for the darkness to oust the gentle twilight glow, with a patience that betrays my 13-year-old self, standing on a small farm in interior British Columbia.
Venus is the first to send her regards, shining with a grace befitting a planet named after the Roman goddess of elegance and love. Soon, the reunion begins. I whisper their names as I acknowledge their presence: Sirius, Vega, Rigel, Capella, Betelgeuse, Antares… It only takes a couple of minutes before I am overwhelmed, my familiarity with the stars only extending to the brightest few.
True darkness is falling now. Venus, brilliant as always, now casts a faint shadow of me on the ground. There is not a single street light in sight. When I look up, I am greeted by lights. The night sky is not dark – not even close. It is filled with stars, more stars than I can count. The Milky Way extends from one end of the horizon to the other, glowing in a warm embrace that protects us from the rest of the universe. It is a religious experience grander than any god man could hope to create.
I am not alone. There are other explorers of the night sky all around me, passionate astronomers who come here, far away from city lights, to reconnect with the majesty that few of my peers have ever experienced. While the world sleeps, we open our wings and fly to the deepest corners of the universe.
The telescopes start to stir as well. Computerized instruments start to move into place and I can hear the faint whirring of the motors. I instinctively walk over to the biggest telescope I can see. It is a behemoth that towers over 3 meters off the ground. Probably need an oxygen tank up there, I think to myself. “Can I take a look?” I yell up to the owner.
He pauses, startled by my voice, and starts to climb unsteadily down the stepladder necessary to look through his eyepiece. “Please, go ahead,” he beckons, sounding surprised. Astronomy is an old-man’s passion, and I am the youngest here by far.
As I climb up the ladder, I orient myself relative to the night sky. I can see that it is pointed in the rough direction of the constellation Hercules, which contains one of the true spectacles of the northern hemisphere, called the Hercules Globular Cluster. In astronomy circles, it is better known simply as M13. So I ask, “M13?”, and I hear him mutter an affirmative.
I have seen this object countless times from my backyard through my comparatively small telescope, but the night sky in my hometown is nowhere near as dark as here. This celestial wonder is a collection of a quarter-million stars spanning a mere 150 light-years, held together by gravity (Ferris 242). When I get to the top, I steady myself, then peer into the eyepiece. I nearly have to squint. Once my eye adjusts to the brightness, I am greeted by the combined might of stars shining in unison, reminding me of crickets singing in unison on a grassy field. It was my second religious experience of the night. By dawn, after breathtaking views of distant galaxies and nebulas, I was a devout believer.
Six years later, and I still remember that day. In the 2200 nights that followed, I have not once seen the Milky Way. I know that it is there, watching over me, as I walk home late after class, but fear keeps it away. Humans fear darkness like death, oblivious to the wonders that hide in the depth of the unknown. To them, darkness is an affliction, a disease that kills, and in their crusade to light up the world, the true victims are the animals: birds that have trouble migrating, baby sea turtles that get lost and eaten, and the predators that cannot use the darkness to hunt (Ferris 13). Humans equivocate about their own mortality, in a futile attempt to escape reality, ignoring its inevitability. Death is like the stars above, out of sight and vaguely remembered, but all it takes is a single storm to show both death and darkness together, as one.
People dress up the deceased to look as if they are sleeping. It is a plain confession of their fears, and an attempt to deceive. They were taught as children to fear death (Kübler-Ross 8). They tell stories about death and try to personify it as evil, firing arrows in the past and guns in the present, not so much as a final salute to a friend but as an antiquated attempt to scare death away (Kübler-Ross 7).
On that night, 6 years ago, I witnessed death firsthand. As a star runs out of hydrogen, it collapses, then annihilates itself in a cosmic explosion more powerful than the energy of 300 billion stars. This disturbance in the fabric of space released from the star’s death ultimately triggers the birth of new stars (Garlick 164). While the remnants of the explosion, called nebulosity, are hauntingly beautiful, all that remains of actual star is a small, rotating ball with gravity of such strength that not even light can escape: a black hole. Instead of focusing on the black hole of our demise, we should look at our own inevitable end as we view the death of stars – a celebration of a brilliant life as we move aside for the next generation.
Works Cited
Ferris, Timothy. Seeing in the Dark. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. Print.
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying. New York: Scribner, 1997. Print.
Garlick, Mark. Astronomy, a Visual Guide. Firefly Books. Print.