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| M51 Whirlpool Galaxy (NASA photo) |
The suburbs have a bad reputation. As endless tracts of anodyne nowhere, sinkholes of boredom and isolation, far from the meaningful lives of richness and significance that are lived by residents of cities. A slur formed after World War II, when cookie-cutter Levittown housing developments crowded out farmers’ fields and young couples swapped their cramped apartments in the teeming, dynamic finger-snapping city for identical contemporary split levels on quarter-acre lots.
But it isn’t true. Or at least not always true.
There are wonders aplenty in the suburbs. For instance, my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook has foxes, hawks, owls, its own velodrome, a speed skating culture that produced 20 Olympians, Prairie Grass Cafe, and the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy hovering just above our heads.
OK, M51 is 31 million light-years away. But you can see it from Northbrook.
Maybe I should just tell the story.
Not realizing what splendors we already had at home, my wife and I drove into the city Saturday. She had a taste for the excellent Italian food at Topo Gigio on Wells Street, and we decided to go early and wander around Lincoln Park Zoo.
The zoo was lovely, but missing a certain vital element — you know, it’s complicated, so we’ll dive into the zoo and what it’s missing on Friday.
Anyway, after dinner — Topo Gigio let us sit at the table nearly three hours, thank you very much — we headed home, a 40-minute drive. As we turned into Center Avenue, I noticed two dark forms sitting on the sidewalk across from our house. People.
One doesn’t sit on the sidewalk in the suburbs unless one is 6 years old, and not even then. Particularly not after 10 p.m. I figured this must be young people having a tête-à-tête. I put the car in the garage, went into the house, leashed up Kitty and came out. I gave the couple a wide berth, tracking them out of the corner of my eye. We do have a homeless guy who sometimes sleeps on the bench at Shermer and Walters, but I haven’t seen him lately. Kitty did her business, and on the way back, emboldened, I vectored over.
“Good evening,” I said. “Everything OK?”
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Very, very enjoyable read. Thanks. With a nostalgic touch about "a dozen novelists working for a year" instead of the ominous AI.
ReplyDeleteLove the spirit of your closing statement!
ReplyDeleteSeestar...what a perfect brand name for a telescope.
ReplyDeleteIt is what it is...literally. Love it!
My only sibling is into astronomy.
DeleteWill tell her about those telescopes.
Then maybe my seestar will buy one.
Your pun compels me to tell on myself, a gringo. I was reading a picture book to kindergarteneers in Little Village. The book was in Spanish and English. One page had a picture of three little girls at the beach picking up shells. A liitle boy pointed and said "seestar!" I asked does this girl look like your sister? No, seestar, pointing again. Oh, this little girl? The teacher was in the back of the room, cackling and chortling. No, he answered, stood up and put his finger on a star fish, or sea star. So, I learned a new term and gave the teacher a good laugh.
DeleteThat is priceless!
DeleteStarfish...sea star. Of course!
If you cut a starfish into five easy pieces and then throw them back into the sea, all you have done is to make five new starfish.
Every Christmas, we affix a huge dried starfish to the top of our Christmas tree.,
I once read that if our Milky Way galaxy could be scaled to fit in a coffee cup then the observable universe would be the size of North America.
ReplyDelete"Once in a while, you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right." Courtesy Grateful Dead, Scarlet Begonias.
ReplyDeleteI've an older model Meade brand refracting telescope gifted to me for my thirtieth birthday. None of the bells and whistles of the modern scopes with software and tracking motors. Though I did purchase a number of upgrades. filters , a doubling lens as well as a robust tripod so you could view celestial objects standing up.
ReplyDeleteAll I brought to NM was a backpack. It would be nice to have here as there is one of the darkest areas in the US nearby.
I remember the first time I saw saturn and it's moons , incredible!
At first there were five and then only 4.
Spent a bit of time looking for comets in the 90s.
Nasa has some great " new" photos of Pluto I saw in a scientific American the other day. Sure looks like a planet :(
In high school, as a part of physics, we were required to trek out to the field sometime between 6:30 and 9:00 pm one night during late January to gaze at the stars through some telescopes that the school had.
ReplyDeleteMy teacher spent a few moments locating Saturn, the great ringed gas giant, as it slowly dances around the southwestern horizon.
As he searched the night sky for the planet, he quipped about how he is always accused of putting a sticker on the lens.
"There is no way someone could think that" I though before i was interrupted by his "aha!"
Sure enough... there it was. more luminous than a sticker could ever be, but clearer than i thought possible. I wasn't convinced that it was a sticker, and I will harshly judge anyone who thinks it is, but my god was it beautiful.
I want to buy a telescope again... to spend some nights gazing into the darkness as opposed to the all consuming glow of my cellphone. I can understand why Dr. Manhattan went mars. Sometimes I wish i could do what he can.
Lovely, Neil. Thank you. On my bucket list is to visit somewhere where the night sky is awash in visible stars, not the pinpricks we get in Chicagoland with all the light pollution.
ReplyDeleteGreat column - makes me feel so small but so uplifted at the same time!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the thoughts today. Made me relisten to "The Galaxy Song" from Eric Idle and Monty Python. Remarkable for it's perspective and accuracy.
ReplyDeleteYes Saturn! One of the most remarkable objects in our solar system.
ReplyDeleteBut m51 is a Galaxy an entire galaxy that with a cheap telescope looks like a star but with a better one you can see the swirling arms it's awe inspiring
It used to be that the Yorkies observatory near lake Geneva would open a couple of times a year for public tours now that's a telescope.
Tom
Yerkes, not Yorkies!
DeleteI don't believe there's any need for an exclamation point after your statement
DeleteI'm frequently disappointed by things. (Surprise! -- read a paper if you wonder why.) But a frequent minor disappointment is the inability to witness various celestial events that occur on the semi-regular. I recall a few years ago, there was a pretty bright comet that was around for several days, at least. We went to some degree of trouble trying to get to see it, but the "dark" places we sought out around here were nowhere near dark enough. (That's pretty obvious when you look at any nighttime satellite view of the country with the giant white blotch that inhabits the southwest corner of Lake Michigan, of course.)
ReplyDeleteThe only reason I'm mentioning it is because I recall marveling as I stared up into a sky in which I can see the moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mars and maybe 25 stars, that there was "nothing" in between me and the overstuffed view that was commonplace for much of the history of mankind. Nothing but light pollution, that is. It was all right there, as I was looking, but I couldn't see it. I'm pleased enough to see the Big Dipper and Orion on good nights.
Anyway, I ran across this a couple days ago, via a repost by Robert Loerzel on Bluesky.
"functionally every single person on earth was seeing a night sky with brighter and clearer stars than basically anyone on earth can see today, until about 150 years ago, due to light pollution."
https://bsky.app/profile/mtsw.bsky.social/post/3mqiuxjjlok2v
That being said, this wonderful column isn't enough to get me to move to the leafy, suburban paradise, however. 😉
"Then maybe my seestar will buy one." Awesome Grizz! I'm a sucker for puns.
ReplyDeleteThanks muchly. It's what I do. Got me kicked out of class a lot, as a youth.
DeleteOh yeah? Well, my sister asked me if I was interested in stargazing, because she bought a new telescope.
ReplyDeleteI told her I’d consider looking into it.
Just love astronomy
ReplyDeleteCongratulations
ReplyDeleteHaving caught up on your posts after two weeks away, this is the most memorable among them. Being science-deficient, I had to re-read then fact-check your statement about the dinosaurs extinction being 35 million years older than the 31 million years it takes M51's light to reach us. I was happily astounded to learn that it's true.
ReplyDelete