Folks think I’ve lost my mind when I suggest the best time of year to visit me for stargazing here in the Southern California desert is during late July and early August.
Yes, the days are scorchingly hot. It’s the desert. It’s summertime. I get it.
But to be honest, I rarely go outside when the sun is in the sky. Neither does anyone else without a nearby swimming pool and a functioning brain.
No, most of us desert rats know to wait until sundown before venturing outdoors.
By then, the temperatures have dropped to a more tolerable — some might even say pleasant — level.
And once darkness falls, we are rewarded with some of the most amazing sights overhead.
The nighttime sky of summer has always been my favorite.
Perhaps this comes from my childhood on the East Coast, when summer was a time of school vacation, hanging out with friends, cooling off with ice cream and watermelon, and, yes, for me, stargazing late into the night.
It’s a shame that people don’t spend much time enjoying the night sky anymore.
Cities have become so immense and light-polluted that, without a long drive to the mountains or wilderness, it’s impossible to see the starry heavens at their finest.
And doing that always seems to take too much effort.
But stand outdoors under a dark night sky of summer just once, and you’ll be stunned by its beauty.
What makes this sky my favorite is seeing the Milky Way arching gently across the heavens.
High in the east, we can see it streaming through the three bright stars of the Summer Triangle. On its southern end, it passes between the star groupings of Scorpius, the scorpion, and the teapot of Sagittarius.
Though it appears as a softly glowing cloud against the darker sky, what we see is so much more remarkable. This is the rim of our galaxy’s disk arching across the sky.
Its hazy appearance, of course, is an illusion caused by the countless stars that seem to blend to create the cloudiness.
One of the most obvious features of the Milky Way is that it’s not uniform in brightness. It is, instead, mottled with dark rifts and rivulets along its entire length.
Though they may appear as voids in the Milky Way, these are known to astronomers as giant molecular clouds — or GMCs — massive globs of interstellar dust that stand in silhouette against the Milky Way’s brighter stellar band.
It is within these GMCs that massive star- and planet-forming regions exist, hidden from eyes not privileged enough to have infrared vision.
Many Native American tribes believed the Milky Way to be a road that led the souls of recently departed to their final resting places in the heavens.
The seafaring Polynesians saw it, instead, as a great blue shark.
But it was the ancient Greeks who described its appearance as that of milk spilled across the heavens, and this led to the name we use today.
Make some time this summer to get away from the light-polluted cities and enjoy the magnificent Milky Way.
Take my word for it: It’s worth the effort!
