Look Long, Look Deep

hidden adjective
1 : being out of sight or not readily apparent: CONCEALED
2 : OBSCURE, UNEXPLAINED, UNDISCLOSED
| hidden motives

It was out there somewhere. IC 342: the "Hidden Galaxy."

On my home turf I spend a lot of time at the edge of a field observing a small bit of the northern night sky. A small bit because it is a small clearing. Along its northern edge, the forest reaches up to grab a gluttonous swath of sky for itself. The North Star, Polaris, is barely visible through some gaps in the tree branches. While on the south edge, my back is up against the trunks themselves, meaning North is the only directional possibility.

A small bit, too, because the city of Charlottesville spews a dome of light pollution strong enough to be seen from space, bleaching away the sight of the millions of modest stars, nebula, and galaxies that are rumored to be out there, leaving only the brashest to be seen, their constellations imagined.

Anyway, I thought myself pretty familiar with the circumpolar night sky, at least as tallied in the Piedmont hills of central Virginia.

But home was now a distant multi-day drive away. We were attending “See The Dark,” a festival sponsored by the Appalachian Mountain Club at their Medawisla Lodge camp in the great North Woods of Maine; when departing Moosehead Lake another hour logged on logging roads. This AMC tract is certified as an International Dark Sky Park, and it boasts the darkest skies in the US east of the Mississippi River.

For a week each Autumn, the AMC puts together a program of astronomy outreach, star gazing, nature walks, crafts, music, and arts to celebrate the beauty of the night sky. A sky absent the blaze of artificial light pollution. The lead astronomers for the week, John Meader and Sean Laatsch, are knowledgeable, engaging, and great fun to be with. I’ve written about the festival before.

For the first couple of nights thick clouds stretched from horizon to horizon. A territorial hazard, John Meader acknowledged: Maine is cloudy 65% of the time. But tonight the dome opened, the sky cleared, and instead of clouds it was the Milky Way that stretched from horizon to horizon. Way into worth it.

The view was a shock. Astonishing. Looking up at the north sky, I was entirely lost. My home base confidence shattered. The wide splash of the Milky Way, the sight of thousands of new stars, new or forgotten, stars so thick they completely overwhelmed recognition, camouflaging my backyard acquaintances.

Eventually I found my bearings. Eventually familiar star patterns fell into place. Eventually I put aside my anger at having to travel 900 miles, just to see the heavens as divine providence intended.

Eventually, I set about putting the telescope together for the journey to the “Hidden Galaxy.”

It was out there somewhere.

I don't often travel with my little telescope. Worse, I had packed a new combination of telescope and mount. Putting them together in the dark, and in the freezing cold, was unfamiliar. In the dark? Yes. In the freezing cold? Yes. Both challenges together in an unfamiliar location? Seriously unfamiliar all around. The evening did not go smoothly.

For example, things were acting very strangely as I tried to align the optics. The adjustments the telescope argued that it needed were unexpectedly large. After a couple of hands-in-the-pockets stints to warm them up a bit, I realized that, well, at Medawisla I was now over 7 degrees latitude further North than usual. The mount wasn't about to elevate the scope by itself.

Once corrected, well, that was better.

But then my fat frozen fingers managed to swipe the wrong way on the touch-pad, or accidentally click some wicked combination of keys, I'm not really sure which. Maybe both. In any case, the planetarium display I was using to guide the scope suddenly contorted itself into a single dimension: normal width, but no height. It was like a monstrous black hole had sat down on the visible universe and squashed it flat.

"Max!!!? Help!!"

No reply. I was on my own.

Max, you may recall, comes and goes on his own schedule. The last time I saw him was months ago. He was asking about books.

"Do you have any Douglas Adams or Elmore Leonard novels?" he asked.

"Well, sure. They're in the library. Help yourself. Mid-shelf, center," I said.

Next thing I knew he was toting an armful back to the office.

"I'm just going to borrow the scanner," he said.

"What are you up to?"

"Ah, well, I, uh, I'm going to train a chatbot," he said.

"You better check! I think those are still under copyright."

"How quaint," he said. And continued on into the office.

IC 342 is nicknamed the "Hidden Galaxy" because it is located close to the equatorial plane of the Milky Way and, thus, in order to see it from Earth we must peer through the accumulated dust of our own galaxy. Here is a reconstruction of part of the Milky Way, adapted from the NASA Sky Map overlaid on Gaia's Early Data Release 3.

The view is parallel to the plane of the Milky Way. The galactic center is at the right edge of the image, and IC 342 is the little orange dot marked near the left edge. It's pretty dusty between here and there!

Here's a top-down, or face-on, view of the Milky Way showing the intergalactic highway, as the crow flies, leading from Earth to IC 342, through the smoke of the Orion, Perseus, and Outer arms of our galaxy. Settle in with a good book, Hitchhiker's Guide perhaps? At the speed of light we will arrive in roughly 10 million years.

I guess it was no coincidence that I had brought with me to Medawisla a copy of Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was the thick "Ultimate" edition containing all five novels. And I had plenty of time to read them, back to back, during the week of cloudy nights.

Bingeing on Hitchhiker's is great fun, and allows you to enjoy Adams' creativity on a broad scale. It also has its downsides. Soon, nothing around you is normal anymore. Everywhere you look, everything is weird and alien. For example:

After Medawisla we stayed at the AMC Highland Center in the New Hampshire White Mountains for a couple days. It's a lovely spot and we decided to take a hike around Ammonoosic Lake. We've done this loop many times in the past. In the wake of bingeing on Hitchhiker's, however, it was gone. Something came through and vaporized the dam crossing, making the loop impossible.

A yellow slab-like something, a Vogon spaceship, no doubt, clearing the way for a galactic bypass. (Technically, it was possible – though not recommended – which only added to the Vogon intrigue.)

We waited patiently for a thundering herd of cosmic buffalo to carry us across.

I woke a little before sunrise and walked back over to the telescope. Back to where I had set it the challenge of collecting images overnight. There was a thin crescent moon singing solo, halfway up the early morning sky. The turf crunched underfoot.

The telescope was standing, covered in frost, out in the field, out in front of the lodge. A power cord running from the storage battery to the camera had frozen stiff during the night. It had decided it was a stretch too far to be tethered to the mount and popped loose, leaving the camera void of current in a state of disbelief. The image acquisition had ended abruptly during the ensuing unscheduled disassembly.

John was also up early, and he came over to commiserate. We traded tales of equipment and aborted missions, and then he headed off to the lake shore to capture a bit of the future morning light. I set about salvaging the previous night.

Despite the power cancellation, the session logs claimed that the computer had captured a couple of hours of data. So optimism ruled the dawn and I finished off acquiring a set of "flats" for calibration, images illuminated by the brightening morning sky, light shining through a white tee shirt stretched over the telescope's eyeball to even out the photons. Then it was packing time, followed by a trip to the lodge for coffee and warmth.

The images did not disappoint. With its exquisite Bortle 1 skies, Medawisla produced the banner image at the top of this post. Only the faintest hint of a galaxy was apparent in any single exposure from the night's work. IC 342 is hidden after all. But looking long, combining multiple images, a total exposure time of a little over 4 hours, the cumulative improvement of signal to noise brought out the beauty of the intermediate spiral galaxy. Surely more time would bring out greater detail. And I'll be going back.

'Hidden' has a rich and varied texture.

It isn't particular. It can hide truth and falsehood equally. So in this time, particularly, when horrors are deliberately obscured, concealed by those with an ax to grind and a profit to be made, it is more important than ever to seek out beauty, to find truth through the dust. Despite the dust.

Some beauty, like IC 342, is hidden by chance.
By chaos. A throw of cosmic dice
that placed the dusts of the Milky Way between us.
A beauty to be seen only by looking long.

Some others are hidden by time.
An old high school friend, past,
there through the dusts of recollection.
A warmth seen only by looking deep.

Some are hidden by choice.
The fawn, curled, camouflaged by grasses,
made safely away from the wolf.
A newborn seen only by looking quietly.

Look long through the Milky Way.
Look long, look deep, look quietly.