After a long drive, after the last colors of sunset have left the landscape, and after a hearty dinner, washed down with the perfect hazy IPA, with barely an hour twixt full darkness and Moonrise, may I be excused as I reach for the automated, for the programmed click of the shutter, twice a minute, that can be automatically assembled into a heavenly carousel of stars? What better way to celebrate a return to starry skies, what better way to visualize what the ancients believed was the diurnal motion of the Celestial Sphere around the Earth? Photographed April 2021.
Brian Rueb from Aperture Academy points milky way rises over Crown Point at Robinson Lakes in the Hoover Wilderness, Eastern Sierras, California. Photographed July 31, 2016.
Olbers’ paradox argues that if the Universe was infinitely old, then the night sky would be as bright as day, as our eyes would intersect a star or an entire galaxy in every direction we looked. The Universe is less than 14 billion years old, and while that may seem like an eternity, it is far short of infinity and so we have dark skies at night… Imagine the pleasure of being so far from city lights that not a hint of the otherwise ubiquitous mercury and sodium glare is visible anywhere, and at an altitude where a full one third of Earth’s atmosphere is beneath you, and what is above was washed clean by an early summer thunderstorm… Imagine a night sky so full of stars that you can see the landscape around you not just in shapes and shadows, but patterns and textures, and if you wait long enough for your eyes to adapt, perhaps even colors. So there I was, having dreamt of this location, of this moonless night, but awestruck nevertheless at the patterns emerging before my eyes as they slowly adapted to the starlit darkness. I wondered, eyes never leaving the perfection of the heavens, if the details I resolved in the Milky Way were really as vivid as they seemed, or were they the result of studying our home galaxy to a greater detail than was ever possible without a telescope or a camera? Did my ancestors, following the trail of the straw thief Vahagn across the sky, resolve the Great Rift into imaginary shapes as did the Inca? What stories did they weave into the dark bands of interstellar gas and dust? I walked back to my tent as Scorpius swung its tail toward the Rift and Antares slowly disappeared behind the nearest peaks… Sunrise was less than four hours away, and like an insatiable madman who cannot tear his gaze from his object of adoration, I had resolved to greet the dawn as I always do when backpacking in the Eastern Sierra…
