Stargazing at Sea

I went to the rescheduled Stargazing.  A group of about 20 of us gathered on the forward deck in near total darkness.  (They even turned off the running lights so we'd get a better look.)  We're apparently 900 nautical miles from the Bahamas, and we were starting to get a little bit of light pollution from them and the East Coast.  From 900 freakin' miles away.  Which I guess shows just how dark it was in the North Atlantic.

We saw about a zillion stars (rough estimate).  It was dark enough that we could see the Milky Way (looking ... like a milky stripe, as it does).  I've only had that kind of view one other time - when I was at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  I'm gonna tell you how dark it was... We had about a half hour of gorgeous star cover.  That came to a close when some clouds rolled in.  Once the clouds covered the light from the stars, we looked over the railing of the ship and saw some patches of bioluminescence deep in the ocean.  (Super cool.)

Captain had a pretty strong laser pointer, with which he very clearly pointed out stars, and a couple planets.  (Saturn was bright; Jupiter brighter.)  Folks seemed pretty interested in seeing the constellations, so he pointed out the half-dozen or so that we could see.  I spotted the easy ones, but mostly ignored the rest -- I honestly don't care how I'm supposed to make out a winged horse out of that square of stars; I was way more interested in just leaning back and looking at the, you know, majestic carpet of stars rolled out overhead.  Fucking glorious.  (Some folks were trying to take pictures with their cell phone cameras; I'm pretty sure they're going to be disappointed with the results.)  Astronomer friend was there adding details about the stars.  (For instance, the captain pointed out that Sirius is actually two stars; Astronomer added that it's a primary star with a white dwarf about the size of earth orbiting it - and that this will be the ultimate fate of our own sun, once it burns up its own energy.)  First officer talked about how to navigate with the stars and how important Polaris is as the North Star (Astronomer added that Polaris is not perfectly aligned with the line connecting earth's poles as we careen through the sky and that the ancient Egyptians actually used a different star for North).

My pet interest astronomically-speaking is exoplanets -- planets outside our solar system.  This is of interest to me because, when I was a kid, I was taught, "we believe there are exoplanets, but we haven't proven it yet."  We've proven it now.  I was impressed when the count was over 800.  Current count of confirmed exoplanets is over SIX THOUSAND.  (Astronomer friend agreed that this is definitely a "within our lifetime" discovery.)  ANYWAY, captain said that the Orion Nebula (he's using his laser pointer and called it a lightsaber, stg) is home to a couple of "rogue exoplanets," which have no sun and are just rotating around each other.  Astronomer friend thinks this is no biggie, but my jaw actually dropped on account of I DIDN'T KNOW EXOPLANETS COULD DO THAT.  So there's one more thing about my understanding of the universe that changed in my lifetime.

Cool.