out of the blue

Sarah and I drove to the Snake River last night. On the drive there the sun blinded me at intervals, but I managed to stay on the road. By the time we arrived, the sun had set and the moon was perched on the lip of the valley. Sarah set up her algae collectors. Then we walked around looking for a place to watch the sky. We decided on a dock right on the river where we wouldn't have to worry about the sleeping bags getting too dusty.

When I was a kid, my family went to the Oregon Star Party nearly every year. My dad made his own eight-inch Newtonian reflector, and a few years after that we made a smaller four-inch scope for me, complete with a polished wooden tripod. Star parties play host to one of my favorite environments: late at night when everyone is huddled over their star charts with their red-cellophane-covered flashlights, or up on ladders next to the giant forty-inch reflectors hoping not to fall, or simply reclining on lawn chairs like me, falling slowly asleep with the constellations laid out above.

The best part about it is the murmur. A crowd of fifty to two-hundred people, all out there for the purpose of looking at the stars. Finding some of those more obscure galaxies and nebulae is a challenge. You have to rely on reference stars, intuition, and a hefty measure of old-fashioned searching — panning the telescope back and forth across the general area until you stumble across it. So people talk, about theory, about life, about science, about what to look for next. And they are doing it all over this tree-less mountaintop. There's a sense of community about it, an undemanding community built around simple appreciation of the universe. People gathered together to admire the majesty of the night sky.

So Sarah and I lay beneath the stars for a few hours, watching for shooting stars and talking and just being together. We watched Jupiter set and Cassiopia set, we saw Scorpio linger in the southern sky and then drop beneath the horizon. We watched Cygnus fly against the light of the Milky Way, and the Dippers (Ursa Major and Ursa Minor) swing around Polaris. We fell asleep.

When we awoke, the sky had grown lighter and the stars dimmer, although you couldn't tell that the light was coming particularly from the East. Cygnus had spun around and now flew in a different direction. The Big Dipper was nudging the sides of the Snake River Valley. The Pleiades glimmered faintly, but soon were lost to the lightening sky. Sparse herds of high clouds wandered in from the south. After eating some bread, cheese and a peach, we gathered our sleeping bags and pillows and headed back to the car. We climbed the twisting highway out of the valley and wound our way back home. The dawn gathered and threatened to break over the Palouse hills, but we reached Pullman and dropped down to Sarah's place before it happened.

We were safely asleep by the time the sun peeked through her windows.