Pretty much all my life, night time has been MY time.  I have always had excellent night vision and I don’t have to squint like I have to do in daylight or in well lit buildings, even at night.  I have a genetic defect in one eye.  It doesn’t contract with light, so I mostly have to wear sunglasses or really squint and get a headache.  So, for me, especially on a boat out on the reflective water, daytime is tough and night a pleasure.  This has made me into a night person, wandering around stargazing late into the night.  But even without the vision situation, I have always been enthralled with the universe which can best be seen at night.  The scientist in me makes me particularly interested in the Universe, the origins and the vast timelessness compared to human life.

When out at sea, the stars stretch from horizon to horizon so clearly that it appears as a altogether different night sky from the night sky on land.  I get the feeling, when sailing, that I’m in a totally different place in the Milky Way Galaxy or maybe that I’m in the Andromeda Galaxy, our neighbor galaxy.  When night vision scopes became available for purchase, I quickly obtained one primarily for night time navigation and safety purposes.  If someone goes overboard at night, it is somewhat difficult to maintain visual contact.  But with a night scope, you can spot lobster trap buoys or anyone in the water just like in daylight.  Night scopes are electron plate photon amplifiers which amplify light 50 thousand times.  If someone a mile or so away is holding a cigarette in his hand it looks like he has a search light aimed at you, if looking through the night scope.  So, if you look at the night sky at a small difficult-to-see constellation with the night scope, you not only see it amazingly bright and clear, but you can see constellations well beyond that you didn’t know were there.

Can you imagine what a sight the moon would have been 3-4 billion years ago?  The moon was only about 17,000 miles away so it would have appeared about 20 times larger than today’s moon.  The oceans’ tides were thousands of feet because of the strong gravity of the moon so close to the earth.  It has been and continues to escape from the earth at about one foot per year.  Oh well … the effect of the moon on the earth is another story --- maybe later.

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