I envy you the good fortune of glancing out your window at precisely the moment a green fireball appeared in the night sky.

Many brilliant, green fireballs were seen in New Mexico in 1948-’49. They prompted speculation about whether they could have been Russian devices or probes launched from interplanetary spaceships. Those green fireballs form an early chapter in the history of the Flying Saucer Myth, which I studied years ago when I was an amateur astronomer.

A sketch of a green fireball was featured in a 2-page spread in LIFE magazine in April 1952 ( it can be seen here).

The night sky is one of the most majestic yet unappreciated sights in life. Astronomer Terence Dickinson wrote in 1998 that children today “are the first generation in the history of civilization to live in a world where the stars are almost certain to be the last thing noticed at night instead of the first…” (in his Night Watch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe [1998]).

An entire way of life has disappeared in recent decades, a way of life in which an essential part of growing up was for children to sit among their parents and family on summer evenings in their backyard or on their porch, listening to the grown-ups talking about their lives and telling their stories – not competing with radio, TV, or any other such distractions – and glancing up occasionally to notice the beauty of the night sky as their elders pointed out the identity of this or that star, planet, or constellation.

I grew up that way in the 1950s and early 1960s, when it was a pleasure to see for the first time the golden disk of the planet Saturn or the brilliant white disk of Jupiter through a small telescope. But how many children in modern culture will ever learn to appreciate the night sky? How many children are now effectively inoculated against the feeling of wonder and curiosity that the night sky can inspire – inoculated by the variety of brain-anesthetizing toys and amusements their parents provide for them from infancy onward?

How rich American children were a hundred years ago – with only books with words, the stars at night, and their imagination. Leslie Peltier grew up then on a farm in Ohio and had only a tenth-grade education. But he became an accomplished and widely-respected amateur astronomer. (See his delightful book Starlight Nights: The Adventures of a Star-Gazer [1965].)

And today: Children have countless picture books, color TV, movies, DVDs, CDs, rock “music”, radio, computer games, cell phones, and entire industries manufacturing toys for them. But few of them will ever see a dark sky at night, far away from the blinding lights of big cities. I dare say people who are blind would appreciate the splendor of the night sky if they could see it for just one night. But that splendor is there on every clear night and free, just for the looking, yet is now commonly ignored by people who are drunk on the toys and diversions of modern technology.

When I was a boy, my father and I often visited the St. Louis Planetarium. Presentations were given in the planetarium Star Chamber, where classical music was used to supplement hour-long lectures about the history of astronomy or prominent objects in the night sky. That was in 1964. The Planetarium is still there today, but the Star Chamber was demolished, and hour-long presentations with classical music are from an age and a grown-up culture long since abandoned. The goal of planetariums today is to hype it up and dumb it down to attract people who could not act, speak, or dress the way Americans did when that Planetarium opened in 1963 if they were offered bribes to do so.

As David Gelernter has written, the dumbing down of planetariums is another death blow to the calm and quiet dignity that could once be found in American museums. (“The End of Dignity”, The New York Times, March 5, 1995)

— Comments —

Fred Owens writes:

I do not quite trust this exercise in nostalgia about the good old days when we saw the stars at night. Nostalgia is kind of an icky-sweet feeling akin to eating one too many fudge brownies. I’ll never be young again, we aren’t going back to the 1950s and I love my cell phone and my laptop.

There is no return and no right of return, but there may be, in the mystical sense of Christ, a coming full circle, and there may be a way to come to a time, in the future, when we can see the stars again. We can agree — without government mandate — to turn down the lights at night. We can actually do this and perhaps Alan’s nostalgic vision of yesterday might serve as an inspiration — as long as we don’t try to go backwards in time.

Laura writes:

Alan wrote about specific aspects of the past: the night sky and the attention given to it. If someone comes away from his reflections with the impression that everything was good in the past, the fault likes with the reader, not with Alan.

As far as the visibility of the sky, town ordinances that call for restricted lighting or for lighting that faces downward do make a difference. These restrictions, provided they are reasonable, do not represent intrusive government. The sky is our common property. Why should our access to it be  limited unnecessarily?

Modern technology has many benefits. But I agree with Alan’s remarks about the junk children are fed. He spoke of adults and children sitting around, talking and reminiscing. Togetherness is not always beautiful and when families interact, they also clash with each other. But such is the price of knowing and encountering each other.

Nature is of such importance in the development of children. All children know this, but not all adults do. Nature affirms a child’s deepest intuitions about the unity that underlies all things. It feeds their awareness of the world that exists beyond nature. It tells them of God’s love. A child deprived of the sky is a child deprived of food. Modern technology has created prisons for children. When they reach adulthood, having never experienced the outdoors or interaction with an unchanging cast of human characters, they are handicapped in the race. They may become perpetual children instead of adults, having never had a childhood at the right time.

I cannot express how important the sky was to me when I was growing up. Of course, children even now, still have the sky, but they are more distracted from it.

When I was happy as a child, the moon told me my happiness was real, not just within me, but an eternal part of the order of things. When I was melancholy, the clouds affirmed that sorrow too. The sky above the ocean, with its canopy of change and its billowing sails of vapor, taught me about the passage of time.

And what child doesn’t like the stars? What child doesn’t find in the stars an irreplaceable teacher?

The stars teach us to defy the crowd.

Robert Frost wrote in his beautiful poem “Choose Something Like the Star”:

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud —
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says “I burn.”
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

 To wish for the beautiful and the good is never an exercise in nostalgia. It is never too late to learn from the stars.

Buck writes:

[Feb. 27, 2012]

Alan writes: