Star Gazing

I was laying back in the hot tub recently, gazing at the sky. (One of my deepest joys is reclining twice weekly in an outdoor wood-fired tub of hot water, siphoned from the creek.) It was a crystal-clear night; the stars shone brightly. I love to look at them and ponder the nature my universe. I'm looking into deep space, and it can stimulate deep thinking.

I often begin my star gazing by looking at familiar celestial friends—a couple of planets, or maybe the constellation Orion, or other star groupings—and just hang out with them for awhile. It's nice to get myself oriented by starting with star formations that I know the names of, but I also like to pick out a random star and stare fixedly at it—having no idea what its name is. I try to imagine what it's like to be in its vicinity; wondering what planets it might have revolving around it. I send greetings to the star and any beings who might be there.

Lately as I have stared into the sky, I have been trying to get a sense of the profound depth that I'm looking into. It's natural to look at the starry sky and view it as a large hemisphere, somewhere far above me; an upside-down bowl that has had many holes poked in it, through which light shines from somewhere beyond. The ancients saw it that way. Interpreted thusly, all the stars appear as if they are the same distance away—some shining through bigger holes than others. But I'm really seeing a three-dimensional field, with some stars much closer than others. So as I lay there, I try to get the sense of that deep field.

Last night I was reminded that most of the points of light I'm seeing are stars in my own galaxy. A very few of them might be distant galaxies that appear to me as points of light (along a couple of nebulas, star clusters, pulsars, etc.), but most all of what I see by naked eye are solitary stars. And those stars are all in my Milky Way galaxy; they’re “local” suns. So at best I can see, with the naked eye, maybe half way across just my own galaxy, maybe some 50 light years away. Although I know that I can see out that far, I can't seem to get my head around that kind of distance. If I've done the math correctly, that's about 300,000,000,000,000 miles that I can gaze! That's too big a number for me to comprehend.
But it gets bigger. Even though my naked eye can see objects 3oo trillion miles away, I realized, laying there in the hot water, that it was still capable of seeing only a vanishing fraction of the universe. I’m just gazing into my Milky Way; one of well over 100 billion galaxies. So if my vision extends partly across just my own galaxy, I am seeing less than one part in 100 billion of the universe! That's an astoundingly infinitesimal part of the whole. I’m gonna need a lot more soakings in that tub, before I can expand my mind that much.