Starry skies
In the summer of 2017, my family did a tour of the U.S. national parks. We had traveled out west first to Salt Lake City, where we rented out a small storage closet and placed our fencing bags there (more on that soon), then traveled south to visit Bryce Canyon National Park, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Arches National Park, and the Horseshoe Bend. These were absolutely stunning sights, to say the least. Words don't do them justice, and while it's possible for you to search up on Google an image of each location, in my view nothing beats actually going there and experiencing it for yourself. I think by looking at a picture of it, you create an expectation for how it will look when you go, and it may actually result in the views being less spectacular if the image was digitally touched up to make it look better. When it comes to national parks, it's best to go in cold. The natural formations are absolutely breathtaking.
After spending a week touring the parks south of Utah, we traveled back up to Salt Lake City, where the U.S. Summer National Fencing Championships of 2017 were being held. We stayed there for a week as my sister and I competed in various events there. When it was all over, we packed our bags back into the storage closet that we had rented, then drove north up towards Grand Teton National Park (where I wrote the first version of what eventually became the Great Big House in New Orleans solver), and thereafter to Yellowstone National Park. At Yellowstone, we stayed overnight in various cabins throughout the park. The first day we stayed at a cabin next to the famous geyser Old Faithful, where I filmed this gorgeous eruption of the Grand Geyser, which is the world's largest predictable geyser, and it's within walking distance to Old Faithful. The reason why Grand Geyser is not more popular than Old Faithful is because its predictability is accurate to a less precise window. Whereas an Old Faithful eruption can be predicted to within a 20-minute window, the Grand Geyser is predictable only to a 3-hour window. My sister and I had to wait around 40 minutes into the predicted eruption window in order to see the eruption (well, well, well worth the wait!).
A dozen mosquito bites later (my sister and I are like a magnet for those pesky bugs), we found our way on one of the nights to a cabin by Yellowstone Lake in the park. It was on the night that we stayed by the lake that I decided to go outside and look up. The idea of stargazing in a location with minimal light pollution had been on my bucket list for years, and it finally struck me while we were staying in the cabin at Grand Teton National Park that this was a great opportunity to do this. However, for fear of mosquitos, I did not choose to actually go outside and look at the stars until we were finally by Yellowstone Lake. Armed with a thick layer of anti-mosquito spray, I cautiously ventured into the darkness of the night from the brightness of my artificially lit cabin room and tilted my head skyward.
My first feeling was actually one of disappointment. I didn't see that many stars – it honestly didn't look that much different from the sky back home. I was so bummed that I thought about retreating back into the cabin right then and there. But I didn't. Something told me that if I stayed, I wouldn't regret it. One by one, more stars gradually blinked into view. I realized that because the cabin room was so bright, my eyes needed a few minutes to adjust to the darkness. Once this process finished, I looked up a second time, and my jaw dropped. I was humbled to the greatest extent I have ever been humbled in my life. The feeling of raw awe is frankly indescribable. I live in a suburb near a small city, but even there the light pollution is enough to block out all but a few dozen or so of the brightest stars. On that night in Yellowstone, no matter where I looked – one direction, the other direction – I saw hundreds upon hundreds of stars, filling up the sky in such perfect, magical alignment that I was rendered immediately wonderstruck.
My sister came outside with me, and my father eventually came out too. Dad probably came out to tell us to come back inside, but he too could not resist looking up and being amazed too. In a literal sense, we were starstruck. From my time volunteering at COSI, the science museum of Columbus, Ohio, I remembered planetarium shows which explained how to find common constellations and asterisms. For the first time in his life, my dad noticed the Big Dipper, which is an asterism located within the constellation Ursa Major ("Big Bear"), because I pointed it out to him. The Big Dipper is a famous group of stars; my dad had heard about it before, but he had never noticed it in the sky before this night.
From the Big Dipper, if you extend the line that connects that last two stars in the asterism, it will eventually reach a somewhat faint star called Polaris. Polaris is significant because the Earth's geographical North Pole points almost directly toward it, so as the Earth rotates about its axis throughout the course of the night, in the Northern hemisphere, the stars will appear to rotate in concentric circles about Polaris. This star was therefore historically significant as a critical navigational tool. It's sometimes called "the North Star"; slaves on the Underground Railroad used it to find their way north to freedom. By looking at how high it is in the sky, you can determine your latitude position on Earth. If Polaris appears directly overhead in the night sky (90º above the horizon), then you are at the North Pole (latitude 90º N). If Polaris appears directly on the horizon line (0º above the horizon), then you are at the equator (latitude 0º). Anything in the middle, you find the angle between Polaris and the horizon line and that's your latitude position on the Earth. For example, if you live in central Ohio, Polaris would appear in the northern sky at about 39º above the horizon. That's your latitude on the Earth: ~ 39º N.
The highlight of the night for me started with a faint haze. I noticed that one long patch of the eastern sky was just a little bit brighter than the rest of the sky around it. It wasn't a spectacular difference by any means, but it was enough to make it non-negligible. I had a suspicion as to what it was. Just a small hunch, but one that excited me to no end. I wondered how I could verify my feeling, and I remembered I had this app on my phone which utilized the gyroscope function so that as I moved my phone around and pointed it at various locations in the sky, I could identify which celestial objects were which and read more information about them. When I pointed my phone toward the faint haze that I saw, sure enough, the app told me it was the Milky Way. It was at this moment that I was at a complete loss for words. All the vocabulary that I had accumulated throughout my life – in English, in Chinese, in German – vanished. I was left dumbstruck, staring at this faint haze of light that together formed a spiral arm of our galaxy.
In accordance with Einstein's special theory of relativity, light travels at a finite speed in a vacuum, and nothing can exceed this speed. Each star you see in the sky is at an inconceivable distance from the Earth. The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri, and it is about four lightyears away, meaning it takes light, traveling at its fastest possible speed, about four years to cross the distance between Proxima Centauri and us. Many stars are much farther than this distance, perhaps dozens of lightyears away. As I gazed toward the sky that night, taking in the gorgeous quantity of stars, I was looking at the past. Indeed, if the light from Proxima Centauri took four years to get here, then I am looking at Proxima Centauri as it was four years ago. We do not have information about how it looks right now because there has not been enough time for the electromagnetic radiation from the star carrying that information to reach us. You can imagine that of all the stars I saw that night, some of the fainter ones might be dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of lightyears away.
The Andromeda Galaxy, the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way, is visible on some darker nights with the naked eye. Who knows, it's possible that my eye glanced over it while I was at Yellowstone. (I would later observe Andromeda more definitively through a telescope at the top of Campbell Hall at UC Berkeley for an Introduction to Astronomy course in Fall 2017.) The Andromeda Galaxy is approximately 2.5 million lightyears away from Earth. The entire length of human history only spans about a few tens of thousands of years. The time it took for light from the Andromeda Galaxy to reach Earth is several orders of magnitude larger than the time since the beginning of human history.
You owe it to yourself to go out someday to a spot with minimal light pollution and just look up. You owe it to yourself to have this experience at some point in your life. The light from the Andromeda Galaxy may have been emitted at a time when humans did not exist on the Earth, but I like to think that from the very moment the light was created, it had a purpose. As it journeyed arduously through two million lightyears of space, it had a destiny: to reach your eyes – yes, your eyes – millions of years later.
After spending a week touring the parks south of Utah, we traveled back up to Salt Lake City, where the U.S. Summer National Fencing Championships of 2017 were being held. We stayed there for a week as my sister and I competed in various events there. When it was all over, we packed our bags back into the storage closet that we had rented, then drove north up towards Grand Teton National Park (where I wrote the first version of what eventually became the Great Big House in New Orleans solver), and thereafter to Yellowstone National Park. At Yellowstone, we stayed overnight in various cabins throughout the park. The first day we stayed at a cabin next to the famous geyser Old Faithful, where I filmed this gorgeous eruption of the Grand Geyser, which is the world's largest predictable geyser, and it's within walking distance to Old Faithful. The reason why Grand Geyser is not more popular than Old Faithful is because its predictability is accurate to a less precise window. Whereas an Old Faithful eruption can be predicted to within a 20-minute window, the Grand Geyser is predictable only to a 3-hour window. My sister and I had to wait around 40 minutes into the predicted eruption window in order to see the eruption (well, well, well worth the wait!).
A dozen mosquito bites later (my sister and I are like a magnet for those pesky bugs), we found our way on one of the nights to a cabin by Yellowstone Lake in the park. It was on the night that we stayed by the lake that I decided to go outside and look up. The idea of stargazing in a location with minimal light pollution had been on my bucket list for years, and it finally struck me while we were staying in the cabin at Grand Teton National Park that this was a great opportunity to do this. However, for fear of mosquitos, I did not choose to actually go outside and look at the stars until we were finally by Yellowstone Lake. Armed with a thick layer of anti-mosquito spray, I cautiously ventured into the darkness of the night from the brightness of my artificially lit cabin room and tilted my head skyward.
My first feeling was actually one of disappointment. I didn't see that many stars – it honestly didn't look that much different from the sky back home. I was so bummed that I thought about retreating back into the cabin right then and there. But I didn't. Something told me that if I stayed, I wouldn't regret it. One by one, more stars gradually blinked into view. I realized that because the cabin room was so bright, my eyes needed a few minutes to adjust to the darkness. Once this process finished, I looked up a second time, and my jaw dropped. I was humbled to the greatest extent I have ever been humbled in my life. The feeling of raw awe is frankly indescribable. I live in a suburb near a small city, but even there the light pollution is enough to block out all but a few dozen or so of the brightest stars. On that night in Yellowstone, no matter where I looked – one direction, the other direction – I saw hundreds upon hundreds of stars, filling up the sky in such perfect, magical alignment that I was rendered immediately wonderstruck.
My sister came outside with me, and my father eventually came out too. Dad probably came out to tell us to come back inside, but he too could not resist looking up and being amazed too. In a literal sense, we were starstruck. From my time volunteering at COSI, the science museum of Columbus, Ohio, I remembered planetarium shows which explained how to find common constellations and asterisms. For the first time in his life, my dad noticed the Big Dipper, which is an asterism located within the constellation Ursa Major ("Big Bear"), because I pointed it out to him. The Big Dipper is a famous group of stars; my dad had heard about it before, but he had never noticed it in the sky before this night.
From the Big Dipper, if you extend the line that connects that last two stars in the asterism, it will eventually reach a somewhat faint star called Polaris. Polaris is significant because the Earth's geographical North Pole points almost directly toward it, so as the Earth rotates about its axis throughout the course of the night, in the Northern hemisphere, the stars will appear to rotate in concentric circles about Polaris. This star was therefore historically significant as a critical navigational tool. It's sometimes called "the North Star"; slaves on the Underground Railroad used it to find their way north to freedom. By looking at how high it is in the sky, you can determine your latitude position on Earth. If Polaris appears directly overhead in the night sky (90º above the horizon), then you are at the North Pole (latitude 90º N). If Polaris appears directly on the horizon line (0º above the horizon), then you are at the equator (latitude 0º). Anything in the middle, you find the angle between Polaris and the horizon line and that's your latitude position on the Earth. For example, if you live in central Ohio, Polaris would appear in the northern sky at about 39º above the horizon. That's your latitude on the Earth: ~ 39º N.
The highlight of the night for me started with a faint haze. I noticed that one long patch of the eastern sky was just a little bit brighter than the rest of the sky around it. It wasn't a spectacular difference by any means, but it was enough to make it non-negligible. I had a suspicion as to what it was. Just a small hunch, but one that excited me to no end. I wondered how I could verify my feeling, and I remembered I had this app on my phone which utilized the gyroscope function so that as I moved my phone around and pointed it at various locations in the sky, I could identify which celestial objects were which and read more information about them. When I pointed my phone toward the faint haze that I saw, sure enough, the app told me it was the Milky Way. It was at this moment that I was at a complete loss for words. All the vocabulary that I had accumulated throughout my life – in English, in Chinese, in German – vanished. I was left dumbstruck, staring at this faint haze of light that together formed a spiral arm of our galaxy.
In accordance with Einstein's special theory of relativity, light travels at a finite speed in a vacuum, and nothing can exceed this speed. Each star you see in the sky is at an inconceivable distance from the Earth. The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri, and it is about four lightyears away, meaning it takes light, traveling at its fastest possible speed, about four years to cross the distance between Proxima Centauri and us. Many stars are much farther than this distance, perhaps dozens of lightyears away. As I gazed toward the sky that night, taking in the gorgeous quantity of stars, I was looking at the past. Indeed, if the light from Proxima Centauri took four years to get here, then I am looking at Proxima Centauri as it was four years ago. We do not have information about how it looks right now because there has not been enough time for the electromagnetic radiation from the star carrying that information to reach us. You can imagine that of all the stars I saw that night, some of the fainter ones might be dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of lightyears away.
The Andromeda Galaxy, the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way, is visible on some darker nights with the naked eye. Who knows, it's possible that my eye glanced over it while I was at Yellowstone. (I would later observe Andromeda more definitively through a telescope at the top of Campbell Hall at UC Berkeley for an Introduction to Astronomy course in Fall 2017.) The Andromeda Galaxy is approximately 2.5 million lightyears away from Earth. The entire length of human history only spans about a few tens of thousands of years. The time it took for light from the Andromeda Galaxy to reach Earth is several orders of magnitude larger than the time since the beginning of human history.
You owe it to yourself to go out someday to a spot with minimal light pollution and just look up. You owe it to yourself to have this experience at some point in your life. The light from the Andromeda Galaxy may have been emitted at a time when humans did not exist on the Earth, but I like to think that from the very moment the light was created, it had a purpose. As it journeyed arduously through two million lightyears of space, it had a destiny: to reach your eyes – yes, your eyes – millions of years later.