11 years and three months ago, I started looking up again, at a night sky that, for the first time in probably 75 years, wasn’t riddled with the blinking lights of airplanes. Satellites still slid by, above the effect of the mess on earth. As readers know, I’ve been looking up ever since and increasingly my stargazing, the thing that lifts me up above the suffering intrinsic to existence, has become my anchor on earth.

Even ships at anchor can get swamped, and this evening, absorbing the news from Newtown, and thinking of the 27 dead, especially the 18 children, I have been shaken. Like so many others. Picking my daughter up from school today was profoundly sad, as like most parents I could viscerally imagine one day simply not having anyone waiting for me there. It could happen. For the parents of 18 kids in Newtown, it did today. The unthinkable sometimes simply happens. A new name enters into a growing public lexicon. Columbine. Virginia Tech. Aurora. Newtown. What will be next?

Last night, I spent about 2 hours outside observing the Geminid meteors. I saw about 20 of them. Each one took my breath away. When you see a meteor streak to the sky, it is in an exhilerating beauty. It’s often just a sliding line of light, a very simple image, but when you catch sight of one, it is a wild ride. Your spirit rises as your mind comprehends what you are seeing, and then, just as you get used to this new definition of beauty, it ends abruptly. And when it ends you wish dearly it had streaked on just a little longer. Sometimes you can see a vapor trail behind the meteor, which fluoresces for a few moments like a ghost before fading forever.

I keep coming back to those meteors, today, as a way to try to figure out the sadness of Newtown in me.

My Bicycle Astronomy project, writ large, is about science education. I want to show people the night sky and uplift their minds, acquaint them with real, not simulated, beauty, and give them some basic building blocks from which they can start to assemble a realistic understanding of the universal contexts of their lives. It’s not a spiritual mission, though I know that real beauty, and the understaning of how it is structured, can definitely uplift spirits. I wish I could somehow uplift the shattered spirits in Newtown this evening.

Tonight my daughter went to a birthday party. Most of her friends didn’t know what happened today, so they could enjoy the evening without the crushing reminder of the suffering that, like dark matter to the universe, makes up much of human life. I was home alone with the news feed, and how I wish I could have been in a house full of rowdy children. But I tried to figure out the astronomer’s response, the response of the rational mind.

Someone tweeted that today is indeed not the day to discuss policy solutions like gun control or an overhaul of our mental health system, yesterday was, and I think that puts it quite well. Twitter discussion around the #guncontrolnow shows yet again the polarization of the American polity. Guns don’t kill, people do. Laws won’t stop people from getting guns. These are unhelpful and untruthful abstractions.

The rationale mind will look at what happened in Newtown today and try to come up with an effective policy to help insure this won’t happen again. Sadly, probably the easiest answer politically is to fortify our schools (and many urban schools already are). This would be sad, as we can’t fortify every public space, like movie theaters, offices, OTB parlors, without effectively militarizing our whole country. No, guns and mental health is what we should talk about.

I support the right to bear arms. But the rational thinker does not need to see things in black and white. It isn’t all guns or no guns. The questions the scientist will ask are: What can we do to lessen the likelihood that a mentally ill person will have access to guns? What can we do to ensure that mentally ill people will have enough oversight and care to lessen the chance of a rampage? And yes, the rational thinker will also ask: what can we do to protect our most vulnerable brothers and sisters in the event that our other policies fail to stop a rampage?

The scientist will not argue on the basis of ideology or dogma, nor will she perceive the issue as all or nothing. In addition, there is information, data, to consider. What do rampages have in common and what strategies exist to lessen their likelihood or limit the destruction? What do the experts say? What does the science show? And yes, rational thinking even extends to that seemingly taboo subject in this country of what seems to work in other nations with other laws. Facts are facts, and nations with stricter gun control have fewer massacres. The rational mind will want to know why, and what we can do better.

As a gun owner, as a father, as a scientist, as an American, as a rational human being, I beg my fellow Americans to start considering these questions. Surely we can prioritize the goal of reducing the number of young lives abruptly cut short, like a meteor that just dissappears, with such a seemingly beautiful path ahead of it.

Like many astronomers, I try, at least once a day, to check in with NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day, or APOD. It’s like one of those calendars where you tear a new sheet off for each day, and it has a deep thought or Farside cartoon or stupid thing that someone who was actually in possession of the nuclear football actually said. Except that APOD offers a daily glimpse of reality, the wider universe in which we live and wonder.

Today’s APOD, by Florian Breuer, is one of the most striking images I have ever seen of a clear, dark, sky, and it comes from a place that might be one of the last places on earth where such a dark sky is visible, if humans keep stringing up lights to illuminate every shadowed corner of what is seen as their exclusive realm (that is to say, everywhere). This photo is from Namibia.

In the lower left, you see two fuzzy patches. These are the Magellanic Clouds, two small galaxies, galaxettes, if you will, or galexitos in Spanish, that the Milky Way accumulated at some point in its twirling about the cosmos. Groupies. That thick arch of stars and dust and gas and, we now know, planets, is the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy. The brightest area of the arc is the core the Milky Way. Earth, the Sun, our entire solar system, are orbiting that galactic core, and our galactic year is about 250 million earth years. The entire galaxy is spinning.

The image is stunning too for the strange, wonderful Quiver Trees in the foreground, which are not trees but succulents, a variety of aloe. Rub that on your face! Some of these trees have been staring at the night sky for three centuries. On the best of nights, which I can only count on one hand at this point in my life, I have seen a night sky that looked pretty much like this. Not quite as colorfull or as deep, but we have to forgive the photograph; it has to exagerate to make up for the fact that it is, ultimately, a simulation. Most of these nights occured in the last few years, during visits to National Parks out west and a haven of dark skies in the east, Pennsylvania’s Cherry Springs State Park.

I am a nonbeliever. Or rather, I believe in a lot of things, like truth, justice, reason, and the fact that both bacon and butter are each distinct, complete food groups that somehow occupy the top level of the food pyramid concurrently. But I don’t believe in God. Haven’t for a long time, longer than I could articulate the proposition in my mind. This sentence should be accepted by most readers the same way “I’ve been practicing Buddhism since I was 17″ would, but I know that it won’t. Nonbelievers are scary, alien to perhaps the majority of humans. Ironically, a life of belief is similarly alien to me, and I led one for some years, earnestly.

I don’t preach nonbelief, or anthing, at the eyepiece of my telescope. I want to illuminate the universe, but the message people get from that view, well, that’s between them and the universe. That message is sacred to me even if I don’t receive the same one, and facilitating its transmittal is one of the enduring joys of my life.

But I couldn’t contextualize why this night sky portrait so moves me without getting into my world view, so I appreciate the indulgence. A few people have stated, sometimes personally to me, and sometimes to the wider world, that they think the universe would be diminished without belief. For me it’s not. It’s actually the opposite. The more I see, the more I understand about what I see, the more beautiful the universe gets. The more I wonder. Believers may take this as a compliment to the being/s they credit with creating all this. They did a spanking good job, because it’s a wonderful, complex, beguiling, thing, a vivid thing that shrugs off whole phalanxes of adjectives without seeming even a teensy bit tarnished from the onslaught.

And this photo reminds me of that deep complexity and beauty. Or rather, it reminds me of the times I have stood under that clear window in the universe and felt that euphoric sense of wonder wash over me, bathed by the photons of the real universe above me.

What a beautiful universe we live in, and how lucky am I to be gaze upon it! I guess that’s kind of like a prayer.

Even when I was a believer, it was the natural universe that held my imagination. I actually had a pact with God. I don’t remember when or the circumstances that brought about this particular covenant, but basically here was the deal; I was going to be a good Christian, and lead a good, Christian life. But in return, God would excuse me from eternal choral duty in heaven. Instead, my plan was to zip around the universe. I wanted to watch planets form, stars explode in Supernova, galaxies collide and races from distant worlds meet. I wanted to bear silent witness to humanity surviving the progress trap bottleneck we are in the midst of, and reaching out across the planets of its solar system and then across the stars. I wanted to see what would happen next!

But then I realized there was no dealmaker, and therefore, no deal. And that was the hardest part about losing faith. I had to become mortal, to accept that my vision is limited in both distance and time, that I won’t ever know happens next on a geologic or galactic time scale. Acceptance of this has been a daily challenge, and I’d be dishonest if I presented myself as some sort of space monk with a peaceful inner life. I still want a great many things I cannot have!

But right around the time this happened, I began to look up more, and astronomy came back to me. And though there are some things that are, and will remain, beyond the reach of my telescope, I still consider myself a fortunate traveller to have seen as much as I have, more than many people will ever see. And I consider myself fortunate to have undertaken such an enjoyable mission on earth, to show other people at least some of what I have seen, and open up the lines of communication between the people in my community and their universe.

You may notice what looks like a sunset, or sunrise, in the sky portrait above. It’s neither, though perhaps it is both. It’s what’s called a light dome, and it’s created by a city with artificial lights pointing in the wrong direction. I say it might as well be a sunrise, because people seem quite content to wipe night off the face of the earth, and it might as well be a sunset because the unlimitless energy that is needed for such wanton acts of excess comes at a stiff price, one that may in the end be our undoing. The world won’t end in a few weeks like some crazy wackoes misrepresenting the Maya say it will, but that doesn’t mean it won’t end, or that one of these tomorrows might look frighteningly unlike its yesterday.

So me, I’ll try to cherish all that realness, while it lasts. While I last.

A Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) is not what happens when someone drinks too much of a popular, pale Mexican beer. It’s not what happens when a member of a royal family gets angry and throws their bejeweled headgear out the window. It’s not what happens when sponges in the earth’s oceans suddenly move a foot in a half in one direction (that’s an undersea, unexplained mass sponge migration or UUMSM). A Coronal Mass Ejection is, according to wikipedia, quoting a NASA website, a massive burst of solar wind, other light isotope plasma, and magnetic fields rising above the solar corona or being released into space. 

And earlier this morning, our Sun had a doozy of one:

 

The Coronal Mass Ejection of March 7, 2012. This image sequence, from a coronagraph aboard the SOHO satellite, uses a mask (center) to cover the main body of the sun, revealing the corona, much the same way the moon does during a Solar Eclipse.

Remember the words of Douglas Adams: Don’t Panic! Nasa scientists do not expect that the dead will rise to consume the flesh of the living from this, or any, CME. Incidentally, the image sequence above was recorded by the plucky robot satellite called SOHO, that’s been watching the sun since it’s launch in 1995. (It’s discovered over 2000 comets, some of which did kamikaze dives into the sun, obliterating themselves in a blaze of short-lived glory.) Conspiracy nuts are constantly sifting through SOHO images spotting large alien spacecraft and angels…any way, back to our CME.

A CME that heads in our general direction can cause a geomagnetic storm in the Earth’s magnetosphere that can result in vibrant displays of the auroras, or Northern and Southern Lights, as well as wreak some gremliny havoc on energy grids, and communication satellites such as those that feed data to your trusty GPS droid. Space weather experts are predicting a particularly strong geomagnetic storm for the morning of March 8 (tomorrow at the time of writing). Will power grids be disrupted like they were during the geomagnetic storm of 1989? The power companies have tried to make the grid less vulnerable to current surges induced by the storm activity since then….but I guess we’ll know when we know. Will the dead rise and crack open our skulls to feast on the goo inside? Will our escape from the undead hordes be foiled when we jump into our cars and the GPS lady says “recalculating…recalculating…”

Though I enjoy zombie literature, I’m not yet nailing boards across my windows and packing my muzzleloader full of powder and shot. Power outages aren’t necessarily bad for society. Peoples’ TVs suddenly go blank and people blink, turn their necks for the first time in days, maybe even step out onto their doorsteps and wave at their stunned neighbors, also surprised that fresh air, being vertical, and images created by something other than glowing pixels can be as invigorating as the Big Red commercial they were watching when the virtual universe went into standby mode. Conversation and community might actually ensue. And/or, people might look up and see a sky with no light pollution. Given that this hypothetical outage was caused by a magnetic storm, itself caused by a CME, itself caused–scientists now think–by the crossing of two magnetic field lines on the sun’s surface–don’t cross the streams, Ray!), we are also likely in for a fantastic display of the Auroras. During the great magnetic storm of 1850, auroras were seen over much of the Earth’s surface. I saw a wisp of an auroral display once, in junior high school, in winter, from my home north of Albany, NY. Just a wisp of green fluctuation in the sky, but it was magnificent. Such a display demands the lights be turned down, and that might just be what happens.

I’ll never forget the testimony of Staten Island based astronomy professor Irve Robbins, who told the director of the excellent documentary The City Dark: ”I’ve seen twice the Milky Way in New York–when there was a blackout.”

So, if yesterday’s CME shuts off the power tomorrow and your GPS woman spirals into an inconsolable depression, look up at night (if it’s clear) and remember you’re standing and living on a relatively tiny slightly-oblate sphere, with space just a few hundred miles above your head, and that space is immense and dynamic and active and dangerous and beautiful.

And when the TVs come back on, then the dead will rise. Or rather, they won’t. They’ll sit, remote controls in hand. Waiting for something to happen.

For space weather updates, go to www.spaceweather.com