I was going back to my dorm this evening from watching Miyazaki's movie Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (a good movie, I think, but foreign), and it looked like Lake Bob might have been frozen over. So I went and inspected it more closely.
It was still very liquid, but then I happened to look up. Oh, the stars were bright, and many, and beautiful. It was a very clear, very cold night, and beautiful.
So I returned to my dorm, asked a couple friends to go stargazing, and went. :-)
We walked out past the RA lot to the tennis courts. There's a hill there or embankment, and depending how far down it you go, you get different amounts of campus light. Toward the top of the hill we could read my star chart. At the bottom of the hill, if one kneeled or lay, the lights were gone entirely, and there were only stars.
Orion, of course, was easy to find, and so were the Pleiades and Cassiopeia. We picked out Perseus for the first time; he's sort of a semicircle looping between the other two, with a bright star below making a triangle's apex. And if you follow Orion's belt stars in a slightly drooping line out to the left, you find Sirius, the Dog Star, the alpha star of Canis Major. There were also the two Dippers and Gemini and Auriga, and a couple others.
It was delightful to go with my friends, because we all knew slightly different legends and constellations. And we saw two shooting stars.
The stars were lovely, dark, and deep, but the hour grew late and it really was cold. We came in, but oh, it was a good night for stargazing.
4 comments:
Sounds gorgeous. It is far too suburban in my area to see many stars, which bothers me sometimes. You get a pretty nice view at PHC. :)
I love stargazing, don't get to do it nearly enough.
Makes me think of New Mexico and the night we were up late looking at stars... ::smiles:: I'm so glad God put them up there and that we have eyes to see them.
~Twynkletoes
Remind me to show you my stellarium program sometime in the near future.
--Ben G.
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