The Daily Dave

A Sky Full of Stars

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I drove to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, on roads that were unlit, unpaved, and unmarked, to ponder the great mysteries of the cosmos. 

Are we just random specks of consciousness in an infinite, indifferent universe?

What exists beyond what we can observe, perceive, and imagine?

And, would I be able to find my way back to civilization?

The answers:

  • Fuck if I know.
  • Fuck if I know.
  • It depends on how you define civilization.1

Priceless Views—At A Price

The middle of nowhere was actually somewhere north of Joshua Tree National Park in California. The area has virtually no light pollution, and the day I arrived—Friday, April 26—would coincide with the Super New Moon. If you want optimal conditions for stargazing, you can’t do much better than that unless you leave Earth, which I didn’t want to do because this is the planet where all my stuff is.

It’s also the only planet that takes American Express, which is good, because it costs $200 to book Stargazing Joshua Tree’s Dark Sky Experience.2 

Silhouettes of humans against a star-filled night sky. One of the people is pointing a green laser at something in the sky.

“Are you saying you paid two hundred bucks to look at the sky?” I hear you asking.

Of course not.3

I paid two hundred bucks for a guide who explained what the hell I was looking at, two optical telescopes, four digital telescopes, a pair of binoculars, comfy seats and blankets, hot drinks, snacks, and a small team that set everything up.

Money well spent.4

A man in a field looking into a telescope.
Hey, that’s me! Edwin Hubble discovered that you need to turn your baseball cap around before using a telescope. Otherwise, the front gets in the way, and you can’t get close enough to the eyepiece. He called this the Big Brim Theory.
A telescope and a man with a laser pointer in a field at night.
The guide is a bit taller than the digital telescope, but he looks smaller because stellar parallax makes it difficult for us on Earth to get a sense of the relative distance and sizes of objects. We must look at myriad factors, like the lightwave frequencies, to properly calculate how big things are. Oh, wait, I’ve just been told he was farther away from the camera.

Space Sombreros!

As mentioned above, we had two optical and four digital telescopes.

The optical telescopes magnified things the old-fashioned way: with a whole bunch of lenses and mirrors. If you crack one open, you’ll find a lot of things in common with the telescopes Galileo built more than 400 years ago when he discovered two of Jupiter’s moons, Figaro and Magnifico.5

Using a Unistellar eVscopes after using an optical telescope is like writing an email after carving a message into a rock.6 Despite being smaller and lighter than their optical ancestors, the digital telescopes were more powerful and provided clearer, brighter images. Their only problem, in my opinion, is that they don’t lend themselves to stupid “Bohemian Rhapsody” references.

Digital telescopes are great for astrophotography. Here are some of the space oddities I saw that night:

The Sombrero Galaxy
The Sombrero Galaxy is overrun with tourists every Cinco de Mayo. (Click to embiggen.)
The Hercules Globular Cluster
The Hercules Globular Cluster contains hundreds of thousands of stars. Its official name is Messier 13, or just M-13, which sounds a bit like MS-13, and, as such, the government has shamelessly deported the entire globular cluster without warning or due process to a prison in El Salvador. (Click to embiggen.)
The Whirlpool Galaxy
The Whirlpool Galaxy is ideal for any kitchen or laundry room. Check out the full line of home appliances at your local Whirlpool retailer. (Click to embiggen.)
The Cigar Galaxy
According to Bernhard Freud, Sigmund’s lesser-known astronomer brother, sometimes a Cigar Galaxy is just a Cigar Galaxy. (Click to embiggen.)
The Crab Nebula
The Crab Nebula? More like the drab nebula, amirite? (Click to embiggen.)
Bode's Galaxy
Bode’s Galaxy is named for its discoverer, the 18th-century British clergyman and amateur astronomer Rev. Ambrose Galaxy. (Click to embiggen.)

The Right Stuff. Or Was It Left? I Hope I’m Not Lost.

The average temperature in outer space is -455° F (or -270° C). That’s about as cold as I felt as I bumbled back to my car at the end of the night, with only a tiny red flashlight to guide the way.7

I cautiously started the car and retraced the route back to the hotel, trying not to catastrophize and imagine getting lost, running out of fuel, trying to subsist in the woods, and eventually getting ripped to shreds by a homophobic mountain lion.8

I was sure I had made a wrong turn. 

I glanced at the GPS repeatedly, anxiously waiting to see a cell signal or anything resembling a road.

Finally, I saw a bar. Then, another bar. Then, a really big bar—Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace. I had a sense of where I was and how to return to where I was staying. I could use the North Star to navigate my way home. Or, better yet, Siri. Let’s use Siri.

Sure, I wasn’t any closer to sussing out the universe, but I wasn’t too far from a warm Airstream with lots of blankets. That was good enough for me.

Footnotes, the Final Frontier
  1. I’m back in Florida now, so the answer is probably no. ↩︎
  2. It’s listed on Viator as Professional Stargazing in Joshua Tree. ↩︎
  3. You are talking to a blog post. You know I’m not there and can’t hear you, right? ↩︎
  4. I want to give the experience five stars, but that seems like a pretty bad rating when you consider there are billions of trillions of stars in the universe. ↩︎
  5. Please do not crack open the telescopes. ↩︎
  6. As per my last rock … ↩︎
  7. OK, it was 47° F, but the wind chill brought things down to 35° F. That’s pretty darn cold for a Floridian, even though I was wearing four layers of outerwear. ↩︎
  8. I know this is a ridiculous scenario. Mountain lions are staunch LGBTQ allies. It’s the coyotes who hate us. ↩︎