Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes

Sometimes I wonder about the night sky. I mean, it used to be so bright; there once was a time when I could pick out constellations, even from my front yard in the city. The pickings were better from my grandmother's yard in the country, though. When we'd visit, we used to go out after dark and lay on the lawn, the whole family.

The reason I mention this is that I saw a show on the Learning Channel about the astronomy of ancient cultures, and I decided to do some poking around on the web to see what more I could find out. You see, some of the sites were really interesting. The carvings at Carnac, off the coast of the French province of Brittany, are mysterious and beautiful. The Mayans predicted the end of the world on a date that corellates to December 23, 2012, which isn't that far off, if you think about it.

So I thought it might be interesting to find more information than an hour on the Learning Channel provides. I was struck by a sentence on a NASA page, written by Brad Schafer of Yale University. Maybe the best thing for you to do, is to every night go outside and to look up. The beauty of the sky is what makes it so fascinating.

He's right; he's absolutely right. I remember going out, looking up night after night and watching the stars move across the sky. I didn't grow up in a small town; I grew up in Dallas, which is one of the larger metropolitan areas in the U.S. Still, back in the '70s when I looked up I could see stars and pick out the shapes that people have traced in the night sky since time began.

I wonder: can city kids still do that? Do they tilt their heads back to see spiders and sailboats? Do they know that the Big Dipper is also a bear? If I look up into the darkness now, it is not pricked with light.

Have we, with our 24-hour lives, taken that away from a generation of children? I hope not. I hope they can see the constellations with their own eyes, and not on the Learning Channel.

before - after