Guided by the Stars

We crested the hill slowly, stopping at the top for longer than usual. No cars urged us on this early in the morning. The air had cleared just enough for us to see all the way down to the city, but the thick, heavy fog that had clogged Point Loma for the last week clutched the skyscrapers of downtown San Diego like a wet cat. The display below us was clear, but the view heavenward curdled thickly in cloud. 

We looked at each other with something like resignation. The sun would rise soon, rendering our search even more futile. 

“Should we go back?” Rianna asked. 

I sighed in the affirmative. If it was that cloudy all the way downtown, there was no point in hunting for Halley’s comet in the brief window where it would be above the horizon before sunrise. Our “it’s always sunnier inland” maxim failed us, costing us the chance to see a once-every-75-years astronomical phenomenon.

A month and a half later, we tried to catch a meteor shower after an exceptionally long day. We needed a space to speak freely and pray, and the Southern Taurids were a good excuse to get out of our rooms. But tired and heartsore as we were from the piled-up ache of life, we didn’t have the patience to wait for the right time of night. The Taurid meteors radiate from the Taurus constellation, which wouldn’t hit peak position away from the city lights until almost midnight, so hungry and freezing, we snuggled together at 8 p.m. to see what the sky would offer up. 

We stayed out for an hour and a half, long enough to see Jupiter tick across a chunk of sky, but there wasn’t much else in terms of movement. The western constellations swam gently toward the horizon. An owl made its long, slow way around the plateau. We spoke about the day, prayed a deep, intentional prayer, and trekked home to sleep off the ache, without having seen any meteors.

In his 1971 paper, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” American scholar Herbert Simon described information overload as “a wealth of information [which] creates a poverty of attention.” 50 years later, our tonnage of information is astronomically larger, and our cache of attention far poorer. According to Simon, the main cost of our overexposure to what Bo Burnham calls “a little bit of everything, all of the time,” is suffered by the recipient. We have more things to pay attention to, and therefore less attention for each of them.

A few days ago, a guy in my nonfiction writing class said that stargazing is too boring for him, because nothing ever happens. He said he watches the sky for five minutes and decides he’s had enough, because nothing has moved. 

“Maybe it’s the people I was with,” he said. 

A few weeks ago, on a normal night as far as I was concerned, there was nothing to brag about but the humdrum, everynight universe, and I wanted to show it off. 

It was only the second date, but we bundled up against the chill night and hiked up to a vantage point overlooking the Pacific. We unplugged the Christmas lights we definitely weren’t supposed to touch and found a bench from which to watch. 

My favorite part of the sky is half-hidden at this time of year, and was behind us, singed by city lights. So we looked ahead, to the west.

“Okay, see those two bright stars there?” I held my fingers out like a drawing compass. 

“I think so.”

“And the one next to them?” I pointed out the visible stars in Aquila and Cygnus, and then Venus and the constellation, Lyra. 

The stars faded to a backdrop for our easy conversation, and as we talked about our siblings and our hobbies, I stopped looking for celestial movement.

Until a light, orange as a penny and slow as a drop of honey, with a visible bowed shockwave announcing its entry to earth’s atmosphere, spilled across the sky. It hung there long enough to take a picture of, almost long enough to get tired of, and as its last ashes burned out, I turned back to our conversation a little starstruck. 

Not a few minutes later, a red meteor, bright as a firework trail, fell from the sky.

“That is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” I couldn’t stop repeating. 

Most nights that I go stargazing, nothing really happens. But pouring enough time into that nothingness has given me a great appreciation for the steadiness of the night, and the shapes and stories that are built by those small, still specks of light. 

A supermoon occurs three to four times a year, when the moon is at its perigee, its closest to Earth. A total solar eclipse takes place about every 18 months. Approximately 30 meteor showers occur each year, some of which last for weeks. During the recent Taurid shower, 5-6 meteors fell per hour, but during the annual Geminid shower, up to 150 meteors can be seen per hour in a clear sky. Roughly one comet per year is visible to the naked eye, and about one asteroid the size of a car burns up in Earth’s atmosphere. A rare large planet parade, which is when five or six planets appear in a straight line in the sky, occurs approximately every 19 years. A parade of 7 planets will be visible in February. 

We’ll never see Halley’s comet in our lifetime. But as soon as January, a new comet will cross our sky, possibly for the first time in its life. It was only discovered in April of this year, and it could become so bright as it crosses in front of the sun that it is visible to the naked eye during the daytime. 

But it might take more than five minutes to find.