AFTER EIGHTS
Like chocolate-mint wafers, some sights are best after dinner...
The long view
A panoramic view of 100 miles would cause any walker to coo, so how about one that stretches 15 quintillion (18 zeros!) miles and takes in an entire galaxy. That’s how far it is to Andromeda, also known as Messier 31, which is the furthest object that most mortals can see with the naked eye. It takes light 2.5 million years to get from it to our eyeballs, meaning what we see now is what it looked like in that incomprehensibly distant past. The top half of Cassiopeia’s W is a useful pointer to this spiral galaxy with its one trillion stars, which is more than twice the number in our Milky Way. Our home galaxy is another highlight of a night walk though, painting a gauzy (or milky – hence the name) arc across the deep dark. And while these can be seen with your bare eyes, a telescope or regular binoculars will make the details ping and boggle your already-boggled mind a little bit more.
The merry dancers
Is any single sight on more bucket-lists than the aurora borealis? The Northern Lights shimmer in greens, reds, yellows and even violet shades across the night sky, rippling in curtains, streamers and rays like a celestial laser show. The chance to see them draws travellers to the globe’s far north in winter, for the closer you get to the magnetic poles the better your odds, but they can be seen in British latitudes too – Scottish ones in particular, where some know them as the merry dancers. The magic happens when charged particles from the sun smash into gaseous particles in Earth’s atmosphere and the show’s intensity follows an 11-year cycle of solar activity. We’re currently in a solar minimum but a sudden flare – or coronal mass ejection – can make them visible for a couple of nights all the way down into England. Keep an eye at aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk for updates and predictions.
Over the moon
The fat circle of a full moon reflecting the sun’s light back to Earth is an enchanting thing, but have you ever stopped to really look at it? It’s not a uniform sheet of paper-white, but shaded with dark Seas – of Tranquility, Serenity, Crises to name a few. They’re not filled with water, but are pools of solidified basalt separated by paler high lands, while the bright white pocks indicate crater impacts. It always shows us the same face – known not very technically as the near side – although its distance from us varies, averaging 238,856 miles. The full moon has long been associated with madness – the word lunacy derives from lunar – as philosophers surmised that if it could affect ocean tides, it could also trouble an individual’s brain. And of course it’s the time of lycanthropy when man turns to howling wolf, so make sure to pack some silver on your next full moon walk. It’s said to be the best defence against a werewolf.