Nerve Endings Firing Away

Ash and I spent a bright Saturday morning under the stars. Yup, you heard it right; Big Dipper, North Star, handful of our neighboring planets, and the Andromeda galaxy spread out right in front of our eyes. We visited the Fernbank Science Center and they have a nifty planetarium that features different astronomy shows. We sat in for the Sky Tonight show. The insides of the white dome above our head were lit up with little stars that would make up the sky, if the dome (and Atlanta’s light pollution) wasn’t there. Presented against a faint outline of the Atlanta skyline around the dome’s rim, the astronomer gave an interesting live talk, complete with a sky map handouts and pointed out different constellations. Our ancestors must have had a great imagination because I surely couldn’t see how they visualized a lion with randomly scattered stars. Maybe you have a monopoly over deciding how things in the sky look when no one else is looking upwards.

At one point, the astronomer turned off the city outline leaving only the starlit dome and I heard a collective gasp from the audience. The astronomer paused and sighed, “If only everyone had this view of the sky“. I couldn’t agree more.