Since Oz now adores Chincoteague to the point of obsession, we went back this past weekend. This time, we took advantage of one of the greatest benefits of a lack of development: darkness. In the evenings after night fell, we went out to the beach in the wildlife refuge to stare up at the sky. If we'd been thinking ahead, we would have brought the telescope.
You forget, living in the city, what the night sky ought to look like. You hear the old saw about counting the stars and laugh and say, "Yeah. One, two, three … Okay, we're done." It's easy to pick out Orion, the Big Dipper, and the Pleiades because those are almost the only stars bright enough to penetrate the orange, sodium vapor morass that is the urban night sky.
But out on the beach, we saw the Milky Way and so many stars I could hardly find Orion. Too many stars to count and two shooting stars (quite countable, that).
Apart from the whole "Wow! That's a whole lot of stars!" thing, I was amazed at how bright starlight actually was. There was no moon in the sky and the only sunlit chunk of rock was Mars hanging low on the horizon, but we could see each other, the car, the beach. It was too dark to differentiate colors, but only just so. Admittedly all that reflective sand probably had a lot to do with the light level, we might have been in the dark if we'd been standing on dirt. The only time we couldn't see was when some other vehicles drove by, trucks with coolers and fishing poles in racks on the front, and headlights that stole our night vision and left us in the dark.
294 words | October 3, 2005 07:55 PM | Wish you were here