I was camping in northern New Mexico one year, and when I say camping, it was walk 20 miles into the woods with a pack camping, and so we were in the middle of nowhere, with no artificial lighting around, and it was in August at the time of the Perseid meteor shower, which is usually one of the best meteor showers of the year, with normal output of around 100 meteors an hour, and sometimes as high as 250 an hour. So, we stayed up late, and walked into a meadow, away from our campfire and just watched as meteor after meteor entered and burned up in the earths atmosphere. But these were just little displays, we were watching them streak by lasting for 7-10 seconds, and not just one doing that, but dozens. Until we went to see the total eclipse this year, it was by far the most amazing astronomical phenomenon, or show, that I had ever seen. And it is something that we are normally separated from because of the ambient light, or light pollution, that is always around us, that drowns out the night sky. There are people who have never really seen the stars at night, have never experienced the brilliance of the Milky Way being splayed out across the sky, have never seen thousands of stars shining, maybe never have even seen a hundred stars. There was a truck commercial this fall in which a father gives his daughter a telescope, and then realizing that she couldn’t really see the stars, he takes her in his nice new truck out to the forest so she can gaze at the sky, of course he then leaves the headlights and the interior lights and the light in the bed of the truck on, which sort of defeats the purpose of getting away from lights, but did show off the truck really well, although I don’t know which brand, and so I’m not sure how effective it really was.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. We don’t have to go back very far in our history to a time in which they night was not perpetually lit all around us. When people paid attention to what was happening in the sky, and depended upon knowing because often their lives or livelihood depended upon it and they couldn’t get up in the morning and ask google or Siri what the weather was going to be that day. The 19th Psalm begins, “The heavens the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.” (psalm 19:1-4 NIV) I think that Calvin is right, and that’s not John Calvin, but Calvin and Hobbes, that if we spent more time looking at the stars, of seeing the splendor and wonder of creation, that we might all live a little differently, or at least approach how we live differently.
