Originally published 16 January 1984
On the clearest, darkest nights thousands of stars are visible to the naked eye. In addition to stars, there are other wonders available to the careful observer who is far from city lights — star clusters, at least one galaxy, nebulas, the Milky Way, the zodiacal light. But even on the best of nights the typical urban or suburban observer sees only a few hundred stars, and none of the more elusive objects. We have abused the darkness. We have lost the faint lights.
Once I saw the zodiacal light, the “false dawn” of Omar Khayyam. On clear moonless nights in August or September, an hour or two before dawn, the zodiacal light can be seen stretching up from the horizon along the band of the zodiac. The light is paler than the Milky Way and often I had looked for it unsuccessfully. The zodiacal light is caused by sunlight reflecting from interplanetary dust that populates the inner part of the solar system. When at last I saw the zodiacal light it was from a dark hillside near the sea. A wind from the Atlantic had cleared the air and the stars walked on the horizon in a tall canopy of light. I never saw it again.
Tingling the spine
“Let us worship the spine and its tingle,” Vladimir Nabokov advised student in his lectures on literature. “That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science.” Searching for faint lights in the sky is both an art and a science, and I count as worth a king’s ransom the tingles in the spine that have invariably accompanied a rare find. “We are invertebrates,” said Nabokov, “tipped at the head with a divine flame.” But the brain is only a continuation of the spine, the wick runs the whole length of the candle. The morning I saw the zodiacal light I felt the heat of the flame all along the wick.
For a special of faint lights try counting the Pleiades, the little cluster of stars in Taurus. Since antiquity they have been called the Seven Sisters, or the Seven Virgins, or the Starry Seven. Most modern observers see only six Pleiades with the naked eye. The claim of twelve naked-eye Pleiades is not uncommon in the literature of the stars. The highest claim I have come across is sixteen. There are possibly as many as 500 stars that belong to the cluster. Twenty of these may have magnitudes that place them within the range of the naked eye, but the crowded massing of the stars makes even the claim of sixteen seem doubtful. The best I have done, on the darkest and clearest of nights, was nine. That was when I was younger and had better vision.
The youngest moon
Or try looking for the young moon. Strictly, the moon is new at the moment it passes between the sun and the Earth. What we call a “new moon” is in fact a young moon, perceived as a thin crescent some time after the moon is exactly new. The youngest moons will be seen at sunset, with the crescent low in the west. Many factors — latitude, the time of sunset, the angle of the moon’s orbit to the horizon, among them — determine the likelihood of seeing a very young moon. I have seen a moon no older than 36 hours. It was as thin as the paring of nail, as thin as an eyelash. But 36 hours is hardly a record, nor close to it. Twenty-four hour old moons are commonly reported. Lizzie King and Nellie Collinson, two housemaids at Scarborough, England seem to have the record with a 14½-hour-old moon viewed on May 2, 1916.
There are other elusive delights for the naked eye, faint lights in the night sky that belie their grandeur. The Great Galaxy in Andromeda is a difficult but accessible naked-eye object. I have discerned it on many a dark country night. Andromeda’s misty blur was on star charts long before the invention of the telescope, but who would have guessed that the blue was an island universe of a trillion stars, another Milky Way, the only galaxy beyond our own that can be reliably seen without optical aid. The Andromeda galaxy is 2 million light years away. No older light will ever enter your eye without the benefit of a telescope.
I have glimpsed M13, the globular cluster of a million stars in the constellation Hercules, or perhaps I only imagined that I saw it. Someday I will travel south and try for the brighter globular clusters in Centaurus and Tucan.
A cloud of stars
On several occasions I have seen the Praesepe, the famous “beehive” of stars in Cancer that appears as a smudge of light to the unaided eye. Hipparchus called it the “little cloud.” When Galileo turned his telescope upon the “cloud” he was astonished and delighted to see it resolved into stars. He counted 36. There are actually hundreds of stars in the cluster, twinkling beyond the limits of vision.
I first saw the Praesepe from a hillside in the Catskill Mountains. Somehow I had made my way that day to the grave of John Burroughs, the turn-of-the-century American naturalist. Burroughs was a connoisseur of nature’s whispered revelations. “The good observer of nature exists in fragments,” he said, “a trait here and a trait there.” Or again: “One secret of success in observing nature is capacity to take a hint.” Burroughs was a man who took the hints and trusted the tingle in the spine.
That night, late, on a nearby hillside, I scanned the sky for faint lights. And I thought of Burroughs, the master of nature’s subtle gestures. Burroughs was a self-confessed creature of the day, but he praised the night: “The gifts of night are less tangible,” he said. “The night does not come with fruits and flowers and bread and meat; it comes with stars and stardust, with mystery and nirvana.”
Now and then night’s faint lights revealed themselves to Burroughs and the heavens opened. His thought went “like a lightning flash” into that abyss, and then the veil was drawn again. Just as well, he said, to have such faint and fleeting revelations of the deep night. “To have it ever present with one in all its naked grandeur would perhaps be more than we could bear.”
