Sedona is one of a handful of cities on the International Dark Skies Community list. Not only can you see a thick blanket of stars at night, you can even see the Milky Way with the naked eye. May I present Milky Way over Sedona, photographed at 1:00am in the morning in May 2020.
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…
(Caption is for this and previous photo) We can imagine a coincidence thousands of years ago, the blink of an eye on cosmic time scales... In the Oort Cloud, an insignificant ball of dust and ice, its path disturbed once again, its orbit honed by the gravity of those far above its station, hurled toward the Sun, uncertain of its future... On Earth, in an in- hospitable corner of the White Mountains of California, a seedling bursting forth, a mere twig of the species pinus longaeva, equally uncertain of its destiny... While one traverses the timeless emptiness of space and withstands the incessant pull of the Jovian planets, the other grows, is carved by the bitter winds into fantastical shapes, spreads its arms toward the heavens, and dies a glorious death, its own body the sarcophagus that will carry it unchanged millennia into the future... Perihelion, for a comet, is as dangerous an affair as the flight of the mindless moth toward the open flame, or the close encounter on a dance floor with a woman so beautiful and so out of reach that every trace of sensation, of admiration, and of love is scorched away in an instant... But, once in a while, a sungrazing comet survives its close encounter and fills the skies of planet Earth with its brilliant light, flaunting its twin gowns of effervescence blown asunder by sunlight and by the solar wind. In the White Mountains, the long-dead bristlecone pine, as timeless as the comet itself, awaits to greet another messenger from the far reaches of our Solar System. This may be the first naked eye comet in two or three decades, but to the bristlecone, patient as ever, it is one of many to have displayed their ephemeral beauty, a mere twinkle against the backdrop of unchanging stars rising to greet the long-lived witnesses to our history night after night, year after year, century after century...
