Aroostook Skies: Summertime(!)
If we could, as songwriter Jim Croce romantically penned 40 years ago, “save time in a bottle” no better candidate for bottling would top late August in Aroostook County. The woods and fields remain luscious and green, the winds blast southerly in lazy, gassy discharge. Immense cumulus puffballs sculpt the bluish sky beautifully. Grasshoppers, butterflies, and critters almost beyond description and number vie for flying time. Oversized spiders, biding their time upon window-sized webs, hungrily wait for an abundant harvest. All in all, nature’s cup runneth over.
The night sky seems to mimic the terrestrial bounty. Clear, temperate nights bring the arching splendor of our Milky Way forking nearly overhead into two sublime streams of starry stuff. I never cease to marvel at the grandeur of this pie-shaped wedge of galactic glory. Casual binocular time draws even the novice along the channels of innumerable star pins and points. Immense reward and satisfaction awaits the willing eye.
Constellations weave mythological magic and seduce our routine summer sensibilities. The names, themselves, invite wonder and imagination to the fore: Corona Borealis, Sagittarius, Bootes, Hercules, Pegasus, Ophiuchus. Mighty suns deeply burn from distant light years yards in subtle shades of burnished gold, tangerine cream, and turquoise-white. There exists a familiar fullness here when we choose to see with our hearts.
The final days of August bring neighbors, too. Mars and Saturn dance slyly, but happily low in the southwestern sky.
Spring and Summer brought both planets into captive though separate sky study. Larger telescopes resolved Mars’s polar hood and peculiar greenish-grey landforms. Saturn remained a world of unmatched grace and beauty, widely and amply displaying its ring wonder. Occasionally, enigmatic Titan, the atmospheric moon, bejeweled the eyepiece co-joined with other minute satellite sights. Now, now, with the shadows of September too close, both planets embrace closely, caught unashamedly in a final farewell, so reluctant to release their hold upon static summer. Farewell!
The ancient one, waxing and warm, will return to flame our own lunar necessities. “Will you ever come back?” she seems to suggest. The crescent contact grows brighter and more insistent with each departing August night until the certainty of September obligations arrive. How many of you started your own celestial quest years forgotten in her reflected radiance?
Yes, I know barbed fences come as a function of our real fears. And yes, I know that bright city lights galvanize our economy. And yes, I know that kids must finish homework and go to bed with clothes pressed and ready for a new “day.” But remember the Summertime — remember Summertime and claim what you must before the gate predictably shuts in the fall of a little leaf.
Larry Berz of Caribou is director of Easton’s Francis Malcolm Planetarium and astronomy instructor at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics.
