The Southern Stars

By Matthew Wherttam

--

This year, I should see the Southern Stars. I would have to travel below the equator to do that, but wouldn't it be worth the trip? The light from those stars has taken hundreds, thousands, and, in some cases, millions and billions of years to reach us, and those stars have been moving to other places all those years. Some of them have even blown themselves to bits in gigantic bursts that will also take many years to get to Earth. So don't the Southern Stars deserve my attention this year? At least some of my attention?

My career, such as it was, never took me far enough south to see them; Australia, New Zealand, and even Chile all seemed too distant for a vacation. But is an unpleasant trip of many hours on a jet plane really enough of an excuse to avoid seeing those stars?

In the winter of 1986, I flew to Phoenix to see my parents, it is true—but also to drive from Phoenix to the desert beyond to Casa Grande, and to its dark, clear night skies where Halley's Comet could be seen. And it turned out to be a delicate, triangular splash of pale light, like a spotlight standing still in a giant, smoky, darkened room. Eerie, yet calm. Mysterious, yet familiar. Fragile, and yet enduring.

The next night, I drove again to Casa Grande where that comet was again a delicate, steady, silent thing. I stood there for hours on the hard desert sand and in that cold, clear air, until in the first light of dawn, in the brightening sky, that comet began flickering from white to black and back again. My eyes had begun playing tricks with the light coming from that comet.

This, of course, all happened decades ago. And that comet, of course, is a transient thing, a thing I will never see again. The Southern Stars are also transient. In fact, the light coming from them is, right now, being bent and blunted and blocked. I really should go this year to see the Southern Stars.