According to the World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness a full 80% of the world’s population lives under skies dimmed by light pollution. Some 90% of people in the United States and Europe cannot see the full beauty of the night sky on a clear night.
What a gift it is to walk out under the night sky of the Apostle Islands or drift quietly aboard the Little Dipper and just turn your head to the sky. It is as if a door opens, a curtain goes up, and what is revealed is wonder. We could talk about the Bortle Scale measuring the darkness of the night sky on a scale of 1 to 9, or about how light pollution is increasing an estimated 10 percent in this country every year.
But this is not a night for numbers. I think instead of Walt Whitman’s short but powerful poem:
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,/ When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,/ When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,/ When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,/ Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,/ In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. — Walt Whitman.
Let’s forget the charts and diagrams for just this one night. Let’s us too just wander in the mystical night and look up at the stars.
— Jeff Rennicke
(These Sunday postcards from the Apostle Islands are an offshoot of the Little Dipper blog. Paid subscribers receive not only these short postcards every Sunday but also a full illustrated essay every Wednesday. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. If not, click below and join us on the journey.")
Thank you very much for this wonderful postcard! And a special thanks for the mystical words of Walt Whitman along with a nod to Van Morrison.