Across Space, Time, and History
I found an interesting press release in my mailbox this morning. It was from the International Dark-Sky Association, reporting that the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico is the IDA’s newest Dark Sky Park. If you’ve ever been to Chaco, you know how dark its skies are, so this is an extremely fitting designation for what is actually quite a wonderful (but rugged and demanding) place to visit.
We visited there in 2002 and spent time hiking to the major sites in the park. I had visited it once before, and it was Mark’s first visit. Some years earlier, he had done the soundtrack for a show about the Anasazi (music which comprises the Geodesium album Anasazi), and so for him it was a chance to reconnect with a place that he had described in music.
Throughout the visit I really did get a wonderful sense of the place’s history. For example, there is a pictograph that is about half a day’s hike from the center of the park that is thought to depict the supernova of 1054. There’s a hand pictured next to a star-like object and a crescent moon, almost as if the ancient stargazer who put it there was measuring the sky.
When you look at things like this, or such things as the depiction of a comet in the painting Adoration of the Magi by the Italian artist Giotto di Bondone, you are seeing the sky as those people did. In a sense, you’re entering their thoughts about the objects they saw. There are ancient observatories around the world, purpose-built by architects who saw the sky as someplace important enough to dedicate years of work and effort. From the Jantar Mantar in India to the Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming in the United States to other ancient and modern observatories scattered across the planet and through near-Earth space, these places allow us to see the sky in the way their builders intended.
In a very real sense, the sky is an amazing unifying principle that unites us all as we stargaze and explore the many celestial sights available to us “up there”. Another unifying principle in astronomy lies in the names we give objects in the sky. For the brightest objects, at least, we use many names that come to us from antiquity, from a time when all astronomy was observational only, and it was naked-eye. So, for example, many constellation names come to us from the ancient Greeks and the legends they told of their gods and goddesses. Many star names are Arabic or Greek in origin, and they all have Latin names stemming back to ancient Rome when Latin was the language of civilization. So, for example, the brightest star in Canis Major is Sirius, which comes to us from the Greek. It’s also known as Alpha Canis Majoris. Betelgeuse, the bright star in the constellation Orion, is of Arabic derivation, from the phrase “Yad al-Jauza” which means “the hand of al Jawza”. It’s also known as alpha Orionis.
Each name we use has a history, and it tells us something about the people who named it and the vision of the sky they had. Orion is seen as a figure of a hunter in many cultures, and so it was not a stretch to think of his brightest star as being part of his arm. The Chinese had a very different view of this guy in the sky. They saw it as a lunar mansion. Many cultures focused on the three belt stars in Orion, naming them after hunting animals or the hunting staff of a goddess, or the stick of a wise man or a judge. Each of these interpretation gives great insight into the minds and thinking of the people who used those terms.
Throughout history, through all the wars, the battles, the conquests, the occupations, the peaceful times, the expansions of humanity to new frontiers, modern times the stars have always been there. They’re under threat from overuse of lights, which is something that IDA is working to fix (along with people around the world who recognize that dark skies are part of our heritage). The starry skies are worth preserving and protecting. Stars and constellations have been a source of stability, something that all people could use, and share. And, when you visit places such as Chaco Culture National Historical Park, not only can you enjoy the beauty of the night sky, you can put yourself in the place of the people who lived there before, and shared the sky with you, through a link that exists only through time and the sky.