Saying thank you to the stars

I started writing this post way back in August when I had been lying on the beach in Walberswick and looking up at the stars. This was something that Cro and I had done for years on the clear summer nights in Walberswick, but I had always sought out the stars even before I met Cro. There is something primal about lying on a dark summer lawn or beach and watching the stars slowly and silently slide across the blackness above you. It almost makes you dizzy. 

To see good enough stars to need your thanks, you have to get the right combination. You need a place that is properly dark and not polluted with the light spilling over from our electric lives. Walberswick does this well, but there are pools of darkness in the unlikeliest places. Our garden in Woodbridge will always show you the Milky Way when the sky is dark enough. I have even seen shooting stars from a pub garden in the middle of London. It is luck. 

You also need a clear sky with no moon for preference, or a very low or partial moon that will not blast away the starlight. Sometimes all of that comes together and you have a sky full of stars and clear air. 

You start out just craning your head back, but then realise that lying on your back will save your neck. You also realise at some point that the beach shingle that has been warmed during the day is still very comfortable until midnight and an excellent vantage point. Eventually, we graduated to really snazzy reclining chairs (sunloungers) which turn out to be even better starloungers, and which were quickly grabbed if we stepped away for a few minutes. 

The starry sky itself has much more going on in it than you first suspect. You will always see some aircraft's lights over this country, and after a minute or two you spot the first satellite sliding across the sky. There are dozens, hundreds of these and you will not go more than a couple of minutes without spotting another one. The stars themselves are the main show, but what always blew my mind was that if you got a star chart you found out that some of the white blobs were not individual stars, but more distant entire galaxies, with millions of stars in them. The numbers are not accessible to a human mind, and again it makes you feel dizzy. 

The biggest show in the starry sky during our August stay was always the meteor shower of the Perseids, one of the best of the year, and which often will provide thirty or forty meteors in an hour of watching. They are mainly racing white spots of light, coming at different angles across the sky, but occasionally you will see a real peach of a meteor, with a smoking trail behind it, and sometimes a coloured smoking trail. The best one we ever saw was about twenty years ago, very bright and with a smoky green trail behind, flying very low across the sky low over the marshes. 

What do you think of when watching these stars? Well it always made me dizzy with the thought of all those other Suns with their own solar system and surely somewhere a creature looking up at our tiny distant Sun. And knowing that the stars here were just the bright ones, but that as you used more powerful binoculars, there would always be more and more stars in between the easy ones, so that actually the sky looks more white than black when you see it magnified powerfully.

I also used to think of the time scales of these specks of light, which had been there since before humans or even life appeared here on Earth, and which will still be there if and when life disappears from this planet. 

And, in my current circumstances, it is comforting to know that all the stuff of the Universe gets redistributed over eons and that in fact when Joni Mitchell sang 'We are Stardust', she was saying no more than the literal truth.  So the points of light that we look up at as we lie on this Earth will, in billions of years when this Earth is not here to lie on, contain the molecules of we who are doing the looking right now.