Astronomy, The Stars!
Though I'm talking about actual astronomy, not the Blue Öyster Cult song.
Do you remember college? Surely you were sober for at least part of the time. Then there are people like me who were sober the whole time. Yeah, I know.
I can still remember sitting in a semester planning meeting with my college advisor around 2008. I expressed interest in taking an astronomy class, even though I was well into my history degree. Professor Blackman reminded me that such a class would be more than just, and I’m paraphrasing, “looking up at the sky and going, oh there’s Cassiopeia.”
I never took the class.
I was actually good at science and math. I got a 5/5 on the Advanced Placement Calculus I test, a fact that later shocked my math major friend who had only gotten a 3. My very first semester in college, I had a GPA of 3.41 in my calculus II, chemistry, and chemistry lab classes… and a (wait for it) 1.77 in all my other classes.1
I managed to pull my shit together well enough to keep my scholarship for all four years and graduate on time. Yet, despite the natural acuity for math and science—I’ve also been a huge stats nerd for more than 20 years at this point—I went the liberal arts path for my major.
I’m not here to second-guess that track. Maybe another time. No, this post is just about how cool outer space is.
Spacecraft
It was 2005 (or maybe early 2006). Twitter did not exist yet, and Facebook was only just leaving the Ivy League schools. But by the time I started undergraduate work, Wikipedia was already in action, and it was there I learned about two astronomical events that were to happen in what seemed like forever into the future: 2015 and 2017. Now those seem like forever into the past.
The 2015 event was the flyby of the New Horizons mission to Pluto, which made its closest approach on July 14. The spacecraft launched on January 19, 2006, at which time the best image we had of Pluto was this one from the Hubble Telescope:
Nine years later, the spaceship flew by Pluto at a distance of about 7,800 miles—less than the diameter of the Earth—and we got this pic:
I admit, I’m a sucker for these images and less so for the hard science that is the main purpose of these missions. But damn, what an improvement, huh? Not to mention its moon, Charon:
To be fair, the scientists themselves are kind of suckers for pretty pictures, too. Human nature, I guess.
We haven’t quite reached the point where we are closer to the flyby than the flyby was to the launch, but it’s less than a year away and will happen on January 5, 2025. Time flies (by) when you’re having fun.
Much closer to home but no less mesmerizing is the International Space Station (ISS), which is visible from Earth. It travels the Earth’s circumference every 90 minutes, but the latitude changes with each pass, and the brightness and duration of visibility vary based on its exact latitude. Rarely, it passes almost directly overhead.
I try to watch it whenever viewing is particularly great. When it’s more than 45 degrees up (halfway between the horizon and the “zenith”, or top of the sky), it’s particularly easy to see. And it can reach magnitudes of the mid -4’s, which is brighter the Venus. It’s usually visible for anywhere between 2 and 7 minutes. There’s an app simply called “ISS Detector” that you can use to be notified when it will pass by your location.
But the ISS is coming down eventually, too, in 2031. When I was in college, seven years felt like a long time. Now it feels like tomorrow.
Eclipses
I have scheduled this post to go out on April 8, 2024. I am not home; I am preparing to view the solar eclipse in either Ohio or New York, we’re not sure yet as I schedule this post—it ultimately depends on where the most favorable weather forecast is.
This will be the second, and possibly last, total solar eclipse I see in my life, unless I start traveling internationally to see more of them.2 The first time was the other space event I was reading about on Wikipedia around 2005–06: the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017.
In 2017, when totality (the time the moon completely blocks direct sunlight) lasted not even 3 minutes, I decided to just take in the view instead of snapping a photo. Totality during this 2024 eclipse lasts over 4 minutes; hopefully I manage one or two decent photos and can share them as the “Pic Of The Week” on Tax Day.
Comets
Two is also the number of comets I’ve seen with my unaided eye: Hale-Bopp in 1997, which 10-year-old me remembers being totally spectacular, and the less-famous NEOWISE in 2020.
We spotted NEOWISE twice. The first time it was a naked-eye object just above a ridgeline. Then, even after it had disappeared from the naked eye, my dad and I spent a night trying to find it with our Newtonian telescope, knowing its location among the stars, but not having any way to find it except scan the sky manually. And, eventually, we got it! Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out taking pictures through a telescope, but I never got one with the naked eye either.
The comet I wish I could have seen but never did was McNaught in 2006—that college time period again. McNaught was visible at northern latitudes, but its best show came in the Southern Hemisphere, where the photographs are amazing.
Photography
Speaking of photographs: I am not the world’s greatest photographer, let alone at night. But if you have a tripod and can figure out how to do long exposure times on your cell phone, it’s pretty easy to actually capture a photograph of the stars (instead of just blank darkness) without even buying a dedicated camera. I know this because I’ve done it with my unremarkable Android phone.
Talented astronomy photographs learn “stacking” and all sorts of other tricks to take the best photos. But even a single exposure at the right settings can impress friends and family.
Orion
And then there’s plain old stargazing. Astronomy, among my interests, is perhaps the most predictable as to when it will come and when it will go. It peaks in the winter, namely when Orion starts rising just after sunset, and starts to ebb as Orion sets earlier and earlier in the night.
To bring this back full circle, I still remember wistfully looking up at Orion—not Cassiopeia—many a time near the end of a fall semester. Stargazing is the most passive from of astronomy, but at the same time it can be one of the most relaxing. But there is a whole world of other worlds out there, too.
Your Turn
Do you have any favorite astronomy pastimes? Or any different pastimes that evoke similar memories in you that astronomy does in me?
An honors class (B+), my school’s rhetoric program (C), and Latin (F). That F is a very long story.
I’ve never done the exact math breakdown on that before now, moving on as quickly from the 2.54 overall GPA as I could. It’s still pretty jarring seeing the split numbers.
The next total solar eclipse to significantly traverse the United States will be in 2045.
Man I remember the first time I saw that hi-res picture of Pluto, it blew my mind. Did not expect it to be red!
Although I would like Nate to cover some BOC pieces, this was another great read. Nicely done!