Illustration by Jody Hewgill
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My Stars!
By Col. Eileen Collins, as told to Jean-Noel Bassior, November-December 2003
A space shuttle pilot’s guide to exploring the night sky
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When I was growing up in Elmira, New York, I never looked at the night sky
much. But the seed was planted when I first attended summer camp at Harris Hill
in upstate New York, not far from the National Soaring Museum.
I watched the gliders fly overhead, and I knew that someday I wanted to be
part of that adventure. My family didn't have the money for flying lessons,
so when I was 16 I got a job and paid for them myself. Then, in 1978, when I
was a senior in college, NASA selected the first women astronauts—and
that's when the astronaut dream started for me. I wanted to be a test
pilot, so I joined the Air Force. They sent me to Oklahoma, and that's
where I saw the sky—really saw it—for the first time. It was a
blanket of stars from horizon to horizon. I'd sit in a lounge chair
outdoors at night, looking at the stars. And just like that, I was hooked on
astronomy.
I was 21 when I bought my first pair of binoculars—which I still
have—and saw the moons around Jupiter. Soon I was buying books and sky
charts. Then I got a telescope and started looking at the planets.
As an astronaut, I'm an amateur astronomer. On the space shuttle, we use
the stars for navigating. But what I look at most often from the shuttle is
Earth, because it's overwhelming—the view from up there is absolutely
phenomenal!
If you're smart, when you're up in space you'll take a break,
turn the lights off, and look out the window. Maybe it cuts into your sleep
time—time in space is expensive, so they squeeze every bit of work out of
us that they can. But you think, someday when you're not flying anymore,
you'll ask yourself, "What do I remember from my space
flights?"
I like to put my face right up against a window, stretch out my arms and
legs—feeling my weightlessness in the spacecraft—and look down. On
the day side of Earth, you see mostly blue water and white clouds. Then the tan
deserts. And finally, the deep, dark green of jungles and forests. At times
like that, it really hits home that we're all sharing the same water, the
same air, the same planet.
From space, the stars are very clear. They don't twinkle, because
you're not looking through an atmosphere. That twinkle can obscure the view
from Earth, but there's still a lot you can see.
>Chart Your Location When you look at the night sky, start with
your own eyes before you move on to binoculars or a telescope. That's what
I did. Sky charts are helpful for beginners, and Astronomy magazine
publishes the chart for the current month.
Just like ancient mariners, we still use the stars to steer the space
shuttle. You can navigate by the stars, too, if you know how to find the North
Star, which always remains in nearly the same spot. Here's how to find it
in November: Face north, and look for the Big Dipper down near the horizon.
Pick out the two stars that form the northern end of the Dipper's bowl.
Follow their line upward, measuring off about five times their distance from
each other, and you'll come to a lone, not-very-bright star. This is
Polaris, the North Star—which also happens to be the last star in the
handle of the Little Dipper.
>Get Out of Town Some of the night sky's most subtle beauty
has become impossible to see in our cities, thanks to all the bright lights. If
you're far enough away from city lights (at least 10 miles, but 20 to 30 is
best), you'll see a lot more stars and, extending east to west, the faint
glow of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
>Go Long If you want to see a galaxy that's really far away,
look overhead during early evening. There you'll see four big, bright stars
in a square. They outline what ancient people saw as the body of a horse, the
constellation Pegasus. Now comes the best part: To the left is the
constellation Andromeda, a "V" shape whose stars angle up to the
northeast and contain the amazing Andromeda Galaxy. It's a spiral galaxy,
just like ours. There are billions of stars in it. Andromeda is the most
distant thing you can see with the naked eye. The light reaching your eye has
taken nearly three million years to get here.
>You've Got to See the Baby In the darkest night sky, you can
get a good look at a star "nursery," the Orion Nebula, a cloud of gas
churning out hundreds of infant suns. It's located in the constellation
Orion (The Hunter). In November, look for it around 1 a.m., in the southeast.
Search for a very bright set of three stars in a line, Orion's belt. Below
them is the fuzzy nebula. You can see it quite well with binoculars.
>Right to the Moon My kids love the moon. They're eight and
three. When it's a quarter moon, I say, "The moon is smiling at
you." I like to look at the "terminator"—the line between night
and day on the moon. With binoculars or a telescope, you can see the sunlight
washing over the rims of craters.
>Moving Targets Like the moon, planets turn up in a different part
of the sky every night, because they're following their orbits. Jupiter is
very, very bright. Right now, look for it in the east in the early morning. And
this year, Mars will be even bigger and brighter than Jupiter because it's
closer to Earth than it's been in 50,000 years. Look for it in the evening
in the southwestern sky.
People ask me, "Are you afraid to fly the shuttle now?" The
answer, of course, is flat-out "No!" We've been through the shock
of last winter's accident and the sadness of losing our friends.
They're heroes. But, hey, my crew and I are ready to go! Yes, there's
danger. We'll try our best to make it 100 percent safe. But as my boss
says, the only way to do that for certain is not to fly. And that's not an
option.
Col. Eileen Collins, a three-time shuttle astronaut,
will be commander on the shuttle's upcoming return to space.
Additional material from Dave Eicher, Editor, Astronomy magazine.
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