By Len Wallick
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Hopefully your local weather provided the opportunity to get out under the night sky this week. We hope you will make a habit of it as we in turn offer encouragement and tips regarding what to look for and where to find it. The idea is for you to form your own relationship with the luminaries, planets, stars and constellations, then pass that information on to your friends, family, lovers and most importantly to children.
In his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury writes of a world where burning books is considered an entirely proper and normal way to preserve the established order. There are even a class of civil servants, ironically called firemen, whose job it is to find books and burn them. However, there exists a secret society of people that seeks to protect and preserve the most important tomes by committing them to memory and passing them on.
Your humble servant suggests you consider the possibility that our personal contact with the cosmos, taken for granted over thousands, if not millions of years, may be at risk just as the books in the fictional story. Perhaps there is no intent, no conspiracy. One would hope. The lifestyle, air and light pollution that keeps us from knowing the sky as our ancestors did may simply be inadvertent, but the consequences are the same, leaving us without important knowledge. One could do far worse than to learn the Moon by heart.