STARING AT THE SKY

Rex Burress

I didn't go outside to spend an hour staring at the sky during the August 11-12 Perseid's meteor dust shower. Staring up is hard on the neck anymore, and lying on my back makes for a creaky exercise. I am glad, though, to be able to see the sky with some clarity.

Nevertheless, in honoring my Astronomer son Ben who works at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, I took my walking stick and went out into the particularly dark morning of August 13 at 4:00 A.M. and stared up toward the constellation Perseus. That was a little late for the peak, but after a few minutes I did see a fine shooting star! Actually, those shooting strays can be seen at anytime in the year, but just more pronounced at the predicted time when Earth orbits into established interplanetary left-over comet dust.

I find it uncannily fascinating that such celestial events like the Perseid showing, or even the moon's phases, and planetary orbits, can be predicted accurately. Is there order throughout the Universe? You could say order with chaos, since sun flares, asteroid collisions, supernovae explosions, and Universe expansion all suggest shifting zones. There still is conjecture about the “Big Bang” birth- of-the-Universe theory, which, if true, must have been the most disorderly blast ever imagined. (“And God divided the light from the darkness...” ?)

Why watch things like autumn leaves, or migratory waterfowl, or Perseid trails over and over again year after year? Aside from the possibility of seeing some variance, there is pleasure in welcoming old friends over and over. Stevenson spoke of this when he wrote of rivers; “There is no music like a river's. It plays the same tune over and over again, yet one does not weary of it...”

While I was in the backyard sky watching, I looked up through our tall, incense cedar tree at the sky beyond, and thought of Vincent Van Gogh being inspired by the stars to paint his swirling skies in the famous “Starry Night” painting. Swirling up from the soil, the trees in Van Gogh's unintentional masterpiece are the tall, slender, Italian Cypress. I'm sure that piece of art was painted in the daytime light, and at a time when Van Gogh was committed to a mental institution and had no telescope, plus little astronomical information to verify swirling galaxies and exploding nebulae. Perhaps “vision” would explain his rationale.

Italian cypress are commonly planted around Oroville yards and often line the road to cemeteries, as they did in Italy, and as they do at Cherokee Cemetery where many Italian gold miners are buried. They spiral upward like the Washington Monument all through my neighborhood, occupying a minimum of space.

I'm not sure what species of cypress John Greenleaf Whittier had in mind when he wrote the long poem of “Snowbound,” but it was written in New England in the late 1800's, and suggests the coniferous Gogh trees. In the middle section of the contemplative poem, Whittier addresses life and age, and spoke of; “Alas for him who never sees/The stars shine through the cypress-trees...” That stanza broadly refers to nature watching, including watching rivers, flowers, rocks, stars, and all the rest of the earth-related natural history, plus watching, with intent on really seeing and trying to understand our planetary involvement, both on the land and in the sky.

Discoveries are constantly being discovered in the Cosmos and on the Earth, so keep watching, or as Yogi said, “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.”

--Vincent Van Gogh