Sky-Watching From the Four Corners of the Planet

The Associated Press asked people from the Arctic to Australia to describe their night sky. Their responses:

S.B. Misra, retired geology professor in the northern Indian city of Lucknow:

“I was introduced to heavenly bodies in my childhood by my grandfather, through [Hindu] mythological stories. I was able to clearly identify the Akashganga [Milky Way], the Dhruv Tara [polar star], the Sapt Rishi Mandal [cluster of seven stars] and many more objects in the sky. This was in the late ‘40s in a remote village some 400 kilometers [250 miles] southeast of New Delhi.

“The view has not changed from the village, but the heavenly bodies appear to be dim and hazy if viewed from cities like Delhi and Lucknow. Also, I can see the heavenly bodies from the Himalayan ranges, where I stayed until last year. The clarity of the sky appears to vary from place to place and seems to have decreased with time in half a century.”

Jocelyn Albert, an American working for an international environmental group in Geneva, on the view from an inn outside the ski resort of Zermatt, at the foot of the Matterhorn:

“We discussed the stars as a family and decided that we had never seen stars in Chevy Chase, a suburb of Washington, like we did in Zermatt. . . . As we walked out of the inn, we were astonished to find that the Matterhorn was lit up, not by a full moon, but by the Big Dipper, and the Small Dipper, and lots of other constellations we simply did not know. My kids, ages 12, 10, and 7, were enchanted, and couldn’t believe just how many stars there were! The evenings were not only astronomical wonders, but helped my children realize just how lucky they were to be living in a country where they can look up and see the sky!”

Evelyn Embleton scanned the heavens in Rose Bay, a suburb of Sydney, Australia:

“In a relatively cloudless sky the stars were few and far between. Yes, I did manage to pick out a few constellations. But these were little pockets of pale blue spots. The ground must have been too light. When I look out my windows, I stare out across to the city skyline --a colorful and very starry display of man-made incandescence. I realized why so many of us now want to move out to the country--somehow looking out at the stars doesn’t have the magic it used to. We urbanites find our star power in city skylines and the blinding glare of oncoming traffic.”

John MacDonald, a scientific and cultural researcher in the Canadian town of Igloolik, almost 2,000 miles north of Cleveland, describes the aurora borealis, or northern lights:

“It’s the immediacy of this very, very strange phenomenon that is not stationary for a minute. You have these curtains, suddenly you’ve got this very hard to describe animation of the lights that will go from one side of the sky to the other.

“They can be so intense that it’s actually possible to read by them. It’s an amazing burst of light that has got everyone using their imagination. That is why they are so embedded in Inuit mythology. They are thought to be the souls of departed people that are playing a special kind of football--played with the skull of a walrus.”