This past weekend, I took a much needed break. The Chicago Astronomical Society was hosting an all-weekend observing session in one of the most scenic places in the state, Starved Rock State Park. I dusted off my telescope, which has seen very little use since the neighbors installed their zillion watt "security" lights, collected my star charts, loaded everything into the car, set the ipod to the "Cosmos" soundtrack, and set off. After a beautiful drive through mostly farmland, I arrived and met up with my fellow astro-geeks.

There were some great telescopes  all ready there--among them a monster Dobsonian reflector with a 35" mirror! But there were scopes of every type; homebuilt reflectors, expensive apochromatic refractors, the stubby-barreled Schmitt-Cassegranians, like mine, big binoculars arrange on spidery counter-balancing systems, computer aimed, CCD equipped, or dirt-simple stuff Galileo would have immediately recognized. Some had big silver filters covering their muzzles, and were slowly tracking the westward course of the sun. All were standing in a large field,open to all directions to the sky.

The astronomers were as varied as their instruments. Most were middle-aged or a little past, most were guys, but their were some younger guys, and  some women of all ages. We all assembled in that field, listening to late afternoon crickets, waiting for twilight as we traded stories and talked about the stars.

As dusk set in, I started looking at the northern sky, trying to find Polaris.

The first constellations any stargazer learns are the northern ones, surrounding the pole star: The Big Dipper; Cassiopeia, the Queen of Ethiopia; Cephus the King; Draco the dragon; and the Little Dipper. There, at the end of the Dipper's long graceful handle, one of the brightest stars of the north: Polaris, the pole star.

It is coincidence that Earth's north pole points so directly at Polaris. During most of the time humans had been watching the stars, there was no star so convenient for navigation. When the Pyramids were being piled up into the dusty Egyptian air, the star Thuban had been pointed to by Earth's wobbling axis. Actually, a good bit more accurately than it now points at Polaris.

It was much easier to pick the north star out than it usually is, at my observing spots nearer to home. I found Polaris in the northern sky, as my dad would say, right where I left it, after a little searching. My father didn't have much use for astronomy, but he'd had considerable use for the stars, flying at night in the Second World War. In those days, long before GPS satellites, pilots used the sky not just for lift, but also for finding their way.

It seemed that, like celestial navigation, the importance and usefulness of the night sky had gradually diminished in his lifetime. The beauty of a clear night sky had slowly been replaced by the glare of strip malls, the sickly orange glow of interstate streetlights, and thickening layers of combustion exhausts over most inhabited regions of the United States. In order to get a view of the night without glare, it has become necessary to seek out ever dwindling pockets of relative dark. I'd traveled an hour and a half to get to Starved Rock.

The ease of finding Polaris was a harbinger of the night's treasures. I've grown so use to the milky gray that passes for night sky near my home, that the far from lightless sky of this park was a revelation. As dusk melted into night, stars that I have not seen in years became not just visible, but BRIGHT! The Milky Way began filling in early, and was soon clear and bright enough not only to see clearly, but to be able to pick out the dark lanes of the Coal Sack nebula with naked eye. It was a fond reunion with old friends; a sky I'd rarely glimpsed since my childhood stargazing days in West Virginia. I must admit almost ignoring all of the telescopes, entranced and absorbed by the great dark bowl above me, filled with stars. For years, I've had increasing trouble finding my way around the sky, so many of my old, reliable guide stars and patterns have disappeared in glare. This night, I could hop from one constellation to another, picking out colors in some of the more brilliant stars. We saw a couple of slow, arcing meteors, near Hercules, stragglers from this year's Persied meteor shower. I did catch a glimpse in someone's 'scope of the new comet visiting the inner solar system. It was beautifully framed in the eyepiece, next to a globular cluster. It was a night of wonders, and it reminded me why I'd started doing astronomy in the first place. Beautiful, etherial, and eternal, that sky was an instant cure to everyday concerns. It was a cool refreshing dip in cosmic perspective.

The sky is, as my father reminds me, still right where we left it. There, beyond the Mercury Vapor glow, the glare of parking lots, and the next-door neighbor's security floodlights, the stars still shine. Planets, star clusters, nebulae, and the thin wisps of stars that once were and will be again, are undimmed. Their light falls constantly upon our planet, ending its millennial journey drowned in the infinitely fainter, but much closer, glow from Wal-Mart down the street. But they're still there. We, in the western, industrialized parts of the planet have just cut ourselves off from their sight. For the sake of perceived convenience, or because we wish to display the aesthetics of our household yards, we have detached ourselves from the heavens. Our children can no longer glimpse the universe that used to hang in our skies at night, inviting them to tell stories about what they saw there.
Turn off the lights. The stars are still there.