May 5, 2021 Star Watch – Vega rising, Big Dipper overhead
Each “moonth”, I go out to an “away from lights” dark place with a folding chair and sit for several hours, trying to deepen what I see. On May 5th, I decided to go out with a cot instead and spend the entire night. I’m 71 so sleeping is easier if I’m on a cot and have my CPAP (which would need to be powered by a battery). Recently we got this great wagon for hauling things around our homestead so I decided to load it up and pull it out to my dark place. I didn’t get enough sleep but I had lots of time with the stars.
The main takeaway from the night was the profound difference between doing a star watch sitting up vs. lying down. When sitting, I have an up/down orientation. The horizon is the bottom of the sky and the zenith is the top of the sky. This orientation frames all the star maps I’ve formed in my mind. Lying down eliminates this underlying orientation. Instead of being at the top, the zenith is now in front of me in the middle of the sky while the bottom-forming horizon is now all around me. Is the bottom of my star map down toward my feet or up above my head or off to the right? Everything is curving all around and I’m seeing familiar things in unfamiliar upside-down and sideways scatterings. I’m gazing at the entire night side part of space.
I felt this difference most strongly with Polaris, the Pole Star. Whenever I look at Polaris, its within a mental map with a plumb bob line dropping straight down from Polaris to the northern horizon. But when I’m lying down, there is no straight down to direct the plumb bob to a particular point on the horizon. I see only Polaris itself, stripped of the mental processing I’ve built up over the years. Instead of seeing Polaris sitting atop its plumb bob column, I start seeing Polaris more truly, light-years away “out there” in a direction our North Pole (which lies beyond my horizon) points toward.
The best part of the night happened during my first wake-up in the middle of the night. The handle of the Big Dipper arced above me with the minor constellation of Canes Venacti, centered within that arc, at the zenith. At some point I remembered that I had written in “Winter’s Milky Way”: that the Galactic North Pole is centered beneath the handle of the Big Dipper, close to Canes Venacti. Think of the spiral shape of our Milky Way Galaxy as defining a plane. A line through Earth perpendicular to that plane is what we call the Galactic North Pole. Then I realized the implication of the galactic pole pointing up at my zenith. I looked off towards the surrounding horizon and nearly all the constellations I had listed as encircling us in the galactic plane encircled the horizon. I had this delightful realization that, lying on my cot, I was level with the plane of my galaxy. I’m sleeping on level galactic ground. (This experience is partly due to my living at 40° N latitude.) Auriga was to the northwest; that is the direction away from the galactic center. That means the galactic center lay towards the southeast (and that is where Sagittarius rose an hour later). I could see enough relationships to feel my position within the galaxy.
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