There is something so absolutely freeing about staring at the stars. For someone who is afraid of the dark, I sure do spend a lot of time looking up into the night sky. The farther away from town I get, the happier I feel. There's so much to see.
The Big and Little Dipper. Orion's belt. The North Star, and meteorites, and shooting stars and sometimes even planets. There's also so much to not see - for example, you can see the galaxy Andromeda by deliberately not looking at it.
What's out there? Did you know that there are four American spacecrafts leaving our Solar System and heading to interstellar space? The furthest one out - Voyager 1 - is more than 11 billion miles from our sun, making it the first manmade object to leave the solar system. It's nuts.
Think of where it is we've been! Of course, this is including robotics. The moon. Comets. Mars. Jupiter's moons. Pluto! Think about it, us, as a generation, have seen the evolution of Pluto's pictures.
How cool is that? Of course, there's so much more to discover. How amazing is it that we can track the nights were the Northern Lights are going to be strongest? How cool is it to look at the news and see that tonight is the peak of a meteor shower?
How on Earth - no pun intended - do people think we're alone out there? I'm not talking stereotypical giant green alien, but just in general. Life. We can't possibly be alone.
How do people not fall in love with the sky at night? You can see the clouds that make up the Milky Way. Even if you can't directly see it, you're seeing so much. Despite the complicated nature of astro-sciences, I wish more people were as passionate about the subject as I am.
Next time you're outside at night, look up. Appreciate the fact that at some point in the future, we won't even have a North Star. The Earth's axis will shift, as it has in the past, as it will continue to do. Consider the fact that there are entire constellations that we will never see, that the other half of the world sees on a regular basis. People don't know what the Big Dipper looks like. I don't know what Canis Major looks like. If I ever travel to the southern hemisphere, the first thing I'll do is find a spot to go look at the stars.
