Star-gazing

It's been a good week for stars. Which is fortunate, because star-gazing is good for the soul. Maybe it's just my soul, but feeling like a tiny speck on a tiny planet beneath a sparkling, infinite sky can heal most of what ails me. It's calming, inspiring, a way to feel connected to a world larger than I can really know.

This week, my sleeping bag rolled out in the the Big Rocks Wilderness, dwarfed by the boulders of the Pahroc Canyon, the milky way was shining clear. Last month's monsoon clouds have cleared, the half-moon rose late, and the high canyon walls block any faint light pollution from spoiling the view. In the hour or so before I'd drifted to sleep, I usually saw more than 15 shooting stars, big sweeping flashes across the sky. Sleeping out every night in the desert, I am used to seeing a few before I close my eyes, but this show was above and beyond.

Seeing a good shooting star makes you feel special. Good luck, make a wish, etc... But as it turns out, there are millions of meteors flashing across the sky, throughout the day and night, caused usually by sand-sized grains of astronomical grit, burning up with friction through the air molecules of the atmosphere. However, according to space.com, we can usually only see .005% of the sky at one time, bringing our eye's share of shooting stars to an average of 12 per hour. Which means that maybe, if you catch them all, you should still feel pretty special.

Last night, the sky-show got even better. A big electrical storm hung over the Delmar valley to the south of us. We could barely hear the thunder, but the sky flashed and glowed with lightning strikes every minute or two. Far enough away to be fear from the fears of rain (and putting up a tent in a wet, 2am panic) and lightning-strike fire, we just enjoyed the light-show.

Shooting stars diving across the sky into a cloud of flashing light. I sleep well after a show like that, once I convince myself to close my eyes....