Skyward for March 2025.
Shakespeare and the night sky.
If we begin this month by trying to find the best line Shakespeare ever wrote, that may not not an easy task, or it could be quite easy. I could open my Shakespeare and pretty much point at random to almost any line in the canon. But today I do have something specific in mind. It is a simple prose passage from Hamlet, and it could be one of the finest passages he ever committed to paper:
I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, and your
secrecy to the King and Queen molt no feather. I have of late, but wherefore I
know not, lost all my mirth, forgone allcustom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this ma-jestical roof, fretted with golden fire—why, it appeareth nothing to me
but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like
an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
-Hamlet.2.2.292-306.
The magic of this passage begins with the “goodly frame”. Hamlet is speaking of the planet on which he lives as almost a consecrated thing. It is surrounded by a most excellent and protective canopy, the air; without it we would never be here or could have evolved here as a species. But the lines reach their zenith with the “brave o’erhanging firmament a reference to the night sky in a way virtually none of us could even imagine. It gets better: “this majestical roof, dfretted with golden fire.” I can think of no more appropriate way to characterize the night sky. Shakespeare is ready to call the magnificence of the night sky, on any night, a holy thing and experience. I have heard the night sky described in many ways during my lifetime, but never so exquisitely.
Many readers of this column take advantage the night sky as a target of their cameras; I am one of those who does not. I am primarily a visual observer, and from night to night, season past season, and year after year, I am still spellbound by the simple joy of the night sky. It is not that I have never photographed. I used to be quite the celestial shutterbug. And between 1989 and 1996 I took literally thousands of pictures of the sky, mostly using the 18-inch Schmidt camera at Palomar Mountain Observatory. Just two of those images, recorded on March 23, 1993, began an adventure with a comet that eventually collided with Jupiter. Perhaps that was enough. In a sense, it is time for me to give my camera a rest, open my eyes, ands simply enjoy the night sky’s golden fire.
