Summer Satellites and the Great Scar

Well, Summer is supposedly here, though it's not always easy to tell in Portland. Not that I'm bitching - you can have the heat and sunlight. The only thing that is sort of a downer is that sky-watching is less fun when it's cold and limits the amount of time you want to spend gazing upwards from a lawn chair. That said, last Saturday was a pretty decent night and after BBQing, my girlfriend and I pulled out the tri-fold lawn chairs and watched the sky for a couple of hours.

It may sound cliché, but it's really hard to argue against how well Dark Side of the Moon goes with watching the countless satellites drift through the salted sky, peppered with the occasional meteorite. I wasn't looking for anything in particular and had no hopes of catching anything mysterious -- that's not why I stargaze. But there was one particularly bright object that we caught in the Northwest moving speedily towards the Southeast. It had a brightness of 4 and was quite stunning. After a brief What The Fuck moment, we both realized it was the ISS. We confirmed this later by an online tracker that gave the exact time and location in which we saw the object.

Sure, it wasn't a UFO, but you know what? We made that. Us. Humans. We have a space station hurtling some 17,000 mph around the globe and that's pretty fucking spectacular, if you ask me. See, sometimes you don't need to imagine extraterrestrials or their suggested influence in order to really appreciate our own leaps and bounds.

As the satellites passed through the night, I told my girlfriend about the first time I saw one. I was about 9 and thought for sure it was an alien craft. I frantically ran into the house telling my parents, who looked at me with raised brows and asked "What do you want us to do, call the United States Air force?" At the time, I was thinking "Of course, what else would you do?! Get on the bloody phone!" Looking back now, I am amused by imagining my parents calling the Air Force to report that their daughter saw a bright light moving through the sky in a straight line.

I did see my first UFO about 2 years later, however. It wasn't particularity spectacular and at first, I assumed it was a satellite. But while I was following it's path, it unexpectedly 'separated' into 3 objects. One remained on the current course, while 2 other parts shot off at 45° angles in opposite directions and continued on until out of my view. In the end, it was just lights in the sky and could very well have had a more down-to-earth explanation. Maybe not, but such is the way of these things: always elusive and riddled with questions.

Anyway, I'd love a chance to get out to Eastern Oregon's high desert this Summer and spend an evening under the open sky. I do manage to get out East a few times a year, though only abut 40-50 miles from Portland. Still, even at that short distance from the city, the view is amazing and you can very clearly see the giant scar (which always looks vaginal to me) that is the galactic center of our own Milky Way. And though it is all so very far away, this scar reveals billions of stars and planets, at least a few of which are probably home to civilizations who are wondering if they, too, are alone in the universe.