After picking the youngest up from track practice last Wednesday evening, I paused in our driveway, staring at the sky, searching for the planets. It was the first clear night we’d had since the planetary alignment began and the darkest with no pesky moon lighting it up.
Needless to say, it was AWESOME! I pulled out my phone, launched my SkyView Lite app (if you’re even remotely interested in space, you should try it. I use the free version) and scanned the sky to see which planet was which. Neptune and Uranus remained a no-show, but four stood out:
Saturn, small in the clouds
Something else caught my eye, and that’s when I might have gone a little overboard in my front yard (picture a 48-year-old woman squealing and jumping up and down while aiming her phone at her neighbor’s house). The International Space Station was crossing the horizon. It has been my white whale for years because I always missed it.
I got emotional as it made its orbit past our little snippet of the planet, in part, because I can’t fathom the courage it takes to slip the confines of the earth like that. But mostly because my brother Tim was one of the biggest space nerds around. He took pictures of the night sky through his camera lens and telescope; that moonshot at the top is his. There are times when the grief of his loss rumbles back. But this time, instead of fighting it, I leaned in. Tracking the space station set against the most perfect night sky on a chilly January night made me feel closer to him again. Like I could hear him whispering, “Told you it was cool, little sister.”
And that moment with him was worth the wait. 🙂
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