The Sunday Letter #16: Stargazing
Our sun is what astronomers call a mainstream or main sequence star—essentially, it’s an average star, one that sits in the middle of the spectrum of what a star can be. It is not too huge, and it is not too hot (relative to other stars, that is), and at the end of its long life several billian years from now, it will expand and become a red giant instead of going supernova. It will eject its outer layers—which will seed the possibility of other planets billions of years down the line—and then compress into a tiny white dwarf.
A teaspoon of white dwarf star weighs as much as a pickup truck.
Because it is a mainstream star, operating at the temperatures that it does, the nuclear fusion that takes place in our star can make a handful of elements, eighty in total. Elements like iron and helium through to polonium, but nothing heavier than that—the heavier elements that exist on Earth come as a result of the deaths of other stars, stars whose matter and elements get flung far out into the cosmos when they go supernova. Our sun itself is what scientists call a third generation star, born from collecting the gas and detritus from thousands of other stars across the universe.
We, in our tiny little miniscule lives here on earth, also have some of these elements in our bones. The calcium in our bones comes from those long-dead giants.
Every time you look up at the night sky, you are looking up into your nursery—not just the nursery of stars.
Last weekend, I went away for a stargazing break on the Isle of Coll. Coll is a small island that sits in the Outer Hebrides, about six miles west of the Isle of Mull. To get there, you take the train north from Glasgow up to Oban, on the western coast. Then you take a ferry from Oban. The ferry travels through the Sound of Mull, stops at the island of Tiree, and then goes on to Coll. I arrived in Oban on Thursday evening and took the early morning ferry on the Friday, pulling my suitcase out of my hotel at 4:45am.
The air was fresh and cool and the world had that hushed, everything-is-on-pause feeling it often does so early in the morning. I was tired but not too tired—I’d managed to get almost six and a half hours of sleep the night before!—and I climbed onto the ferry with everyone else, stowed my luggage, and had breakfast in the ferry cafe. It didn’t get light until a few hours into the ride, but as soon as the light started showing I was out, taking multiple trips to the deck to try and capture the light and the water as it shifted and changed.
There was a woman sitting by the door with her young son, the two of them sprawled over the bench with their suitcases. I went past them multiple times to take photos. At one point, as the ferry approached our final destination, there was a rainbow shining outside and I went back to that deck point to capture it. The woman was ahead of me, taking a photo of the rainbow as well.
“Lovely lovely,” she said, and then she went past me, back inside, and started gathering her things together.
When I came back to the exit door with my suitcase, I stood behind the woman and her son as we readied to disembark.
How funny, I thought. She looks just like a Very Famous Actress. People must tell her that all the time!
And then the ferry staff opened the door to let us out, and as he did so the woman asked her son to make way for the staff, and when I heard her son’s name something twinged deep in my brain.
Oh my goodness, I thought. It is her.
I followed them off the ferry and then began the walk to my hostel. It started to rain almost instantly, but shortly thereafter someone stopped by the side of the one-track road and asked me if I needed a ride. Of course I said yes. I climbed into the back of their ATV-dune buggy vehicle, this nice man and his young child, and they took me to the village hostel.
“See you later!” the child said, cheerfully, as they drove away.
Later that day, after lunch at the local hotel and a long walk to a deserted, windswept beach, after dinner and a dark, careful walk back to the hostel, I looked up at the sky above the hostel building and saw the Milky Way arching clear as clear above my head. It wasn’t the brilliant colour I’ve seen in photos—the human eye, as I’ve learned, can’t pick up all of the colours that cameras and telescopes can see—but it was there, brighter than I’ve ever seen it.
Not a bad way to start off a star-filled weekend, as it turns out.
Some of the things I learned this weekend:
space and time are intricately linked. When we look at a photo like Hubble’s Deep Field, we are looking at light that has taken billions of years to reach us—so we are looking back into the past as well as across distances wider than we can fathom.
oxygen is what makes life possible on our planet, but also what kills us in the end.
there is no dark side of the Moon (thanks, Pink Floyd!). The moon is tidally locked to Earth, which means we only ever see one side of it from the planet. But the Moon is fully illuminated by the Sun, so a better way of expressing this is the far side of the Moon.
Objects that are in orbit around Earth, or around stars, are not actually weightless—they are falling to the Earth. It’s just that they are travelling so quickly, at such high velocity, that they have enough horizontal speed to avoid hitting the ground. (This is what happens when you drop a ball directly from your hand onto the ground versus throwing the ball—when you throw the ball, it has additional speed/velocity as it travels, which means that it takes longer to hit the ground.)
Astronomers and scientists do believe, beyond a doubt, that there is life on other planets. Whether that life is intelligent life—leaving aside the fact that how we measure intelligence is its own sticky issue, blah blah—is another question entirely. Based on what we know about the observable universe and how long it has taken for life to get to this complex stage, there are many who argue that it’s simply not possible for intelligent life to have evolved sooner than now, which essentially means that the odds of other intelligent life appearing elsewhere in the universe, earlier, are, well, astronomical. (Sorry. Couldn’t help it.)
There is an ocean of water beneath the ice on the surface of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. There is almost definintely life of the bacterial kind on that moon, and maybe even life beyond that.
But also: the science is always changing. When Galileo first pointed his telescope at the stars, he described Saturn as “a planet with handles” because his telescope couldn’t differentiate Saturn’s rings. Advances in telescope technology in subsequent years allowed astronomers to see and understand very different things.
A hundred years from now, all of the above information might look quite different. That’s the fun thing about time. Everything changes, even the way you understand yourself. Nothing stays the same.
Another thing I learned: the Very Famous Actress has bought a house on Coll.
“She’ll probably come down to the pub at some point this weekend,” one of the course facilitators said.
She did not. But who could blame her?
At one point during the talks this weekend, one of the facilitators mentioned that a previous attendee had said it makes me feel so small and insignificant, looking up there at the sky. It makes me feel small and insignificant too, but instead of being dismayed by this, I find it comforting. I’ve found it comforting since that dark night three years ago when I stood in my parents’ backyard and looked up at the moon.
Here is the universe of grief inside your heart, and here is the universe of life and stars stretching out above your head. You are balanced between these two things.
It feels impossible, and it is.
But also, at the same time, it isn’t. Somehow, against all of these astronomical odds, we keep on going.
I wanted to start this Sunday Letter by talking about our sun and how ordinary it is, because this fascinates me. Our! Sun! Is! Ordinary! It fascinates me because on the second day of the course we looked at the sun through special telescopes and I realized that I’ve never actually seen the sun before. This star of our solar system (har har), this massive, extraordinary ball of gas and light that makes everything—everything—possible.
It is ordinary. It is a run-of-the-mill star.
But I could just as easily have started this post by talking about the week preceding my trip to Coll, a week that came on the heels of a migraine and a stomach bug and then hormonal swings. A week that had me drifting through St. Andrews feeling restless but also mired in anxiety, convinced that I’d wasted a whole lot of time up to this point. Time that should have (so I said, to myself) been spent writing and researching instead of sleeping in and watching TV and going for long walks along the West Sands.
You’re in Scotland in no small part to look at the stars, the small voice in my head said a few days before I went to Coll. Remember? This whole book about grief and the universe? So why aren’t you out there, looking at them? And then I would drag myself out to West Sands beach late at night, and sometimes I would find clear skies but more often than not I’d find clouds. And I would stand there under the clouds and feel very small and insignificant indeed, and then I would walk back to my apartment listening to university students sing and holler tipsily from the streets, and I would wonder what on earth are you doing here, Leduc, having come all this way to do…nothing?
One night, I went to the beach too late to see the sunset and too early to see the stars come out, and instead went for a long walk on the sand, feeling my mind explode out in a million directions. The future (what if nothing comes of this, what if there is no book), the past (why isn’t Jess here, why is the world so atrociously unfair), even the present. Why can’t I even focus on what I’m doing right now? One foot in front of the other on the sand. The sound of the ocean crashing on the shore. No. No. No. Why does it all keep slipping away? Eventually I turned around and went back home, and then later that night when it was actually dark I dragged myself out again. The sky above was clear and the path across the golf course, leading to the West Sands, was wrapped in darkness.
And there, above the West Sands beach, was the Big Dipper, shining in the sky as it has done for billions of years. Looking at it felt like looking at an old friend. Suddenly, I felt surrounded by warmth and recognition.
And also, unmistakably, just a hint of gentle laughter.
You know I’m always here, right? Shining over you, even when you can’t see me through the clouds?
On our first night of stargazing, the facilitators taught us how to look for the Big Dipper—or the Plough, as they call it over here—and from there to find Polaris, and from there to turn and find the southern constellations. I had inklings of how to do some of these things already, but watching it all unfold beneath a pitch-dark island sky was a whole new universe of wonderful. We did the bulk of our stargazing in the parking lot behind Coll Bunkhouse, and when I realized that the Big Dipper was inching behind the building as the constellations made their way around the night sky I couldn’t stop smiling.
They set up telescopes and showed us how to find Saturn and Jupiter.
“Jupiter’s bands can sometimes be hard to see at first,” one of the facilitators, David, said to me. “Try looking into the telescope but away from the planet. Don’t look at it directly.”
This is called the averted vision technique, and it worked. I focused on the smaller dots of Jupiter’s moons and at the corner of my eye the bands of the planet steadied and darkened and then there they were.
Hmm, that small voice said again. That ping of recognition. Feels a little like looking at grief, doesn’t it.
In those first few months after Jess died I found myself actively turning away from the reality of her death every chance I could get, even though the grief was everywhere I turned. It was like trying to outrun gravity.
No, I’d hear myself saying. I’d think of her and the deep raw dark of anguish would claw its way up through my throat and make it hard to breathe. No, I would say again. And I would turn away and try to look at something else or try to imagine a different world into being. Focus on your book. Don’t say dead. You can know it, but you don’t have to face it. She’s just—gone away. She’s off on a long trip to Antartica and she isn’t coming back. That’s all.
Preposterous, I know. Still I thought it, still I clung to it all through those first few lonely months. And gradually I began to notice that the grief-feeling, the physical manifestation of it, was moving through my body the way that we were all of us continuing to move through time. First it sat in my throat and threatened to choke me. Then as the months went on it moved a little lower, sitting in my lungs, a pang that could rise and choke me at any moment but mostly just sat there and ached. As months became years it moved lower still, a fist that squeezed the heart. The pain was no longer quite so sharp but the ache was always there, and if I thought about it too long it would travel up into my lungs and flare up all over again.
Even now, it flares up at the flick of a switch, the blink of an instant. Dead, I say to myself. No. No. No.
And so I look away, and instead I focus on how much I love her, and the bands of grief grow sharper in a way that helps me understand they are just part of the picture now, and will be until the day that my own time here comes to an end.
Here’s the thing about astronomy that I didn’t really understand until last weekend: stargazing is cold. Astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere call the fall and winter star season because in the late spring and summer the heat in the atmosphere interferes with what you can see. This is why so many observatories are built high in the mountains—higher up, where the atmosphere is thinner, it’s easier to see and track those balls of gas and fire so many billions of miles away.
I should have realized this, and did not. It didn’t even really get that cold on the island—maybe 4 or 5 degrees Celsius at the most, with the windchill pushing things a bit lower—but as one of the facilitators said, it felt Baltic. There I was, having come all this way to look at the stars and the planets, doing exactly that and also thinking longingly of my hotel room and my nice warm bed. The mundane and the precious existing in both places at once.
And then a shooting star fell through the sky. It was bright and massive, and instead of arcing across the sky it fell almost directly downwards over the ocean. It fell in a single bright plume of green and then it split into two smaller strands, stretching down through the sky for a good four or five seconds.
“Oh wow—wow—WOW!” one of the course facilitators shouted as it fell. When it ended he told us that he’s only ever seen one fireball larger than that in all of his decades of stargazing. The next morning he told us—a thread of surprise in his voice—that no one else in the whole of Scotland seems to have seen it. At the very least, there have been no other reports.
“This area is fairly isolated,” he said, “so it’s entirely possible that it went undetected by meteor scanning software. You’ve all witnessed a truly unique event—lucky you!”
I think I know where it came from, of course. But there’s no science to back that up. Just the usual fact of the ordinary and the extraordinary, once more existing hand-in-hand.
Our second night of stargazing was filled with rain, and so instead we had a few sessions in the indoor planetarium. They still felt extraordinary, in no small part due to the enthusiasm, humility and graciousness of our hosts. (Big thanks to Steven Gray, James Green, David and Gary and all of the rest of the team at Cosmos Planetarium.) In our off hours I tried to use a bike to do some sightseeing of the island, before remembering that it’s been decades since I’ve been on a bike and I was therefore in no shape to go puttering around an island, even one as flat as Coll. (Was I also afraid of wiping out in front of the Very Famous Actress’s house and having her think I’d done it deliberately? Maybe.) Instead I settled for another walk along the rocky green shores and more picture-taking. Moving along the island shores in my tiny inconsequential human life.
This will still be here long after we’re all gone, I thought. We flare into the world like shooting stars and if we’re lucky, someone will see us and love us and carry our memory with them for as long as they are also here, walking on the planet. Eventually they’ll pass as well, like all shooting stars do, and the memories will be lost to time.
But isn’t it beautiful, to flare so brightly in that instant? To see and know the uniqueness of the life you have, the lives of those around you. To know love that flares like that green fireball in the sky.
Everything matters. And also, nothing matters, given enough time. You love like the shooting star knowing that eventually even this comes to an end—that this is how we are all built, this headlong rush into oblivion. This dance of the ordinary and extraordinary that makes up our days.
And then you pass, and your body goes back to the earth, and you become the soil and the trees and the air that nurtures countless other generations. And when that ordinary star of ours expands you become fuel for that too. All of us together, all of us linked. How extraordinary that our tiny little insignificant lives get to be a part of this.
I saw stars of several types this past weekend, as it turns out. Somewhere, I know, Jess is smiling.
Currently Reading: info on the Isle of Skye, in preparation for this weekend’s trip!
Currently Watching: Season Four of Star Trek: Lower Decks.
Currently Eating: porridge, like any good transplant to Scotland would.