Stargazer

There's my friend Orion, watching out for me!

As I mentioned before, I have kind of a thing for the night sky and all the stars.  It's nothing for me to go out on a clear night to walk the dog and not come in for a half hour or more.  I get lost, looking up.

When I was too young to know much about the night sky, I got all caught up in the endless wonder of the stars.  It was like somebody hung up a great big light show in midnight blue satin of the night sky, and it was just for me.  It wasn't long before learned the names for the shapes of the stars.

The older I got and the more I studied, I learned that our sun is actually a star, and knowing that we're here, like the little Whos Horton heard, flying around our star on a blue marble, it made me wonder if maybe we're part of some shape of stars somebody looks at from one of those other distant balls of glowing gas.

Sometimes I wave up at the sky, just in case.  I don't want to high-hat a fellow being, even if it's extraterrestrial.  Especially if it's extraterrestrial!

It fascinated me that the stars aren't really sprinkled in shapes in the heavens.  The constellations we see from Earth are just a matter of coincidence and parallax.  Stand in a different spot in the airless expanse, and you won't see the Big Dipper or Cassiopeia.  But the same dots might connect to make a different picture over there.

The thing that really, really floored me about my friends the stars is that they're living things... not exactly like we are, as far as we know, but they're born, they live, and they die, just like us.  Because they're so far away, some of those stars we look up at every night might have died long ago, and we just don't know it yet, because their light is still traveling across Time and Space to us.  Like an echo calling "Hey, you missed me, but I was here, and I want to send you my light for as long as it lasts."

When you think about that, isn't it something?

And then there's my favorite star in the sky.  It's Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion.  Orion's a big, flashy constellation that takes up a Good Bit of the night sky.  He's the Hunter.  He wears a belt (snazzy!)  And the deal with Betelgeuse, right there on Orion's right shoulder (on our left side) is that Betelgeuse is a big red star that's changing very rapidly, astronomically speaking.  It's the tenth brightest star in the night sky, but if the human eye could see all the different kinds of radiation a star gives off, Betelgeuse would be the brightest star in the sky.

I can relate to that!

So anyway, to borrow from Jack Horkheimer, from this Star Gazer to maybe someone else out there who likes to get lost in the stars of the night sky, or to you if you need to hear the message:

Keep Looking Up!