Here’s what I appreciate about the night sky: On a clear night, there’s a clear picture. And here’s what it says about life to me.
From a distance, all these bodies are about the same size with only slight deviations – some are brighter, some are slightly more tinted in color, but they’re all about the same size to the human eye. It’s our proximity to these objects that skew our perception: from our vantage point the moon – a body 27% the size of our own planet – is roughly the same size as our sun, an object 100 times the diameter of our own planet. Jupiter, a planet 2.5 times larger than the rest of the planets, looks like a shiny dot in the sky, and about the same size as Mars. On a really clear night, you may be able to see one arm of the Milky Way galaxy across the sky…but only one arm.
We see the stars organized as patters in the sky – Orion, the Great Bear – but at the end of the day, their alignment in these shapes are created by our view from our place in the universe.
Our proximity, or lack there of, creates a bias and an inability to see magnitude in the big picture. We see patterns where none exist, we misjudge size. When we’re so deeply involved in a situation, we overestimate the importance; when we’re invested in a situation, we create patterns where they may or may not exist. When we look at the sky, we see millions of similar individuals in the sky when in reality they represent a diversity of size, color, depth, and magnitude. Our sun is the most important star in the sky, it heats our planet and makes life possible; in reality its a mid-range yellow star with no particular features. Its our dependence on this object that makes it important.
Yet, from a distance, we only see similarities. Only barely detectable to the eye are the differences between Red Giants and White Dwarfs. Betelgeuse has a detectable red hue to it if you’re paying attention. Sirius is the brightest star in the sky, but how many of us could pick it out? All those distinctions get lost in our distances.
How many times do we let distractions close to us cloud us from the larger picture – nearby lights or a cloudy, overcast sky that keeps us from seeing the stars at night? Not unlike our every day life.
I appreciate the night sky. It gives me a little perspective, perhaps because of the utter lack of proportion it shows us. You can look out over millions of years, millions of light-year distances and see only similarities in the aggregate with the odd-outlier standing out among the many. I don’t wonder about other life or about the vagueries of the universe, I’m far more simple than that. The night sky puts much of human interaction into perspective as a function of our lack of perspective in the night sky.
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