You ever looked out at the stars in an area without any light pollution? I don’t mean like out in the middle of the countryside, most of England has light pollution. I mean somewhere with like a Bortle Class of 3 or less. Somewhere you can look up and actively see the milky way with your naked eye? Couple this with the understanding of just how many billions of stars are clustered up above, and you have this incredible, humbling experience filled with awe. You can almost, for a brief moment, get a glimpse of the scale of the sky, and how small we are in it.
Technically speaking, I went to a star observatory in LA. The thing is, it was during the day time, and I didn’t see any planets, or stars for that matter (Griffith Observatory is a 15 minute drive from the Hollywood Walk of Fame (how’s that for a geography pun?)), so when we returned to England and I caught news that the newly refurbished Sherwood Observatory had been completed and would soon be holding open evenings for the public – I booked tickets immediately.
We arrived on the night and were invited to look around, check out the exhibitions they had downstairs, and go visit the telescope. For reference, the type of telescope they have at observatories isn’t the type that your Dad has in the attic, or like the one that you keep seeing on Facebook Marketplace. These guys have one of the largest publicly accessible telescopes in the UK, and the thing is the size of a building. I mean this literally, the telescope is the building. From the outside, you can see the entire thing rotate around and point towards different stars.
The equipment inside has control panels, switches and boards, and this ginormous metal cylinder in the centre, composed of mirrors and lenses that all focus down onto a small eyepiece. The whole thing is programmed to counteract the earth’s rotation, and every time our focus went slightly out of view, the entire inside of the building rotated around the follow it. A long line of people, young and old stood waiting for their turn to stare into the eyepiece and count the rings across Jupiter’s surface, it’s moons spread out in a neat line around it.
If you haven’t seen Jupiter’s rings before, I suggest you do it. Knowing that you’re looking at another planet with your own goddamn eyes is something special.
Outside, a smaller group of people huddled around a telescope, a much smaller one, where you could look up and see the same sight, when the clouds weren’t invading the view, of course. While the machinery was less impressive outdoors, we had a lot more time to experience the planet this way.
The joy of this, is that for a solid 2 weeks after seeing Jupiter, Kymberley and I found ourselves pointing at whatever bright celestial object we could see in the night sky, asking ourselves if that one might be Jupiter? (9 times out of 10, we were finding Saturn or Mars, but hey, we learn).
We finished the night by watching this presentation in a massive 360 degree sky-dome type thing, where we flew around the universe watching the history of the stars, and hearing about what will happen to our Sun in 3 billion years, long after we stop arguing about politics and wristwatches.
If I could encapsulate the feeling of that night, watching the stars with 100 other people who all came out to experience something magical, I’d compare it to a Sunday evening after a long week, listening to lo-fi covers of your favourite songs. It turns out that Animal Crossing got the vibe right with their star gazing events. The whole thing is awe inspiring and sublimely peaceful – especially if you manage to time it on a clear night.