Want to experience the kind of cosmic panorama seen under the opening credits of Star Wars? You’re at the right place at the right time. We are fast approaching the year’s starriest sky.
That’s because at nightfall we’re aimed toward the most concentrated part of our galaxy. During the first few hours of darkness, from 8 to 10 p.m., the Milky Way neatly splits the sky from north to south and passes directly overhead.
But don’t look for it this weekend, which has a brilliant full moon. Wait a week, when the night’s opening hours are bathed in darkness for a full fortnight. Those perfectly dark conditions from Sept. 10 through 24, combined with late summer’s typical crisp, dry air, afford the kind of transparency that allows the countless subtle details of the Milky Way to emerge in all its glory.
It’s a far cry from the spring, when the Milky Way is coincident with the horizon and invisible. Then the sky offers only a smattering of stars. But in mid-September, as long as you’re away from big-city lights, it’s a planetarium come to life.
Actually, forget that metaphor. Planetarium skies may delight city dwellers, just as Tokyo residents may get pleasure from depositing a few yen and breathing oxygen from a mask. But neither duplicates the experience of celestial infinitude or fresh air, commodities free for the taking in our enchanted Catskill corner of the cosmos.
No, the real Milky Way is not merely a glow. It’s wonderfully ragged and splotched with a myriad of inky patches that are vast dust clouds in our galaxy’s spiral arms. It’s dotted with bright and faint stars that make it alive with activity and set it apart from other sections of the sky. It’s a vault where star clusters and nebulae and 30,000 additional faint stars spring into view for anyone slowly sweeping its path with binoculars.
This is the place where knowledge can safely be put aside.
Getting away from the lights of town, lying on a blanket or lounge chair (reclining helps ease neck strain) and simply taking 15 minutes to be alone with the Milky Way during a moonless night is rejuvenating. Here, knowing the stars or constellations is as unnecessary as naming each goose in a flock winging across the autumn sky. The lunatic riot of stars tumbling downward toward the south and the twisted texture of the background glow surely belongs in our lives now and then.
It was Galileo in 1610 whose jaw first dropped when he viewed it through his crude, low-power telescope. “All wordy debates about it can now come to an end,” he wrote. “The Milky Way is nothing but a congeries of innumerable stars.”
To the ancient Maori, the sky-splitting glow was the center of the universe. To the Mayans, it was the path taken by the dead en route to heaven. And even in our space telescope age, it’s still the heart of ours — our resident galaxy, observed not from the outside but from our worm’s-eye viewpoint within its pinwheel motif.
Join the family! 
