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Silent sunlight, welcome in
There is work I must now begin
All my dreams have blown away
And the children wait to play
They’ll soon remember things to do
When the heart is young
And the night is done
And the sky is blue
—Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam),
from Silent SunlightW
elcome to the fi rst of these
columns for the potentially very
inspiring year of 2020.
The song stanza quoted above is
certainly inspirational, but for our pur-
poses here we need to adapt a few of the
lines. Silent starlight is as powerful in its
own, somewhat different way, as silent
sunlight is. And our hope is that the
night we love is not done. To protect and
regrow the night, however, there is work
we — not just I — “must now begin.”
Silent starlight. The mention of
“silent sunlight” makes me think of
sunlight pouring in through a window
on a clear, sharp winter day, all quiet
out-of-doors. Sunlight itself is silent
— and so is the light of the multitude
of suns, the stars — that shine in the
night sky. On calm, windless winter
nights we hear even fewer sounds, so
the brilliance of Orion and the other
winter constellations — the brightest of
the year — has an even greater pres-
ence. Of course, we might occasionally
hear loud cracking from something
freezing up in the night, or the sounds
of our footsteps crunching on ice or
snow. But those kinds of sounds have a
quality reminiscent of the sharp spar-
kling of stars, reinforcing the stellar
beauty above.Silent
Starlight
January’s starry sky inspires
a year of dreams and plans.
A few years back I coined the term
“vidience” as the counterpart in sight
to what “audience” is in sound. A vidi-
ence is what we observers are collec-
tively when we are stirred by the sights
of a silent starry sky.
Start of the stars. Is January the
best month to begin a year — or life-
time — of observing the stars? We really
must factor in what times of the night
are best in a given month. I continue
to be fascinated with the fact that the
brightest star, Sirius, is on the merid-
ian almost exactly at midnight of
January 1st, the fi rst minute of the New
Year. I’ve also written here before about
how early evening in January brings us
the hour Orion is rising and late evening
the hour it’s highest. Which of these
ought to be called “Orion o’clock?”
The fi rst step in dealing with these
matters is using sidereal time, which
is the time measured by the rotation
of the Earth relative to the fi xed stars
rather than to the Sun.
The Heavens by Hours again. The
liveliest, most memorable way to follow
time by the stars is with the system of
the Heavens by Hours, a system that has
a name for each sidereal hour. This idea
was originated by astronomical author
and illustrator Guy Ottewell, with thefi rst two hours of right ascension strad-
dling the meridian at 1h sidereal time
and earning the name “the Andromeda
Hour.” Ottewell no longer does a print
version of his legendary annual Astro-
nomical Calendar, but you can get a more
basic (and free) version for 2020 at his
website universalworkshop.com. There
you can also fi nd how to purchase his
deluxe Map of the Starry Sky and 2020
Zodiac Wavy Chart.
The hour of our January issue all-
sky chart. It is, perhaps, the Pleiades
Hour or the Perseus Hour at the time of
our chart on page 42, because the lovely
star cluster and the heroic constella-
tion are both near the meridian. Orion
is midway up the southeastern sky,
with Sirius not far above the southeast-
ern horizon at this hour. The group of
bright constellations surrounding Orion
almost fi ts within the east-to-southeast
celestial pie slice in a pie of sky whose
center is the zenith. Andromeda-Pegasus
hangs down the western sky from near
the zenith to near the horizon. And the
departing Northern Cross of Cygnus
stands upright on the west-northwestern
horizon with Deneb at top.¢FRED SCHAAF welcomes your com-
ments at [email protected].Under the Stars by Fred Schaafskyandtelescope.com • JANUARY 2020 45