On Idaho’s Snake River there’s little light pollution at night to dim the stars of a December sky. The moon is bright, but when its absent the skies are so black we qualify for an IDSP (International Dark Sky Place). Sometimes, after supper when the sun’s set, I’ll walk down the gravel road near my home. A miner’s light around the top of my head helps me see in the early evening dark. At least once on my walk I reach up and click my headlight off. Then I look up and stare into the vast sky above me. The spray of stars littering deep space are astonishing.
As the song says, all is calm, all is bright.
One night many years ago I was watching the sky and saw a remarkable thing. All the stars were twinkling except one. It was a white smudge of chalk on a mostly dark canvas. I went back inside the house to get a jacket and my binoculars. Through the binoculars I could easily see the tail of this “star.” The year was 1986, and I was viewing something people see only once every seventy-five years or so: Halley’s Comet.
Asleep in our beds we miss so much in the night sky. About ten years after seeing Halley’s Comet I was jogging in the early morning dark, and suddenly the sky lit up like broad daylight. It was so bright I could see our neighbor’s house a quarter of a mile away. I stopped jogging a moment and just stood there in the middle of the road, awestruck. The natural world took notice of the sudden light too. The perennial rustling of ducks, birds, and other wildlife along the river hushed, and the only sound I heard was the gentle lapping of the Snake along its banks.
At first I thought this strange phenomenon was an aurora borealis, something you’re more likely to see in Alaska or northern Canada.
The Snake River flood plain is not really in the auroral zone. It was probably a meteor streaking through space and blazing out somewhere above me in earth’s outer atmosphere. If I was from an ancient civilization, a nomadic culture for example, living somewhere in the Middle East, I might have thought this flaming star—a sign.
Others have noticed the spectacular night sky here on the Snake River. In the next valley over, the Bruneau Sand Dunes State Park has a public observatory and hosts star shows March through October. I’ve seen the rings of Saturn and fantastical nebulae formations through their big “Obsession” telescope. But much can be seen here with just the naked eye. There’s been several dark mornings this December when you can see Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter lined up below the big moon like obedient children. I have to remind myself that Jupiter actually has a radius eleven time larger than earth.
Sometimes, I think about space travel and whether or not we’ll ever be able to live on Mars. I’ve never wanted to leave earth, but I worry about the devastating effects of climate change. There is no “Planet B” though. Scientific and international reports on the environment have made this very clear.