Starlight and Satellites

Nights are an interesting time while at site.  While in America you can just flip the lights on and continue as usual, but that is not the case here (you know, no electricity).  As such, you become acutely aware of when the sun sets every day and really notice the days shortening in the winter and lengthening in the summer.  You become far more aware of the phases of the moon and its rising and setting, as it can greatly affect how you spend your nights.  It’s really shocking to me now to think back on my life in America when I never really knew what the phase the moon was in.  I didn’t need to.  But here, it is very important.  Some full-moon nights are bright enough where you can see most anything.  It’s light enough to bike without a flashlight (but watch out for hyenas).  Also, you notice those new-moon nights or nights when the moon hasn’t risen above the hills and just how truly dark it is.  The difference is palpable.

Night is a time for hanging out.  Different compounds go about this in different ways.  Some play music on their battery-powered radios.  Some make aataya and talk (I will sometimes drink it with them, but I don’t really like drinking caffeine at night because then I can never fall asleep).  Some shell peanuts while discussing the day’s news.  Regardless of the activities, there is always a lot of talking involved.  Unfortunately for me, about 65% of my communication is non-verbal; pointing and hand-gestures and whatnot.  Yeah, this doesn’t work at night time unless it is a full moon.  You might think this is discouraging, but it might be those pitch-black cloudless nights I cherish the most, because it is great for stargazing.

This has become one of my favorite activities in village.  Usually when I go to someone else’s compound they will put out a mat on the ground and insist that I lie down.  Lying down I can look up at the stars in all their glory.  Perhaps this new-found fascination won’t make sense to those who grew up in or live in small towns.  I grew up in the suburbs of San Diego, a highly populated region that meant that there was a lot of light pollution.  Looking up at night you would see a dull glow 360 degrees about the horizon.  On a good night you might see a couple of dozen stars.  That is one of the downsides of living in a big city, there’s never really a reason to look up.  You would be surprised how infrequently people look up.

But since my village has no electricity and the closest electrified town is Kedougou, 18km away, there isn’t really any light pollution.  This means that on those moonless cloudless nights you can see hundreds, maybe thousands of stars.  I wish I could present a photograph to show you, but it’s really difficult without a good camera or a long exposure or I don’t know.  Anyway, you can see the constellations, the wandering planets, even the faint line of the Milky Way.  But my two favorite things to see are shooting stars and satellites.

 

Once again, growing up in a city with a lot of light pollution, seeing shooting stars is very rare.  I never really realized how frequent they are in a clear sky.  It is a rare night here in village when I lie on my mat looking up at the skies that I don’t see a shooting star.  I usually see multiple, every night.  And I never really realized the variety of them.  All the shooting stars I had seen were just a quick line of light that would streak across the night’s sky.  But I have seen shooting stars that were so defined you could see a bright orange tail burning behind them and around them.  They are quiet brilliant, like the falling stars in Howl’s Moving Castle

I also love to see satellites.  I didn’t realize until coming to Senegal that you can actually see them traversing the heavens at night.  According the and XKCD whatif (http://what-if.xkcd.com/60/), on a clear night there's virtually always a satellite visiblet.  It just looks like a normal star that slowly moves across the sky.  It is a testament to humanity that we are able to even alter the very foundations of the great celestial and left our mark on the infinite. 

And it’s on those starry nights looking up into forever that I realize just how awesome I am.  We are all made of stardust right?