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LJ Idol Exhibit B.9: Finding serenity...
Until I went outside to look for the Northern Lights at a few minutes past midnight a couple of nights ago, I hadn’t really realized just how civilized our little corner of the desert steppe here in Kazakhstan had become, for now there were lights along most of the roads and walking paths of our area, which meant that many fewer places where one could look up at the night sky and get a good look at the stars without the lights effectively washing them out of the sky.
Most people don’t think about star-gazing much (if they think about it at all), but it likely strikes them as a pretty staid pastime. And while it's true that the deliberate contemplation—even with the unaided eye—of the objects adorning the inverted bowl of night provides an easy avenue to a state of serenity, that state is almost always punctuated by phenomena that draw the observer's attention.
I happened to be in Kazakhstan a few years ago as well, on another launch campaign, when I struck up an acquaintance with the campaign's senior manager. As it turned out, he and I shared similar backgrounds (engineering), grew up in the same part of the country (more or less), enjoyed watching Firefly (among other shows), and had worked during a number of years with roughly the same circle of people in the aerospace industry (he as an executive and entrepreneur, and I as an interpreter and translator).
We also shared an interest in what happens in the sky above, although in this department, his knowledge outstripped mine. He introduced me to "Iridium flares," which occur when sunlight is reflected from one of the highly reflective antennas on one of numerous Iridium satellites (which orbit at an altitude of about 500 miles) onto a point on the earth. If you are in just the right place and are looking in just the right direction, you'll see a bright light appear in the sky for a few seconds and then quickly fade (this can even happen in broad daylight, as the brightest flares are about 100 times as bright as Venus when that planet appears in our sky). These flares can be very jarring if you don't know what you're looking at.
One mid-August evening during that campaign, we killed some time over a couple of beers, chatting about nothing in particular, until well past midnight when it seemed feasible to go outside and see if there were any Perseid meteors to be observed. We grabbed a couple of chairs, went out the front gate of the hotel, found a place about 40 yards down the road where we would be out of the glare of the hotel's lights, seated ourselves in the middle of the road, and looked up toward the constellation Perseus (from which the name Perseid is derived for this meteor shower).
We did see a number of meteors, but not the 60-80 per hour that had been predicted, and even though we were observing a few hours after the "published" peak had occurred, the Perseid shower actually occurs over a period of a couple of weeks, not a couple of hours, so anything is possible. We continued to chat as we sat, and were distracted at one point by some Russian voices from some distance away, but after a few moments, it appeared that some of our Russian colleagues had simply stepped outside to grab a smoke.
Redirecting my gaze upward, I noticed a star that seemed to be moving slowly away from another, neighboring star, but so slowly that I wasn't sure it was actually moving (I thought perhaps it was an optical illusion, the result of staring at two points of light for too long). Then my acquaintance said, "Hey, will you look at that!" It turned out he was looking at the same point of light. A few seconds later, the moving star winked out, which would suggest it was a satellite that had passed into the earth's shadow, but as it was after one in the morning, that also suggested the satellite was in a sharply inclined orbit. Or perhaps it was a UFO? (Technically, it was, as far as we were concerned, because we could not identify the object.) We didn't have much time to think about it, in any event, as it had became apparent that the Russian voices we had heard earlier were now moving in our direction. I noted, in passing, that the owners of those voices would not pass any kind of sobriety test.
So now imagine, dear reader, that you have been celebrating a bit with friends and have now decided to walk back to your hotel room along a road where there is no traffic, at a time of night when all normal people in nearby buildings are sound asleep. Now imagine that, as you walk along, you almost literally walk into two indistinct figures sitting quietly on chairs faced in your direction in the middle of what is a particularly dark stretch of road.
The chatter stopped abruptly. We had been discovered.
I toyed with the kafkaesque idea of growling the Russian equivalent of "Hand over your papers!"—but only for a millisecond or two. Instead, I said "Good evening," even though it was well past midnight. The newcomers approached warily, and then recognized us and we all shook hands (apparently, one of the Russians had played basketball with my acquaintance a few days previously), and a short conversation ensued. All's well, as they say, that ends well, but I will tell you, just between us, that every member of that homeward-bound group had been sharply yanked in the direction of "more sober" upon spying us like that in the middle of the road.
So while it's almost certain that all the new lights in our area were installed to address safety concerns, I could not help but wonder, as I sought a dark stretch of road couple of nights ago to view an aurora that wasn't there, if—among those concerns—there might have been a strong desire on the part of a decision-maker or two to avoid ever again bumping into shadowy figures while walking home in the dark.
Most people don’t think about star-gazing much (if they think about it at all), but it likely strikes them as a pretty staid pastime. And while it's true that the deliberate contemplation—even with the unaided eye—of the objects adorning the inverted bowl of night provides an easy avenue to a state of serenity, that state is almost always punctuated by phenomena that draw the observer's attention.
I happened to be in Kazakhstan a few years ago as well, on another launch campaign, when I struck up an acquaintance with the campaign's senior manager. As it turned out, he and I shared similar backgrounds (engineering), grew up in the same part of the country (more or less), enjoyed watching Firefly (among other shows), and had worked during a number of years with roughly the same circle of people in the aerospace industry (he as an executive and entrepreneur, and I as an interpreter and translator).
We also shared an interest in what happens in the sky above, although in this department, his knowledge outstripped mine. He introduced me to "Iridium flares," which occur when sunlight is reflected from one of the highly reflective antennas on one of numerous Iridium satellites (which orbit at an altitude of about 500 miles) onto a point on the earth. If you are in just the right place and are looking in just the right direction, you'll see a bright light appear in the sky for a few seconds and then quickly fade (this can even happen in broad daylight, as the brightest flares are about 100 times as bright as Venus when that planet appears in our sky). These flares can be very jarring if you don't know what you're looking at.
One mid-August evening during that campaign, we killed some time over a couple of beers, chatting about nothing in particular, until well past midnight when it seemed feasible to go outside and see if there were any Perseid meteors to be observed. We grabbed a couple of chairs, went out the front gate of the hotel, found a place about 40 yards down the road where we would be out of the glare of the hotel's lights, seated ourselves in the middle of the road, and looked up toward the constellation Perseus (from which the name Perseid is derived for this meteor shower).
We did see a number of meteors, but not the 60-80 per hour that had been predicted, and even though we were observing a few hours after the "published" peak had occurred, the Perseid shower actually occurs over a period of a couple of weeks, not a couple of hours, so anything is possible. We continued to chat as we sat, and were distracted at one point by some Russian voices from some distance away, but after a few moments, it appeared that some of our Russian colleagues had simply stepped outside to grab a smoke.
Redirecting my gaze upward, I noticed a star that seemed to be moving slowly away from another, neighboring star, but so slowly that I wasn't sure it was actually moving (I thought perhaps it was an optical illusion, the result of staring at two points of light for too long). Then my acquaintance said, "Hey, will you look at that!" It turned out he was looking at the same point of light. A few seconds later, the moving star winked out, which would suggest it was a satellite that had passed into the earth's shadow, but as it was after one in the morning, that also suggested the satellite was in a sharply inclined orbit. Or perhaps it was a UFO? (Technically, it was, as far as we were concerned, because we could not identify the object.) We didn't have much time to think about it, in any event, as it had became apparent that the Russian voices we had heard earlier were now moving in our direction. I noted, in passing, that the owners of those voices would not pass any kind of sobriety test.
So now imagine, dear reader, that you have been celebrating a bit with friends and have now decided to walk back to your hotel room along a road where there is no traffic, at a time of night when all normal people in nearby buildings are sound asleep. Now imagine that, as you walk along, you almost literally walk into two indistinct figures sitting quietly on chairs faced in your direction in the middle of what is a particularly dark stretch of road.
The chatter stopped abruptly. We had been discovered.
I toyed with the kafkaesque idea of growling the Russian equivalent of "Hand over your papers!"—but only for a millisecond or two. Instead, I said "Good evening," even though it was well past midnight. The newcomers approached warily, and then recognized us and we all shook hands (apparently, one of the Russians had played basketball with my acquaintance a few days previously), and a short conversation ensued. All's well, as they say, that ends well, but I will tell you, just between us, that every member of that homeward-bound group had been sharply yanked in the direction of "more sober" upon spying us like that in the middle of the road.
So while it's almost certain that all the new lights in our area were installed to address safety concerns, I could not help but wonder, as I sought a dark stretch of road couple of nights ago to view an aurora that wasn't there, if—among those concerns—there might have been a strong desire on the part of a decision-maker or two to avoid ever again bumping into shadowy figures while walking home in the dark.
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Loved reading this anecdote :)
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Wish you could come to Australia sometime and see the southern Milky Way. You'd love it. When we camped out last Easter weekend on Whitsunday islands, the view was just spectacular - the nearest human-made lights were at least 20 km away. Our neighbour, a very excited young Brit, set up his DSLR camera on a tripod on the beach, and was playing with the settings. It's amazing just how many more stars his camera picked up, the sky was almost solid white in the centre of Milky way! And all those stars are coloured - red, blue, green, even pink or purple.
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Here we have to drive a fair bit to see much in the way of stars -- the apartment complex has security lights, and there are businesses around us with their own lights.
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Too bad the experience didn't encourage the men who stumbled across you to drink less rather than regulate more. ;)
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It was only for a few seconds, and there were no other cars, and it was a long, straight stretch of road. She was a chicken. :)
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I love this. So much.
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