Blowin' in the Wind: The Dimensions of the Milky Way

("Blowin’ in the Wind" is a periodic feature on my blog consisting of an assortment of nature writings – hymns, songs, excerpts, prayers, Bible readings, poems or other things – pieces I have not written but that inspire me or give me joy. I trust they’ll do the same for you.)

Gail and I will be heading soon to the hinterland of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where a highlight we always enjoy while there are its night skies. Occasionally we are treated to some fantastic views of the aurora borealis, the northern lights. But each and every single night that is clear we’re given fantastic views of the cosmos, and I often find myself sitting long with a star map and a pair of binoculars on the end of the dock. Star clusters, nebulae and distant galaxies are not difficult to spot with binocs if one knows where to look, but they’re not my favorite sight. Besides, these are usually ‘pinpointed’ objects, where one does not get a sense of the sky’s awesome vastness, or its almost dizzying three-dimensionality. My favorite sky view? Taking a long look at the Milky Way. It almost always takes my breath away, giving me a feeling of space-flight while I’m at it.

The Milky Way is best seen without binoculars to get this sensation, though a look through field glasses or a telescope always presents an absolutely stunning array of stars not visible even to the best naked eye. After evening twilight in the U.P. in mid-August, the Milky Way runs diagonally in a fairly straight line from the northeast down to the southwest, picking up great constellations along the way like Cassiopeia, Cygnus, Lyra, Aquila, Sagittarius and Scorpio, all rotating clockwise as the night progresses. And the ‘line?’ That is because we are actually looking out ‘sideways’ through our spiral galaxy’s flattened disk, and the concentration of stars presents itself to us as a wispy, cloudy line. One is usually unable to see it from even small cities, with its artificial light typically fading away both the sky’s blackness and the Milky Way’s lightness at the same time.

One can easily get caught up in the complexity and enormity of this galaxy we call home. Over 100 billion beautiful suns and at least as many planets. 100,000 light years across. And up until a mere century ago last year it was thought to be much smaller and, at that, alone in the universe. But then a man named Harlow Shapley worked out its rough vast dimensions, including the placement of our solar system within it, and informed a near disbelieving world. On and on it has gone since, as we have found our galaxy one among many, its address among what is called a ‘local group’ of galaxies within a larger supercluster, which is then itself within an even larger galactic supercluster. And some are even postulating our universe itself may belong to a ‘multiverse’ consisting of numerous universes.

A person need not be overwhelmed by this, though, since, once we are up to considering a galaxy 100,000 light years across, bigness just gets bigger. And God just gets to still be God.

I recently ran across a poem written about Shapley’s discovery and wanted to share it with you. I know nothing about its author, but would be glad to meet her some day and talk about it. Here it is.

The Dimensions of the Milky Way
by Marilyn Nelson
Discovered by Harlow Shapley, 1918

Behind the men’s dorm
at dusk on a late May evening,
Carver lowers the paper
and watches the light change.

He tries to see earth
across a distance
of twenty-five thousand light-years,
from the center of the Milky Way:
a grain of pollen, a spore
of galactic dust.

He looks around:
that shagbark, those swallows,
the fireflies, that blasted mosquito:
this beautiful world.
A hundred billion stars
in a roughly spherical flattened disc
with a radius of one hundred thousand light-years.

Imagine that.

He catches a falling star.

Well, Lord, this infinitesimal speck
could fill the universe with praise.

Indeed. I could not agree more.

The sky is fascinating. It captivated the ancients as they tried to figure out how this whole thing works, and it even mesmerized the Bible writers with awe and appreciation for its (and their) Creator. And it captivates and mesmerizes me, and I hope you.

When I consider your heavens and the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have set in place… O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! (Psalm 8: 3, 9)

~~ RGM, July 30, 2019

POTM...*: Pictures on the Rocks

(*Photo[s] of the Month)

Gail and I had the good pleasure of spending a couple days with my brother John and sister-in-law Cathy recently in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and we spent one of those days doing something I’ve long wanted to do: see Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore from the water. We had been there twice before, once when the kids were all quite young and once since, but the opportunity had never lent itself to see it the way it was meant to be seen.

Pictured Rocks is one of the least-visited units in the National Park System, with just over a half million sightseers, hikers and kayakers per year. The fact that many might say it is ‘not on your way to anywhere’ is responsible for most of this, as the astonishing beauties of Michigan’s U.P. are unknown to most who even travel widely. To set it in context, it lies between the metropolises of Munising and Grand Marais. Oh, haven’t heard of those? Let’s expand it a bit: how about between Marquette, home of Northern Michigan University, and Sault Ste. Marie (home of

Lake Superior State University, and twin cities with Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada). Haven’t heard of those either? Well, I can’t help you then, except to say, “Get there!” It’s only a single but lovely day’s drive for Detroiters, Chicagoans, Milwaukeeans and Minneapolitans/St. Paulites.

Hugging forty-two miles of rugged Lake Superior shoreline yet barely six miles wide at its broadest, PRNL was the first designated National Lakeshore among the National Parks (1966). And Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world, is itself one of the founders of the feast – the relentless crash and howl of its breakers and winds against two-hundred foot sandstone cliffs have shaped the formation of the park’s

sea caves, arches, dunes and agate-strewn beaches. And then the minerals held within the sandstone have done the rest, leeching along with groundwater out through the rock layers and, over time, painting the rock face a myriad of colors – red (iron), yellow and brown (limonite), black and white (manganese), and pink and green (copper), among others. One cannot see many views of the rock face without getting on the water; the Miner’s Castle overlook is one, pictured here, so it’s really a lake cruise or kayak trip you’ll want to experience to be able to fully enjoy it, or at least a hike down to one of its beaches. Yes, there are beauties in the interior as well, falls and primeval forests, wildflowers and wildlife, particularly pleasing in early spring and autumn dress; but it’s the waterfront rock cliffs for which the park is set aside as a U.S. citizen-owned marvel, and I am glad we were finally able to see them.

Color. I’ve often thought about the detail given in the Old Testament of the Bible regarding the tabernacle and temple in which the people of Israel worshiped. It gets right down even to particulars about the colors of hangings, linens and priestly clothing (Exodus 35-39, 2 Chronicles 2-3). I guess it’s only fitting that such attention be given; after all, the colorful glories of nature were God’s original temple, and they remain so.

RGM ~~ October 16, 2015

From My Journal: A Bit of a Nature Autobiography

During our visit here to Florida’s east coast to see my wife’s parents, I had the rare pleasure yesterday of observing on the eastern horizon both a sunrise and a near full moonrise over the ocean on the same day. The former took place at 7:15am, seen from my usual morning jaunt at Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge on Jupiter Island; exactly fifteen hours and two minutes later, I witnessed the latter from the rocky beach behind the historic Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge on Hutchinson Island, the next barrier island to the north. Both sun and moon came up blood red.  Waves broke firmly but somewhat quietly across flat sand in the morning, though in a stiff wind; they crashed mightily last evening against the coquina reef rocks, ironically making high spray in calm air.

Hobe Sound NWR, Florida

To the best of my recollection it is the first time I have ever witnessed both moments upon the same day, and it was somewhat unplanned. As offshore clouds allow, I see the sunrise frequently in my early morning walks along the beach when I am here; and I had also taken previous note of moonrise times, in the event an opportunity might present itself through the family activities for the more rare chance to see a moonrise over the ocean, a particularly lovely experience. In any one-week stay, of course, lunar realities are such that there’s only a one in four chance that opportunity might present itself at a humane hour! So to be able to hit them both then on the same day was a singular, coincidental delight. (The only other thing to which I can compare it is the day I was able to set foot in both the Atlantic and Pacific, but that story is for another time…)

Why do such things give me such pleasure? What is it about nature that gives me this buzz? Sometimes I think myself a nutcase! But my delight with such a simple thing as this, curiously, came the same day that a question had been posed me by my daughter Maren, vacationing with us; on our way back from the beach in the afternoon, she asked, “Dad, how old were you when you first began to appreciate the natural world?” It is a question I had pondered before, though coming to no particular conclusion, and I told her that. I mentioned a few things that had influence, and she found them interesting and urged me to write about it (to share on my blog). So since I am still on vacation, I find now to be an opportune time to do so. Forgive me if it is a mite longer than my typical blog.

Why do such things give me

such pleasure? What is it about

nature that gives me this buzz? 

Purple Coneflower

I wish I could say that there had been a specific experience that captured me as a child, but I remember none. To be sure, I played outdoors a lot during my unique, disparate childhood. Unique? Disparate? I explain. For my first twelve years of life my family each summer vacated our home in the very urban core of Chicago’s near north side for the far north woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; my mother’s grandparents’ homesteaded family farm became our home for the summer’s duration, and we would return to Chicago around Labor Day in September to start school. In the U.S., more different environments than Chicago’s inner city and the rural U.P. can hardly be found. Additionally, the farmhouse had neither running water nor electricity, so what was there to do except be outdoors? Rainy days seemed a jail sentence. Once at ‘the farm,’ we seemed to kick off our shoes and run barefoot in the woods and fields all summer long save Sunday church. We had a couple swings on a huge white pine at woods’ edge. How wistfully I recall the well-used tufts of roots that provided our pathways through the nearby swamp; as a kid, one couldn’t get back a hundred feet into the murky wetland without thinking they might never find their way out again and back to civilization. I remember catching frogs and tadpoles (my cousins called them polliwogs) in the muddy little pond a half mile east on M69, now dry; or walking the mile west to Ten Mile Creek with a fishing pole and a can of grasshoppers and never catching anything; the moon-walk-sized leaps down the steep sand dunes made after the DOT had negotiated to buy sand from off my grandmother’s property; climbing (and falling out of) apple trees in the orchard at my Aunt Margie’s in Bark River; and Saturday evening trips to various area waterholes for a weekly bath, sorely needed.

But I also remember being outdoors a lot during our school year in Chicago: playing marbles with neighborhood friends on whatever piece of appropriate bare dirt we could find to scratch out a hole (no circle marbles for us!); camping out overnight in friends’ backyards, with one kid usually producing a stolen cigarette or two that I managed to avoid; ice skating on frigid Chicago afternoons or evenings at Haas Park, or the two nearby schoolyards, Goethe and Brentano, all of which had been flooded by the city for winter recreation; rolling down the grassy slope of the big hill at Montrose Harbor Park on spring or fall Sunday afternoons; saucering or sledding down the nearby ‘hills’ (a real stretch!) made when the Kennedy Expressway was constructed; scouring the woods and creek at Bunker Hill Forest Preserve during family holiday picnics; scavenging in construction pits when new buildings were being put in somewhere in the neighborhood or the O’Hare Airport ‘L’ subway was being dug; hikes at Illinois State Beach State Park or Lake Geneva just over the Wisconsin border with my church youth group; or my favorite – simply walking along the breakwaters and ripraps of the Lake Michigan shoreline three miles east of our Logan Square home.

So, Chicago and the U.P. – the differences were huge, even schizophrenic, but the outdoors was the common denominator. Still, among all these things, I don’t recall being particularly passionate about the outdoors as a child; it’s just the place where childhood life and play seemed to happen. Three experiences, however, stand out for me as a late teen, and I look back to these as watershed times when God’s natural world staked its claim on my spirit.

I was eighteen the middle of my sophomore year in college, winter, early 1973. Several of us got it in our minds, after a high spiritual experience at North Park College that winter

White-fronted goose migration, Squaw Creek NWR, Missouri

(some even called it a revival), to put together a trip over spring break to several of our Covenant denomination’s churches in Florida to do youth programs. (You could bet that it would not have been to Winnipeg!) At that time, I had never been out of the three north central states of Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan – essentially the straight line between our Chicago home and Grandma’s U.P. ‘farm.’ The six or seven of us students camped along the way and ended the trip leading a large youth retreat at a state park in the Florida Keys. I remember being smitten by the ocean, the palms, and the birds and flowers of a south Florida winter, mesmerized by the newness of the unique things I was seeing. I also remember being smitten by the worst sunburn of my young life.

Several months later I spent the first of three summers working at a Covenant Bible Camp, Mission Meadows to be exact, in Upstate New York. My experiences there were formative for my life in many profound ways, but dragging my cabin of charges around the ample woods and along the wilder shores of Lake Chautauqua was one of its many joys. Though I was the maintenance director that first summer in addition to being a cabin counselor, I also ended up spending a lot of time with a friend who was the outdoor ed guy, who taught me a lot about eastern forest and riparian habitats. A highlight for me each week was a day trip that we all took some distance from the camp for a hike in an incredibly beautiful creek gorge, the name of which slips me. I couldn’t get enough of it, and imagine that along some of the trek there wasn’t much of an apparent difference between camper and counselor.

Finally, the following two springs, a number of us back at North Park put together two more spring break trips, this time as a biracial group, visiting an African-American church’s Bible camp in eastern Tennessee, Cedine Bible Mission of Spring City, nestled on an arm of the huge reservoir created by the TVA. Though we did a lot of painting and fix up (I can still smell the creosote!), we also had a chance to take hikes, and I shimmied myself into a kayak for the first time in my life exploring backwaters of the lake. Again, things were new to me I had not known before. Appreciations that had begun to develop in me as a child were coming to fruition.

I realized by then a pattern was beginning to emerge. Wherever I went I found myself gravitating to parks, hikes, ranger lectures, campouts, nature expeditions, outdoor photography, lake recreation, you name it; if it was outdoors, it was where I wanted to be. It didn’t matter the discipline – biology, botany, dendrology, entomology, astronomy, meteorology, ornithology, geology, zoology – they were all interesting to me. And to my

Wintergreen

great happiness, I also met at that same time the young woman who would become my life partner; perhaps it was no coincidence that I discovered that she loved these things, too, for the only thing better than enjoying the beauties of life is having someone with whom to enjoy them.

To this day I find that natural beauty pierces my soul. Studying nature and enjoying its delights fills my leisure hours. It’s the reason why seeing a sun and moon rise over the ocean on the same day is so precious to me – it draws out of me a visceral response that I can honestly say feels like a holy ache, a God-created passion that has gripped me. Even in my workaday world of consultations, coaching sessions, conferences and workshops, give me a seat by a window with a view of a tree or the open sky and I can sit contentedly even through the longest (and sometimes even the most boring) of board meetings.

So that’s what occurs to me in answer to Maren’s question. Nothing earth shattering or dramatic about it, just a childhood and youth of easing into God’s magnificent creation. It is a pleasure that knows neither bounds nor end.

He makes me lie down in tender green pastures. He leads me beside still and restful waters. He refreshes and restores my life. (Psalm 23:2-3, Amplified)

~~RGM, from a March 30, 2013 Journal Entry,

Palm City FL