THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
70 Falmouth Street Portland, Maine 04103
43.6667° N 70.2667° W
Altitude: 10 feet below sea level
Founded January 1970
2021-2022: LXXXI
"It is good to love the unknown."
-Charles Lamb
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Thursday, February 10, 2022
Stars on the Window
They appear when you light a candle and place it next to the ice encrusted glass. How like an intricate spider's web it seems: a labyrinth of glistening crystals. They are simple water droplets trapped in a winter's sleep. At the first touch of the spring Sun they'll awaken and with a silent swoop ascend into the chilled blue sky. Soon those drops will once again slide down tropical waterfalls and splash about in gushing rapids. Right now, however, they're nestling together to dream away a dormant night.
You should be dreaming now, Miranda, but you're not. Instead you're silhouetted against the celestial lights. A small head peering up into the night world. A perfect cherub, your little bulging cheek arcs made lustrous by moonlight. My stern lecture about the prudence of sufficient sleep was to no avail. The cosmos summoned you and and for now you yearn to be part of the midnight realm. No matter. I can sleep at work.
Look. If we blow gently at the candle flame, the stars on the window will dance and twinkle, just as the real stars do in response to the breaths of planet Earth.
But, how to explain them?
Look at the sparkles along the snow. Let's spread our arms out over the lawn to turn the world into a sphere of glass. We now see as many stars below as above.
How easily could we pluck them from the sky and pick them off the ground to bejewel the bedroom?
Not at all.
If we drove in our car for a hundred full lifetimes one after another toward the closest one, at the end it would still be little more than a bright pinpoint of light.
But, they're so small. We could cup them in our hands like diamonds.
Not at all.
Some are so large that if they were put in the Sun's place, we, here in this house, would be tucked away deep inside them: tens of millions of miles below their surfaces.
But, we feel no heat from them. They're so cold.
Not at all.
They are other Suns casting furious heat onto their own worlds, awakening the water droplets and making them fly. We don't feel their heat for the same reason we don't feel the flames of the hearth fires currently burning in cozy Arctic homes.
Blow out the candle and the stars on the window will vanish. We could blow on the stars and they would wink out of sight.
Not at all.
Think of a world's age: the time that passes between Earth's formation out of the swarm of planetesimals five billion years ago to the time when it will become a cinder billions of years from now. Take a hundred of those world's ages one after another after another. At the end of the last one, most of the stars would still remain, albeit in middle age. Not old, mind you. Middle aged stars still bristle with vitality, just like middle aged humans do, provided they aren't sleep deprived.
But, there is nothing around them. They are blinking at us in emptiness.
Not at all.
Put your ear to the floor and listen. Can you hear that? The swoosh and slide of dog sleds running across the tundra far away in the perpetual Polar night. Hear our neighbor's wind chimes coaxing harmony out of the winds. Now look through the glass Earth below to Sydney and Tokyo and Jakarta: bustling, unsleeping, growing and pulsing. Life. Life in every nook, niche and cranny within a tiny hollow around the Sun. Who knows how many such hollows have formed around those other stars? How many other beings are out of bed and admiring the boundless star fields above?
You're not listening to a word I say.
You're watching and thinking.
Real stardust fashioned your eyes that now look upon those stars; the same stardust that formed the brain striving to comprehend them. So, you're trying in some manner to rejoin with the source...at 1:15 in the morning.
Ok, Miranda, you continue to engage in the purest form of astronomy and I will lie back and watch the stars on the window. One of us is bound to fall asleep eventually.
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