A Dark and Still Night on Arunah is Neither

For the first time in weeks, a promise of clear dark skies made the call to the hill too much for me to resist. I left my house at sunset, and by the time I turned onto Trouble Street night was started to overtake twilight. A small red fox darted out in front of me and safely made it into the woods with me as I drove up the empty hill, turned off the car, and emerged into the silence of nature. As the sky continued to darken to a velvet black, the silence of the hill turned out to not be so quiet after all.

Once away from the din of cars and trucks and the roar of suburban lawn mowers, the sounds of the night emerge… the cacophony of crickets, tree frogs, and night birds emerge from the silence. Off in the distance an owl announces its presence with authority. In the woods behind the clearing, the scurry of small animals can be heard. I’m sure that owl has heard them to…

Low in the west, Venus is blazing, but with two escorts on this evening. Saturn and Mars are nearby, and offer some stark contrasts in brightness and color to Venus’ glory.

The puffy clouds of the midsummer afternoon gave way, and the beautiful glowing “cloud” of the summer Milky Way emerges. This is what I’d come to see. I scanned the Milky Way, from the brilliant clusters off the stinger of Scorpio, caught the lagoon and Trifid and host of nebula and clusters in Sagittarius, then lingered on the rich star fields in Scutum.

I took a minute to just let the splendor of the summer Milky Way soak in… the rift was sharp in the cooling dry air. I picked up the binoculars again, and grin as I’m surprised by Collinder 399. To me, in binoculars, this cluster is a cosmic joke… it just too perfectly looks like a coat hanger, made up on identical 7th magnitude stars.

I completed my tour of the summer Milky Way, concluding with a game but failed try to pick out the North American Nebula. The whole area seems glowing to me, I can’t positively identify the object. The only time I’ve glimpsed this elusive object is under dark skies of Texas, and even then I needed on O3 filter.

After straining to see dim objects, I’m amazed at how bright the clearing looked. I could easily followthe road past the warming hut, and noticed the tall stack of firewood we’ve got aside it. The lesson is a dark night isn’t dark if you let the amazing human eye-brain adjust to it, and the night isn’t quiet, once you remove the sounds of civilization you hear the richness of nature.

Too soon a rising 3rd quarter moon put an end to my dark sky fun, though it put on its own moonrise dance show as it climbed through distant trees.

For a few quick hours on the hill, just me and the sky with my trusty old binoculars, the year could have been 2010 or just as easily been 1710 or hopefully 2110. A nice way to connect with nature and the wondrous universe we live in.