In half an hour's stargazing from the top of Robbins Farm, I saw two short swift streaks of light that I felt comfortable identifying as shooting stars of the Ursids and a third uncertain blip that might only have been my eyes adjusting to another star in the hard clear sky of 15 °F. They were striking out across the precession of the equinoxes, Thuban, Kochab and Mizar, Polaris. I could have missed others as I kept turning under the winter constellations that even a suburban night was finally cold enough for, the jewels of Mars and Jupiter, the quarter-moon coming up so huge and orange at the edge of the skyline that we checked to make sure it wasn't some kind of catastrophe: it shrank out of the haze of Boston and turned ice-white. I would have lain down in the snow if I had been wearing my leather jacket and filled my field of vision with stars. Instead ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch praised my endurance for standing out in the sandblasting cold, even after I had to come back to the car because I took off one of my gloves and my fingers seized up: "You were dipped in the Atlantic . . . But your hands had reached into the deepest part." I held them in the dashboard vents until the color came back into them. When I carried his phone with its star-map app back across the field, it kept showing me the astronomy on the other side of the earth, an Etruscan underworld's worth of sky.
spatch praised my endurance for standing out in the sandblasting cold, even after I had to come back to the car because I took off one of my gloves and my fingers seized up: "You were dipped in the Atlantic . . . But your hands had reached into the deepest part." I held them in the dashboard vents until the color came back into them. When I carried his phone with its star-map app back across the field, it kept showing me the astronomy on the other side of the earth, an Etruscan underworld's worth of sky.
