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When gazing at the night sky, how do you feel?
Look closely at the spring sky above, what do you see? The view on a clear, moonless night from a dark location gives one pause for thought.
With a basic sky chart, you can pick out Arcturus, the second brightest star seen from mid northern latitudes. And of course, you can see the Big Dipper, climbing nearly overhead with Leo hanging below it. Plus a multitude of mostly unfamiliar stars of all different brightnesses. Immediately you begin getting a sense of the vastness of what lies above. Don’t stop, think some more.
As seen with your own eyes and through binoculars, behind all those many stellar points is emptiness — nothing. If you look between any two into the enveloping blackness, your gaze will likely extend beyond the limits of our understanding: first, past the edge of our Milky Way galaxy (several thousand light-years), then between two other very distant galaxies (many millions of light-years) and continue unabated among incredibly far galaxy clusters (hundreds of millions of light-years). Once past those dim glows typified in amazing Hubble Space Telescope images, you’re gazing many billions of light-years and your line of sight still hasn’t landed on anything.
All this can be seen — or rather in a mind-boggling way, cannot be seen — from a state park in the country, or at an overlook along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Now, how do you feel?
The story above first appeared in our May / June 2025 issue.
