One of the Best Days I Can Remember
A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the Milky Way.~ Carl Sagan
One of the best days (actually, nights) I can remember was on September 10, 2018, the occasion that year for celebrating my 70th birthday.
Aware of my growing passion for observing and photographing the Milky Way (I’d taken this shot one month earlier, for example, near the town of Ramah, one hour east of Colorado Springs)…
…my daughters Claire (and her husband Garren) and Laurie arranged for the four of us (my wife Carol’s eye infection at the time sadly forbade her joining us) to toast my 70th by experiencing and shooting this starry spectacle together. The fact that this was the first time for the three of them to behold clearly, under ideal conditions, the majesty of our 400-billion-star galaxy enriched this birthday (actually, this “birthnight”) for me and for them beyond measure!
Planning
Maximizing our chance of a successful experience required careful planning as to the location and timing of our stargazing:
Location: Westcliffe, CO (a “Dark Sky Community”)
Light Pollution. Until 100 years ago, prior to invention of the incandescent electric lamp, the Milky Way could be easily viewed in the night sky virtually anywhere in the United States. Sadly, since then – owing to urban proliferation of artificial light pollution (“skyglow”) produced by streetlights, outdoor advertising, homes, car headlights, airports, etc. – the Milky Way is now visible to only 20% of Americans.
Dark Sky Communities. In response, the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA; https://www.darksky.org) was created in 1988 to promote “protection of the nighttime environment and dark night skies by educating policymakers and the public about night sky conservation and promoting environmentally responsible outdoor lighting.”
The Association designates an area as a “Dark Sky Community” if it has exhibited “exceptional dedication to the preservation of the night sky though implementation of a quality outdoor lighting ordinance, dark sky education, and citizen support of dark skies.”
Currently, 25 sites in America (and seven more worldwide) are IDA-recognized dark sky communities.
Westcliffe, CO. We who live in Colorado Springs are fortunate to be less than two hours away by car, to the southwest, from a dark sky community comprised of two rural, high-elevation (7,800 ft.), contiguous towns – Westcliffe and Silver Cliff – cradled between (and shielded from urban light pollution by) the Wet Mountain and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges.
Claire, Laurie, Garren, and I settled on Westcliffe as the location for our date with the Milky Way. This was where photography buddy Roger and I had shot the stars once before, under the tutelage of Colorado Springs’ premier night-sky photo tour leader, Mike Pach.
Timing: The Importance of “New Moon”
Though my birthday falls on the 1st of September, we postponed celebrating until the 10th to coincide with that month’s “new moon.” This lunar phase is, in effect, “no moon,” in that the lunar surface becomes completely dark in the night sky on an average of every 29.5 days.
The darkness bestowed by September 10th’s new moon further enhanced our chance of clearly viewing the Milky Way in Westcliffe – provided that there would be minimal to no cloud cover overhead. As local weather conditions were out of our control, we considered various strategies (animal sacrifice was judged impractical) for appeasing the weather gods, settling on crossing our fingers – happily, as will be shown, with stellar success!
Celebrating
To qualify as a dark sky community, all of a town’s outdoor light fixtures must have overhead covers that prevent “light trespass” upward into the sky.
All of Westcliffe’s outdoor lights were in compliance with this ordinance, so it mattered not where Claire, Laurie, Garren, and I set up shop in the area for stargazing. After exploring possible venues in the late afternoon, we decided on a vacant barnyard in a nearby ranch that would afford a wide vista of the southern sky.
Following checking in at the Westcliffe Inn and dining royally (literally) at nearby Alpine Lodge, we waited with fingers crossed for darkness to descend, then headed out to our viewing location at 11:00 pm.
Dark sky community? – check! New moon? – check!! Unclouded sky? – check!!! The trifecta!!! The stars were aligned in our favor! Crossing our fingers had worked!
As we acclimated to the silent darkness enveloping our barnyard while setting up our photography gear, the grand show began in a way that we could never have anticipated:
The opening act was solely auditory. To our surprise, out of the black stillness emerged faint sounds of a horse’s hooves clippity-clopping on a gravel road, growing ever louder as they approached our location…, then grinding sounds of horse-drawn carriage wheels rolling over gravel…, then German-sounding conversing among the carriage’s human inhabitants… Wha?? Amish? Here? Yes! We learned later that Westcliffe had become home to a thriving Amish settlement. In compliance with dark sky community guidelines as well as conservative Amish directives, the carriage that we heard had no lights, and so we could only imagine what it, the horse, and the people inside looked like, as they passed close by – oblivious to our presence – and journeyed on to their destination.
Then, at 11:30 pm, the solely visual, main attraction of the grand show began! To our delight and relief, out of the ubiquitous darkness emerged faint, sporadic pinpoints of light in the southern sky…, growing ever brighter…, then dozens…, then hundreds…, then thousands…, then tens of thousands…, then surely millions of tiny (to us) suns! The Milky Way!! Our galaxy – our home – rising to the occasion, majestically towering 100,000 light-years straight up into the heavens!!
There were no words for any of this. We simply silently cultivated awareness of our experience in that endless moment… mesmerized, yet fully awake… consciously conscious… unclouded by thought… alert to subtlety… attending… accepting… being without doing… clear that we were four, yet one…
In that instant, I flashed back to my youth in the 1950’s on the sandy shores of Ocean City, MD, where on clear nights, time also stood still as the stars silently whispered timeless, comforting words to me and my parents, like these from Desiderata:
You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding the way it should.
And, in that same instant, I flashed forward to August 21, 2017, where on a grassy airstrip in Glendo, WY, Roger and I experienced our first total solar eclipse in the bright light of day. For 2½ minutes, while all but the sun’s corona was concealed behind the moon, time stood still, as our warm, sunny midday yielded to cool, starry night that enveloped and silenced us, enlightened and transformed us. Wordless, we and the 100,000 others present gazed up not as separate individuals, but as one, there and then, here and now…
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, in the world of clock time, by 12:30 am there was little left to do other than commemorate the event with shots of the evening’s “co-stars” Claire, Garren, and Laurie bidding the grand show goodnight…
… after which we called it a night, packed up, and returned to the Westcliffe Inn to sleep the sleep of the just overwhelmed (in a very good way).
So: one of the best days I can remember? That would be the most stellar night of September 10, 2018, the occasion for celebrating my 70th birthday and infinitely more.
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere…
Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset…on sea and continents and islands,
each in its turn, as the round Earth rolls.~ John Muir
