A GLOWING PYRAMID OF LIGHT ON the horizon tugs at my senses, but it’s hours too early for dawn. Also too narrow at only three fists wide, though it stretches halfway up the sky. What is that giant awning of light doing at the edge of the world? This “false dawn,” as the twelfth-century Persian poet and astronomer Omar Khayyam called it, is really the Zodiacal Light, which fools many dawn-addicts and travelers. Ours is a dusty solar system, full of debris left from the coinage of the planets 4.5 million years ago, and sometimes sunlight, reflecting off millions of seed-to boulder-sized particles orbiting the sun, projects a semblance of dawn in the depths of night. These dust motes glow most when the constellations are at a sharp angle to the horizon; hence their name. Because I’m steeped in darkness, whenever I avert my gaze I catch sight of it at the round eye’s so-called corner.
A speck of glitter glides eastward through the stars just above Jupiter and the constellation Scorpio. The Dawn spacecraft was launched at sunrise on September 27, 2007, to explore two large pieces of cosmic rubble, dwarf planet Ceres and asteroid Vesta. Its objective is to understand the dawn of the solar system, how the planets formed, and what that implies about planets circling distant stars. During its eight-year mission, it will slingshot around the sun and pause long enough at Vesta and Ceres to orbit, photograph, and measure the two bodies before moving on, never to return home. Like most of our spacegoing vessels, once its dispatches are sent, Dawn is slated to travel the oceans of night for eternity, maybe to be recovered one day hundreds or even thousands of years from now, as a message in a bottle from a lonely, curious species.
I am writing this in the tilt of mind we call autumn. How fast it cools in this archipelago of stars, where Earth sails, swollen with fidgeting animals and doubloon-like leaves, the scented ooze of flowers, curtseying geese, jasper bays where whales nurse their young, undersea volcanoes in a petrified seethe, whiz-kid machines, and herds of humans, who speak, love, muse, squabble, and dream. A meteor storm in the forecast. On falling stars thick as fireflies, I wish for brawny atmospheric planets small enough to form oceans and harbor life, where other beings, bustling about their chores, may pause to admire the streaming milt of stars. Maybe, like us, they guide by those nomad lights; maybe they’ve even named our lantern sun. Other worlds, roll gently around your stars tonight.