Michael
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The Return of the Leonids
On the night of November 17, 2011, the Earth will pass through the trail of dust left by the comet Tempel-Tuttle on its thrice per century pass through the Earth's orbit, producing a shower of meteors that have come to be known as the Leonids. Because the dust left by the comet lingers for some time, there is an annual event as the Earth passes through the comet's wake, but every 33 years, when the comet has just passed, the shower is particularly, and often historically intense.
As a child, I read a short story entitled “Night of the Leonids”, by E. L. Konigsburg. It tells the story of an insolent and foolhardy young boy who causes his grandmother to miss the uniquely spectacular 1966 Leonid meteor shower, unaware in his youthful ignorance that it was an event that she might never again have the chance to witness. The memory of that story has always been with me, and when I saw reports of the upcoming event, it reminded me of a night now ten years ago, when another uniquely spectacular Leonid shower was expected to occur.
I was living in Palo Alto at the time, the sleepy, affluent little town south of San Francisco that surrounds Stanford University where I had once upon a time been a student. Although I took a great interest in all the sciences, I had always been particularly drawn to astrophysics and astronomy. As much as I loved the beauty of our little blue planet, and hoped that we might one day learn to live daily as the transcendently beautiful, heroic and ingenious beings we are at our best, all of the mindless ignorance, ugly insensitivity and cruel brutality of human affairs would not allow me to cease hoping that there was something out there better than us, and so I looked to the sky in search of it, upward past where the invisible gods lived, into what were to me the real heavens. I was not going to be like that insolent boy in Konigsburg's story—if the universe had something special to show me, I was determined not to miss it.
Leonid meteor passes by the Moon
It was a Saturday night into Sunday morning when the shower was to peak. I was unexpectedly delayed for some reason I cannot now immediately recall, and set out just after midnight—an hour later than I had planned—and in my haste, I eschewed a very pressing need for gas. I headed to the dark, isolated foothills of Santa Clara county to watch the celestial event of a lifetime.
I knew practically every inch of the Bay Area's backroads, from Santa Rosa to Santa Cruz, Pacifica to Pittsburg. I spent some part of nearly every night driving these roads, contemplating every aspect of life beneath the star-spangled navy blue blanket above us. I knew just the place where I planned to take it all in, a deserted stretch of road just west of the 101 freeway, about 10 miles south of San Jose. But as I approached my selected destination, I found that things would be a bit different than I had expected. Along a normally empty county highway, hundreds of cars were lined up along the side of the road, spectators lying on roofs and stretched out in lawn chairs. As I made my way toward the particular spot I had chosen, the crowd grew thicker.
I was surprised that so many had turned out for the event. I had grown to believe that my fascination with such things was relatively rare, a belief forged from the way even my high-IQ Stanford friends in tough technical majors would lose interest when I started talking about deep space exploration or the particle physics of stellar fusion. So despite the significant amount of media hype surrounding the occurrence, I just didn’t think that the interest would be enough to overcrowd even my chosen stretch of highway that on any normal night I could drive continuously for an hour without seeing another car. If this road was packed with spectators, I calculated that there must have been countless thousands watching from different locations around the city, and millions upon millions more watching around the world.
I was even more taken aback when I noticed the composition of the star-gazers. They ranged from senior citizens to rowdy teenagers, middle-aged couples to small children, all together, eyes turned skyward, waiting for the show to begin in full force. In the quiet night, I could hear the voices of the others on the road, and although I could not see them clearly, their voices, accents and individual lingo bespoke a crowd as diverse as the country itself. It was funny, as a Black kid growing up in a neighborhood where there wasn’t time for stargazing because in most homes the cupboard was empty and the rent was due, I'd always felt somewhat an outsider because of my interest in science. But that night, I heard young men my own age, speaking in the familiar dialect of my old neighborhood, eyes turned to the sky along with the retirees, college professors, housewives and schoolchildren.
In reflection, I could attribute the sense of togetherness to the fact that it had been only two months since the 9/11 tragedy, but that was not on my mind at all, nor did it seem to be on the minds of the others. But perhaps the oneness of it all was in part because the event marked a welcome respite from the fears and anxieties of those dark and uncertain days.
Depiction of 1833 Leonid Shower Over Niagara Falls
I pulled into an empty spot along the road, set out a towel on the hood of my car. I left the engine running so the hood would stay warm, and stretched out looking upward, trying in vain to blow rings as I exhaled my frozen breath to the diamond-speckled roof of the world. Within minutes, I saw the first faint greenish light streak across the sky, as if running a frantic gauntlet through the stars. A few minutes later another…and then another. In the darkness, I heard the voices exclaiming in wonder. The comments spanned the “OH BOY!"s of old men to the “OH S**T!"s of young kids.
As night grew colder, the meteors came more and more frequently. They also grew brighter, some large enough to cast a blue-green light across the darkened hills, leaving a smoky trail that lingered for several minutes. A few especially massive meteors terminated their streak with a small colorful explosion. At the height of the shower, the streaks came nearly every second, often three and four at a time, sparkling like a cosmic fireworks display. And then, quite suddenly, it was over.
A large blue-hued Leonid streaks toward the Earth.
Slowly, the remaining onlookers packed their cars and drifted off into the darkness. Although we didn't speak to each other very much, there seemed a kind of unspoken kinship that had formed between us. It was something you couldn't precisely describe—you could just feel it somehow. As the others went, I stayed on a bit longer. Because I had known this place before they had discovered it, it seemed right to me that I should be the last to leave, and I was, although not quite in the way that I had envisioned...
There is something about man—I believe, in our very nature—that makes us take great notice of celestial events. The curiosity and wonder that so defines our species is part of what caused early humans to look upwards and dream of far away civilizations and mystical gods. This wonder is at the root of our creativity, and our exploratory genius, and will ultimately lead us to the great discoveries to come. They may look from time to time, but I've never seen any other creature staring at the sky.
The reminder of the impending 2011 shower came as welcome news for me, struggling as I have been in recent weeks, working intensely both on the most personal and difficult piece of writing that I have ever endeavored to produce, itself borne of a series of difficult realizations about myself and my life, and working out an apparent solution to a long-unanswered mystery in physics that I'd been searching for since I'd first began reading about science as a child. The intensity of these two concurrent pursuits, each enough to be overwhelming on its own, had caused me to take a few uncharacteristically impulsive actions that strained—and perhaps even fractured—my relationships with my family and some of my closest friends. Since most who read this may never have the experience, let me tell you: at the moment when you realize you may have figured out something that Einstein couldn't, you go a little temporarily insane. Imagine how you would feel if you achieved something you had dreamed of your entire life, but never really truly thought you would reach, and then imagine if no one, no one, you shared it with understood...
Although the 2011 Leonid shower is not projected to be exceptional, I nonetheless feel it might be the kind of event that might help me regain my drifting self-assurance and quell the sense of isolation and abandonment created by these two competing tasks, one my story of my life, the other an advanced theory in physics, both of which those close to me cannot yet understand for all their trying. It will be as the mysteries of the universe have always been—something to remind me that the day-to-day struggles around me, though they may at times feel enormous, are but temporary blips on the celestial radar.
Hubble Telescope Ultra Deep Field Space Image from NASA