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An August
Nighttime
Sky
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Labor Day Weekend has always
seemed like a made-up holiday.
It has been a hectic summer
around Wyobraska. Six weeks of springtime storms
have roofing, siding, and window replacement crews
buzzing around the region like bees in a late summer
flower garden. It’s easy to get “busy as a bee” in
the summertime and miss those wonder-filled moments
that seem to come along a little more frequently in
the summer than any other time of year. Like so
many others around Wyobraska, I’ve had a busy
summer, so busy, I’m afraid that I haven’t had much
time to enjoy the wonder of the natural world—my
loss. I made up for that just a little bit earlier
this week.
Nothing evokes more wonder in
me than an August night time sky—especially one with
no moon. I happened to be making a drive back from
Colorado earlier this week, through the dark night
time landscape of eastern Goshen County Wyoming and
western Banner County Nebraska. About thirty miles
northeast of Cheyenne, I noticed that this was going
to be one of those August night sky viewing
opportunities that I only seem to find the time to
seize on late night drives on Wyobraska’s blue
highways.
Of course, every month has an
equal share of moonless night time skies, but the
still balmy temperatures of August nights allows one
to take in that immense sky at one’s
leisure—unhurried by either the ubiquitous wind or
biting cold that seem to plague the moonless nights
of most other months. I don’t know if one can
remember just how immense that moonless night time
sky really is. Every time I see it again, I get
the same sense of overwhelming wonder. That wonder
is only increased by what little modern astronomy
and cosmology can now tell us about what that night
time sky contains. That broad milky band of
seemingly tiny little stars is, of course, our own
galaxy stretching from one distant horizon to the
other—and most of the other “stars”, we now know,
are full-fledged galaxies all their own—each as
large as our own galaxy. August nights give one
the luxury of time to ponder that reality, perhaps
long enough for a little bit of that wonder to hang
around for a few days.
The busy summer also allowed
little time for me to pursue one of my
“hobbies”—reading contemporary science writers—and,
of course, always a little poetry. The explosion
of scientific research over the past several
centuries continues to accelerate, in spite of
several pompous predictions over the past century
that human civilization would be reaching the end of
science within 100 years or so—in other words, know
everything about everything. I’ve found a little
time in recent weeks to begin reading again, and am
struck by how most good scientists, and good poets,
for that matter, seem to end up like me a few
evenings ago—standing on the side of a dark
nighttime road, looking up at an immense universe in
wonder.
A bit of personal amateurish
horticultural research a few years back inspired me
to read up a bit on genetics. It is a broad
subject, of course, and another area of science
where initial optimism about the capacity of science
to “know” the subject within a few years has been
tempered by a new wonder on the part of the
scientific community about the complexity of the
subject--and the speculation that there may be
aspects of genetic functioning that are unknowable.
That reading has caused me to
look at a summertime garden with a bit of the same
wonder that I feel when looking at a moonless
nighttime sky. Sunlight, rain, summer breezes, and
soil combine to produce gardens filled with leaves,
stems, flowers, bees, butterflies, and an almost
inexhaustible list of other living creatures. We
miss the wonder of a garden when we overlook the
intricacies of their individual structures and the
complexity of their collective interactions when we
describe, or think of, a garden with the few simple
words—flowers, weeds, birds, and bugs—that come
quickly to mind when our summer keeps us too busy to
look out over our gardens with wonder. This Labor
Day weekend might be a good opportunity to
experience the wonder of a summer ripe Wyobraska
garden or a moonless August night.
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