The French Astronomer

In the desert, the consistent nights of clear sky provide the perfect conditions for star gazing. The sky takes over the landscape, stretching out so expansively over the sand and mountains, reflecting nature's brightest blue. At night, the sunbeams quickly clamp themselves down over the mountains, slowly shading in the shadows with purples, reds and pinks. It all happens so fast and without any cloudy interruption, causing the colors to really streak and paint the sky so artistically. I can’t capture it with my camera; I’ve tried. Fortunately, I purchased a polarizer before I arrived here, which has helped immensely in photographing just how blue the sky is.

We booked a tour of the constellations and hopped on yet another tour bus, this one filled with English speakers from all over. A French astronomer greeted us out in the middle of the desert and led us out into the sky, everyone in their newly purchased alpaca hats with the native patterns of swirls and animals on the outside. For myself, I wore my newly purchased colorfully checked hat that has the animal fur flaps that clip over your ears and flip up in the front, very stylish.

He began by noting that viewing the sky is about observation. As the stars are moving, we are moving, and our cultures are also developing and changing. Perhaps the natives in the past were a little trippy from the substances they smoked from desert plants and perhaps the missionaries were trying to convert people by converting the constellations to Christian images. With his laser he pointed out squares or diamond constellations that are seen as a centaur, scorpion or an alter.

“As as you can see here, this is bear. Here is the head and the body, right? Obviously. Well, if you thought that was a bear then you probably would think that over here is a woman. As you know, all women have square heads. But a Virgin? I don’t think so.” He said as he pointed out the constellations that formed two stretched out legs. “Now, if you’re a European this bear now becomes a saucepan or a big dipper. And over here, if you have a monarchy, you would see this as the Northern crown, but if you are perhaps a Communist, this now becomes the sickle.”

“If you’re a Christian you would see this as a cross. Why they chose to use one of the most horrible ways of death, I don’t know, but the Barbarians – they didn’t have this way of killing people, so they saw a kite. People from Patagonia saw a hand and other indigenous saw an arrow. And over here we have a constellation very intelligently named, well, what do you think?” he said as he used his laser light beam to point out three stars 45 degrees away from each other.

“A triangle,” answered someone.

“Yes! As I said, you are a very educated group. But as you can also see, I know many triangles in the sky,” he said, proceeding to connect all different dots to make triangles.

“Now, if you could make a list of your top ten favorite things of all time to do in your life, they wouldn’t be things you learned in school, would they?”

“Triganometry.” piped up someone from the crowd.

"Astronomy is one of those things you will never learn in school."

“I will show you the astrological signs, but I don’t think they really have much meaning. The stars don’t really care about us, and for astrology to be correct they would have to have meetings, figuring out whose birthday was when and then decide to do mean things to people. Well, if you’re boyfriend breaks up with you, and you follow astrology, then he probably was right to do so.”

“What are the five best things to do in life? Breathing, eating, sleeping, drinking and…..? Sleeping again.”

“What do you have to do before you have a baby? Well, you have to make them. And you may need to try one or more different people before you find someone special. Well, watching the stars provide the perfect conditions. Imagine: it’s cold, you’re looking up at the sky. I’m telling you, it’s perfect. There is a closer distance between you, unlike playing tennis or some sport together – these are not going to do the trick. But how do you point out the constellations? Well, you don’t get a laser. What you do is with one hand point out the star and it’s really the other arm that is doing the important job,” he said as his other arm demonstrating pulling a person closer to him, “and don’t just repeat information that you read on Wikipedia, that is not going to work.”

He proceeded to spout off toneless facts about the age of different stars and how far away they are in the sky and then imitated a girl politely creeping away. Then he informed us it’s possible that she could be a nerd too and natural selection would take over the situation.

“You see, to get to the closest star would take 385 generations of humans. So, if you were to take 4 humans, put them in a rocket, and send it off at the speed of light, it would only be the 385th generation that would make it to that star – and you can imagine by the time they got there they would be a little deformed. Perhaps they would have three legs, green skin, and speak in a strange voice. So, whenever you see extraterrestrials on earth, remember that when they began their journey they were actually quite normal looking humans.”

Photography is actually able to capture stars that our human eye can’t take in. He took some of our cameras and set them up to expose for 30 seconds in order to show this. Now I am happy to have a beautiful picture of the night sky. There is an image via the Hubble Ultra Deep telescope that was about able to capture about 2,000 galaxies in an area that is about 1/12 of the moon, the image exposing for 12 days. If there are that many galaxies in that small of a space, imagining how immense our universe is reminded me how very tiny I really am in comparison.

In the beginning of our tour, there was a star over in the East just above the mountain and by the end of the tour it had moved up a good ways, as the earth had been rotating ever so slightly the entire time. As the Earth tilts and rotates, the Southern hemisphere can see certain stars, only sharing about 2/3 of the sky with the Northern hemisphere at a time. The Milky Way surrounds us, and as our guide pointed out, when you see the Milky Way through a telescope you’ll notice that it’s not actually milk but a thick clusters of stars.

“And as everyone knows, people in New York actually walk like this,” he said, demonstrating a person walking at an angle.

It would take 8 minutes at light speed to get to the sun, our closest star. The planets are found within a certain band across the sky but can be seen in the different places over the years as they move along their course and sometimes they align in different ways. As they move, they also find themselves in different astrological signs, which astrologists try to interpret. Saturn in Virgo…. Mars in Scorpio… etc, etc….

“At the beginning of the month, there was an alignment with some of the planets but it wasn’t a great one because the Pope didn’t die. As you know, whenever there is a planetary alignment something catastrophic always happens – a Pope or King dies, etc. In 2040, Mars, Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter will all align with the moon and that will be the end of the world,” he informed us, ever so sarcastically.

“Now, how do you read a star map? Well, the best source is actually your I-pad, which has GPS and can locate exactly which sky you are in. Then, you want to find the Southern Cross. As you can see, I know many crosses, “ he said as he made different cross constellations with his laser and all different stars in the sky, “but if you read a map it will have the constellation drawn out with a helpful label, ‘Southern Cross’.”

“What you have to remember when looking at the sky is that we’re looking at the past. We receive the light of these stars many years after they have actually formed. See that star over there? The light from that one left when you were born. We are looking at basically the same sky that people did hundreds of years ago. The stars move very fast, but in our sky, this one for example, has only moved from here to here,” he told us, pointing out a very small space in the sky.

We saw a shooting star (or, falling rock burning up in our atmosphere) during the beginning of the talk and he informed us that two others would be included in the tour. He took us around to different telescopes where we were able to see nebulas, globular clusters, the Milky Way and even Saturn. The view of Saturn was actually quite strange because the white silhouette was an exact replica of my glow-in-the-dark stickers that clung to my starry sky ceiling when I was younger. It was a stark white clear cut-out of Saturn, with its satellite to the left brightly shining. I suspected that perhaps it was in fact just a sticker by its artificial nature.

After the tour, we went inside for some hot chocolate. We were actually in his house, though the center room resembled more of a dark adobe gathering place with tiny lanterns hanging from wooden posts. The bathroom was actually very excellent, with a lampshade around the center light with a starry space scene, hot tub in the corner, and colorful and artistic touches in the mirrors and soap dispensers.

He’s been doing research on asteroids out in the desert, funding it himself. His knowledge and exuberance for astronomy was inspiring, especially in that he made it fun for us to view and listen to. Being out in the middle of the desert wasn't so bad either, those stars are quite the spectacle.