Observing the Heavens with My Eyes

Great peace and great joy come from settling down and gazing at the heavens above. Sunrises, sunsets, slivers of brand new moons, showers of meteors, and brightly shining planets have been favorites of mine since I was a boy.

I have gazed with great contentment at the milky way on moonless nights from the tops of mountains when hiking the Appalachian Trail. I have woken in the middle of the night in my camping hammock and looked up to see that the stars of the big dipper had moved counter clockwise nearly a half circle around the north star since sun down. Seeing that let me know that morning must be near. I have counted the days of a hike, not by the days of the week, but by the phase of the moon. This use of the sky is part of what I have come to call trail time - the relaxation of modern time constraints that allows abandoning a watch and calendar - substituting the signs of the heavens for the minute by minute accuracy of modern life.

The more I use the sky for trail time, the more interested I become in it. The more I live in trail time, the more personal the sky is. The moon's names for its great month long seasons have become important to me. Looking at the traditions of many cultures, I developed names appropriate to the time of year a moon encompassed. A moon begins with a sliver of a new moon just after sunset and waxes (grows) to first quarter and then to full. The first quarter moon is South at sunset and the full moon is East at sunset. It then wanes to third quarter which is South at sunrise and ends with a sliver to the east just before sunrise - a cycle that takes about 28 days.

There are a number of magical times of year for me. First green grass of the spring and apples ripe on the trees are two of my favorites. Longest day in June and longest night in December are also on the top of my list. So it made sense to name those moons green grass, apple, long day, and long night moons. Planting moon, following green grass moon is when tender tomato plants can be set outdoors without much risk of them freezing. In Ohio green grass moon was April and planting moon was in May. Harvest moon followed apple moon, and hunter's moon followed harvest. (In Texas, this system is all messed up, as I plant tomato plants in early March and I never find apple trees in the woods. The grass often does not turn green until late July when the rain starts. All of this has knocked me a little off center as I try to adjust to Texas moons.)

Planets are quirky sky objects that move at their own speeds through the night skies. Venus and Jupiter are very bright - usually brighter than the brightest stars. Mars is a pretty red dot and Saturn a reasonably bright star-like object that wanders slowly from constellation to constellation. Venus slowly moves eastward away from the setting sun to an altitude above the western horizon of several spans of my hand, and then approaches sunset again as the evening star. Then it rises before sunrise earlier and earlier and then approaches the sunrise again. Mercury escaped my notice until this last year. I had mistakenly believed it was a very hard planet to see in the brightness of the sunrise or sunset. Instead it turns out that Mercury is very bright and easy to see either to the East or to the West for several days every six weeks.


Next: Observing the stars, studying the constellations.