Amid the storms of summer, it’s easy to forget that on clear nights, the skies put on a light show.
Last night was supposed to be peak viewing of the month-long Delta Aquarids meteor shower. They will be visible for some time yet, overlapping with the arrival of the returning Leonids, but slightly less visible.
Of course, viewing requires a clear sky, and lately, our darkened skies have been less star-studded black than luminous gray, a soft veil shrouding the earth’s night light.
I got up once in the middle of the night and noticed that the clouds had cleared — no meteors visible, only a single waning crescent, brighter than electric bulb, high in the southeast sky. It was the mirror image of the one above, turning away instead of toward us in the dark of night instead of day, but it, too, had emerged from the dissipating cloud cover of recent storms.
Clear night skies used to be a steady feature of the rainy season, a time for starwatching and for seeking moon. The storms, heavy and dark though they were, inevitably passed through during the daylight hours, leaving a diamond-edged clarity in their wake. The meteor showers of mid- to late summer would find us out of doors in the cool night, shouting with delight over every silvery arc.
It’s one more thing that climate change has upended, the weather patterns that permitted such celestial pursuits. Now, the nights are as apt to be cloudy as clear, more likely to be too cold to stay outside long, or, if warm, too abuzz with mosquitoes to make the night air hospitable. And while we were granted no rain yesterday, today may be another story . . . or, it may do as it does so often these days, frontloading our skies with phalanxes of thunderheads, only to deliver two dozen drops and oppressive humidity while it sends the real weather a few miles north or south, east or west.
Still, the new daily timetable has its rewards. Sunset is often a fiery thing now, turning barely-distant storms the shades of amber and coral and rose instead of iron. The light is as mystical as that found in the scalpel-edged air of fall, even if the angles are not so sharp. And still, the possibility of a celestial light show remains: if not enough clarity to see the meteors, at least enough parting of the clouds for us to find the silver crescent of the moon.
Perhaps we’ll go outside tonight to see.
~ Aji
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