MORNING SENTINEL • July 28, 2021
Some gorgeous skywatching rotates into life on July and August nights in eastern Maine, where we have some of the darkest skies in North America. Your eye can pick out roughly 6,000 individual stars in a black sky. About 300 of the brighter ones have names. The rest are known to astronomers by numbers. You begin to notice not all stars are alike. They differ the way snowflakes differ, or human fingerprints or irises. Each has its character. Our own sun is a star of medium size and brightness, classified as a dwarf star of spectral class G2. You could spend a lifetime sorting out information on one star at a time, synthesizing the astronomers’ facts with your own night vision, and probably not make your way through the visible 6,000. ~ Dana Wilde