Every Soul a Star (18 page)

It seems like the whole campground has come out to hear Ally talk. It’s after nine, so it should be starting any minute. On my way here I passed the Star Garden and heard Ally’s voice. I was about to go and say hi, but it sounded like she was having a really intense conversation. She was peering through one, then another telescope, talking to someone. Only I didn’t see anyone else with her. I crept away so she wouldn’t see me. Maybe living out here does something funny to your brain. Not like in a bad way though, because I think Ally’s really interesting.

I shiver a little and wonder why they don’t start a fire in the fire pit that we’re all gathered around. Mr. Silver joins me on the log, along with two of the guys from the trip who are camping in the tents. I close my book, two pages away from the end. Tonight the guys are wearing t-shirts that read my eclipse is better than yours. One of them turns to Mr. Silver and says, “Why don’t they light that fire? It’s cold out here, dude.”

Mr. Silver looks at him like he’s insane. “You can’t light a fire when you’re stargazing! It would ruin everyone’s night vision. It takes at least a half hour till you can see all the stars. You take one look into a light like that, and you’re done for. Think, man, think!”

The guy shrinks back a bit. I’m VERY glad I wasn’t the one who asked. I notice a lot of people have flashlights with red plastic over them and remember one of Mike’s articles talking about how red light doesn’t affect night vision. I tilt my head back. Mr. Silver is right. I can already see a lot more stars than I could when I first got here, just twenty minutes ago. I pat my regular ol’ flashlight in my pocket, glad I didn’t use it to read with.

“Hey, everyone,” Ally says, stepping into the circle. I know she was upset with her parents earlier because her brother told me. Something about a plan not working out the way she’d hoped. But with everyone’s eyes on her, she seems totally together and confident. Really grown up. I hope Mr. Silver lets me include her in the experiment or else I’ve gotten her hopes up for nothing. I probably shouldn’t have even told her about it before I asked him. I don’t have much experience in this sort of thing. I guess this is what I get for not being more social. Somewhere Mom is saying
I told you so.

“Welcome to the Moon Shadow!” she shouts to the crowd. “One more week till the big day!”

Everyone cheers and whoops. When they quiet down she says, “This is going to be a review for most of you, but for the newbies, after tonight, you’re gonna know how to easily navigate the night sky.”

I look around the group. She has everyone’s full attention. Well, maybe not Bree’s. She’s sitting in the back row with her earphones in. I watch as her mom reaches over and yanks them out. Bree shoots her a look but tucks them away.

“Has everyone visited our Star Garden?”

Whoops and shouts go up from the audience.

“Well, when you get home, if you don’t have access to a telescope, does anyone know what you can use instead?”

“Binoculars?” a brave soul calls out.

Ally nods. “Yes, but that’s not what I was thinking of.” She gestures to Kenny, who jumps up from his log. He’s holding a small object up over his head. It’s too dark to see it clearly. It looks like, well, it almost looks like an empty toilet paper roll!

“You can use
this
!” Ally says, taking the object from Kenny. “An empty toilet paper roll!”

Everyone laughs.

“I’m serious,” she insists, smiling. “It won’t make the stars look closer, but it will make them clearer by helping you isolate them. It also helps bring out the colors of the individual stars.”

The younger kids are still laughing. Clearly they think it’s the funniest thing they ever heard. It
is
pretty funny. Whoever thought of a toilet paper roll as a telescope? Kenny takes his roll back and sits down. He makes a big show of tucking it carefully into his shirt pocket.

Ally waits patiently until the audience quiets. “There are eighty-eight constellations in the sky,” she says, “and everything we can see is contained inside them. Once you know how to find the constellations, you can find anything—the planets of our solar system, distant stars, whole galaxies.”

I look up at the sky while she talks and am startled to see how many more stars there are, just a few minutes after I last looked. I’ve never in my life imagined there were so many. How can anyone make patterns out of zillions of tiny white dots?

I tune back in to hear Ally say, “Space is so incredibly vast. I guess that’s why they call it space!”

The audience laughs.

“Everything is so far away, it’s easier to measure distance in how fast it takes light to reach us, rather than miles. Light travels six trillion miles over the course of a year. Our own personal star—the sun—is ninety-three million miles away, practically right next door in the scheme of things. Light leaving the sun only takes eight minutes to reach Earth. The next closest star, Proxima Centauri, is four light-years away, which translates to twenty-four
trillion
miles. The farthest you can see with the naked eye is the Andromeda Galaxy, a whopping two-point-seven million light-years away. Anyone out there good with math who wants to figure out how far that is in miles?”

I watch as Ally’s brother’s hand shoots up, with Bree’s sister Melanie right behind him. “You two can do that on your own time.” Everyone laughs as the kids lower their hands. “Trust me,” she says, “it’s really far. And with a telescope you can see much farther than that. Soon there will be a telescope in space that can see back to the beginning of time, somewhere around fourteen billion years ago.”

A hush falls over the crowd as that sinks in. I admit, the stars are more interesting than I’d thought. Or maybe Ally’s just a really good teacher. I bet I wouldn’t have failed science if she had been my teacher.

“Just like Earth,” she says, slowly turning around in the center of the circle, “the other planets go around the sun in fixed orbits. That means we can see them easily, in a band of the sky called the Zodiac. Jupiter and Saturn will be out tonight, and anyone who wants to go to the Star Garden afterward can check them out. They might look tiny through a telescope, but Jupiter would fill the distance between the earth and the moon. And Saturn is actually fluffy, like cotton candy. If there was a bathtub big enough, it would float!”

I glance over at Bree. She actually seems to be paying attention. Melanie is rapt.

“But keep in mind that if our solar system was the size of an apple, our galaxy, the Milky Way, would be the size of North America. And tonight we’re going to learn a very basic way to navigate it. If you’re ever lost and not sure where you are”—her voice breaks for a second, but then she takes a breath and continues—“if you’re lost, all you have to do is find the North Star.”

I can’t imagine finding one star out of all that mess. There’s no way.

“Now you might be thinking there’s no way you can find one star out of all the thousands you can see with the naked eye.”

Okay, that was weird.

“But trust me, you can. The first thing you need to do is find the Big Dipper, which is part of a constellation called The Big Bear, and one of the most recognizable patterns in the sky. It looks like a ladle. Three stars form the handle, and four stars make up the bowl at the end.” She holds up a poster and shines a red flashlight on it. It’s a diagram of the Big Dipper. “Try to find it on your own, and then I’ll show you.”

Murmurs arise as people point and twist their heads around. I’ve seen it before at home, on Boy Scout camping trips and stuff. But it was easier then since there weren’t so many stars. I search all over, but I can’t find it. Mr. Silver nudges me and points. I follow his finger but still don’t see anything.

“Okay,” Ally says, “let’s find it together.” She whips out a small pen and points it up at the sky. Suddenly a beam of green light shoots into the sky. That’s no normal pen! She uses it as a pointer to clearly outline the seven stars that make up the Big Dipper. Once I see it, it seems obvious. It’s about halfway up the sky, to our right.

“Can I have a volunteer to help me find which way is north?”

From behind me a small voice starts chanting, “Jack! Jack!” Others join in. It takes a minute for me to realize they’re talking about me! I whirl around and see that it was Pete who called out my name. Before I know it, Ally’s in front of me, smiling. Mr. Silver nudges me again, and I have no choice but stand up. Great, now I’m going to look like an idiot in front of everyone. I feel like I was just called to the board at school and don’t know the answer.

She has me stand in the center of the group, looking up. “First we find the Big Dipper.” Thankfully she uses the pointer again because I’m too nervous to find it on my own. Then she points to the two stars that make up the front part of the bowl. “Now, if you look at these two stars and then extend your eye out about five times the distance between the two of them, you’ll wind up at the North Star, otherwise known as Polaris.” But instead of doing it with her laser pen, she hands the pen to me. “Don’t shine it in anyone’s eyes,” she whispers. “We can’t afford a lawsuit.” Hand shaking a bit, I take the pen.

“Okay, first go back to where we were.” It takes me a few seconds to get it steady, but then I can easily run it along the seven stars. It’s such a weird feeling. Almost like I’m touching the stars themselves.

“Now extend it in a straight line and you’ll hit the North Star.”

I do as she says, moving the laser across the sky. But I’ve jostled it too much and am no longer in the right place.

“Try again,” she says.

I find the Dipper again, and move very slowly this time until I hit the next fairly bright star.

“That’s it!” she says.

Everyone claps. Phew, that wasn’t so bad. I move to sit down, but she says, “Not so fast. You still need to figure out which way is north. First, find the North Star again.”

I start to move the pen, but she takes it from my hand and turns it off. “Find it without this.”

I’m about to say I can’t, but then I realize that I can. I can actually pick out one star out of what looks like a zillion. I go through the routine again. “Okay, I have it.”

“Good. So now wherever you’re standing, imagine a line pointing from you to Polaris. That line points north. It can also tell your latitude. If directly over your head is always ninety degrees, where would you say the star is right now?”

I panic for a second. I only barely squeaked by in math this year. I crane my neck to look directly overhead, and then slowly lower it to the horizon in front of me. The North Star appears to be right in the middle, maybe a little higher, at around 48 degrees. I tell Ally this, and she says, “That’s exactly right! If the North Star was directly overhead, you’d be at the North Pole. If it was really near the ground, or the horizon, you’d be standing near the equator. Now don’t you feel better knowing you’ll always know where you are?”

I nod. More clapping ensues, and then I sit back down on my log. Ally talks for a few more minutes, tracing the shape of the Summer Triangle with her laser pointer. She says how each star of the triangle is in a different constellation and how one of them, Deneb, is so powerful that it gives out more light in a single night than our sun does in a century. She knows so much about things that I never gave a second thought to. But if Mr. Silver says it’s okay, I’m going to be able to teach
her
something now. When she’s done talking, her dad steps up beside her and says, “Far be it for me to rain on anyone’s parade, but the National Weather Center has issued a warning of a strong storm headed our way in a few days. It’s already soaked half the Northwest. It should be here and gone well before the eclipse though, so that’s good news. But everyone be careful on the paths, the mud gets slippery in the rain. And those of you in tents might want to make friends real quick with someone in a cabin or an RV.”

The lecture breaks up, and all the red flashlights make the air seem otherworldly. I promise one of the t-shirt guys he can have my other bed if or when the storm comes. I want to tell Ally what a great job she did, but there are too many people around her. Mr. Silver hands me my very own red flashlight and we head up toward the hilltop where his experiment will take place. It takes about ten minutes to get there, and we spend the time with him talking and me listening and thinking how dark it is. I don’t mind the dark. I’ve spent a lot of time in my treehouse late at night, but this kind of dark is totally different. Thankfully we’ve switched over to our regular flashlights, and that makes it much easier to see.

“Now we’ll have a two-day window to do this, starting at ten pm the first night, eleven the second. Each team is assigned a block of time since the transit could happen any time during those two days. I’m not even going to consider the possibility of rain, so you set your mind to clear skies.”

“Sure thing,” I promise, wondering how I’m going to mention Ally.

We get to the top of the hill where his telescope is all ready and waiting. He pulls the silver waterproof cover off and stands back to admire it. “It’s a beauty, ain’t it?”

“Um, sure. It’s really something.”

He checks the small computer attached to the side of the telescope and then fiddles with some other piece of equipment, which I assume is the special camera. “Now, Jack, I don’t expect you to understand all of this. All you’ll have to do is read me the data as it comes up, that’s all I ask.”

“No problem,” I say, more confidently than I feel. “Um, can I ask a favor?”

“Go ahead,” he says, busy adjusting something in the viewfinder.

“Ally, the girl who gave the lecture tonight, is it okay if she hangs out with us during, you know, the experiment? She knows a lot about this stuff. I’m sure she wouldn’t get in the way or anything.”

He looks up with a mischievous grin. “You like this girl?”

How do I answer that question? It’s not like a beautiful girl like Ally would be interested in me as anything more than a friend. I’m grateful that she wants to be my friend at all. I decide not to answer. “So can she come?”