Moments of wonder, to see and remember A STORY WORTH TELLING
“Sun, moon and starry sky early summer evenings, when the first stars come out, the warm glow of sunset still stains the rim of the western sky. Sometimes, the moon is also visible, a pale white slice, while the sun tarries. Just think — all the celestial lights are present at the same time! These are moments of wonder — see them and remember.”
— Vera Nazarian ESC1361 Astronomy was a filler class, a last-minute pick because I was three hours short of graduation at East Texas State University years ago.
But it fit my schedule and allowed me to graduate.
That decision left me with a love for everything celestial and a deeper appreciation and insatiable curiosity about the wonder we call “the heavens.” The classroom hours were anything but easy, but the labs were a blast.
“Classes” in the dark of East Texas nights in a field somewhere outside of Commerce involved observing stars, planets, constellations and more.
Fast-forward about 25 years to Hill Country starry nights, where I enjoyed evening conversations and cooking outside with my kids on the back porch at our house just above the Medina River near Pipe Creek.
“The stars are beautiful,” said daughter Robin, then about 15 or 16 years old.
“They are,” I agreed. “It’s hard to believe that night-sky universe just goes on forever, without end.”
Silence prevailed as I watched the stars twinkle while Robin processed what I had just said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“The sky, the heavens, space,” I replied with a shrug. “It’s infinite — never ends.”
More silence.
“Dad, it has to end somewhere.” “Nope.”
“How can that be?” she asked, her voice rising.
“OK, let’s say there is a stop sign a couple billion light years past planet Pluto,” I tested her. “What is beyond that sign? There is no such thing as nothing in space.”
“Mind-boggling,” Robin said slowly.
“It’s like time,” I said. “There never has been a time before time. Time has always been.”
“Aww, Dad, come on. This is too much for one night,” Robin said. “It’s hurting my brain.”
Fast forward once more to last Thursday night. As I contemplated turning in for the evening, one last check of messages revealed several about the northern lights.
Solar storms created an aurora typically seen in high-latitude regions but rarely visible in Texas, but they were happening over the state at that very moment.
A scan of the sky from my front porch revealed nothing— zilch.
“Good,” I thought.
“I’m ready for bed anyway.” I checked my phone one more time and found images posted from Shelby County with the words: “You can’t see them with the naked eye. But they show up in photos.”
OK, I’m a lifelong photographer. Never had I ever captured a picture of something I couldn’t see. The universe is infinite, and time has infinitely, well … been time.
But you can’t take a photo of something you can’t view. To prove my theory, I marched back outside, pointed my cellphone camera toward the east and above the streetlights, and pulled the trigger with a smirk.
“Unbelievable,” I muttered when I saw it on the screen. Red-, blue- and green-tinted arches blended into a solid black sky. I looked back at the night in disbelief. Yep, it was black. Several more experimental photos of “darkness” yielded an array of colors that I could not see otherwise. I was super excited. After sending images to a friend to celebrate my findings, I was on the edge of town 10 minutes later, looking for fewer lights, fewer trees and better results.
The phenomenon was the same. Aim at a black patch of sky, snap a photo and … voila! Beautiful views of celestial sightings on my camera.
It was breathtaking to capture pictures of “the northern lights a-runnin’ wild,” to borrow from Johnny Horton’s classic 1960s song.
Standing under an East Texas night’s blanket of darkness collecting images last week, I remembered nights in Northeast Texas long ago, peering through a telescope into an endless universe of heavenly bodies for college credit. And I also thought about my daughter’s attempts to comprehend the infinity of space and time. Like her, this night was almost too much; it was hurting my brain.
Plus, I had to consider the pictures of celestial occurrences in an infinite universe that I could not observe with the naked eye but could easily photograph.
Truly “moments of wonder” to see and remember.
