Efnniht

A day or two will pass between
The Equinox and Equilux –
In Autumn, it is Night who’s keen,
While Day has lingered, still in flux:
So one’s already evened out,
While still the other lags askew.
In Spring, it’s all reversed about
As Day leads by a day or two.

‘Efnniht’ or even-night was the Old English name for the equinox.

Alienated

Look up.
Look up on a clear night,
And there they are –
Oases of light in the desert black,
That stretches back forever far.
And how many worlds must orbit ?,
And more each time we look,
Where congregating chemicals can cook…

They must surely be
Surrounding us on the deep and wide –
They that cannot help but hide
In all directions we can see.
We are within a ball of life
Where all we view on ev’ry side
Are living stars with planets each –
And all beyond our reach.

All this life, and nothing to show –
It’s simply far too far away,
So there they are and there they’ll stay
As epochs come and eons go.
We listen out for radio,
But static is all they play.
They must be out there, even so…
Yet all this life – and we’ll never know.

Watching the Stars Go By

Looking up on these dark clear nights
Gets me thinking –
Are these stars ever-burning lights ?
I doubt it – some are already blinking –
Variables, never the same through the year,
Though the diff’rence is pretty small beer.

And the way the heavens have always wheeled,
The polar axis shifting round,
Till some low stars will be concealed,
Below the horizon, gone to ground.
Others are still up there, still shine,
But the pyramids no longer align.

And of course, they’re all in orbit through the galaxy,
Just like the Sun,
Drifting in the gravity waves of the sea,
Closer and further as round they run
Changing the brightness that each appears,
Over the hundreds of thousands of years.

On even longer timeframes are the giants,
Stars which simply swell and swell,
And brighten as they do, in strict compliance
With their enlarged shell.
And after that, they slowly fade from view –
At least, without a lens or two.

And then there’s the stars that go boom –
The supernovas, blazes of glory,
The superstars that meet their doom
In one almighty furore.
But how many of these tonight
Will ever get to burn so bright ?

Well, first of all, forget the Type 1a’s,
We’ll never see them coming –
But the Type 2s, before they end their days,
They warn us first by humming –
Blowing off mass in dimming clouds
Whose nebulas we see as shrouds.

And we know they must be massive beasts
To begin with, these monster stars
But weighing one is a movable feast
With ridiculous error bars.
But we reckon they need eight Sun’s-worth of matter –
Though birth-weight or death-weight ?  Surely the latter …?

Yet finding a list of stars by mass is illusive,
Given their many uncertainties –
Perhaps their spectrums will prove more conclusive
In trying to determine these –
We know all O’s and B’s 1-to-4
Are massive enough to fatally roar.

Well, technic’ly the white dwarfs can be
As super-hot and white,
But all such dwarfs are too dim to see
On even the clearest night –
Take Sirius B – closer and larger than average dwarfs,
Yet still into the black of the sky he morphs.

But what about the other extreme,
The supergiants, too big to fade ?
The I’s, and maybe some II’s, by the Yerkes scheme,
Ought to make the grade.
But what percentage of all these stars comply ?
Who knows ?, but I doubt it’s very high

Still, however scant are these,
There’s some already shining bright –
Like Spica, Deneb and Antares,
Quite oblivious to their plight.
And Betelgeuse and Rigel bold –
Indeed, half of Orion, all told.

The sky is a restless place,
Forever shifting its paradigm,
It’s just that the eyes of the human race
Are merely a blink in time.
So if you ask me why I stare up ev’ry night,
It’s just to check the stars are all alright.

When I mentioned that ‘half of Orion, all told’ will go boom, I hadn’t appreciated that of the eight bright stars that form his torso, all bar Bellatrix will go boom.  But there are plenty of dim background stars within his borders, so it still counts.

I asked Chat GPT what percentage of stars in the Milky Way will end up as Type 2s, (between 8-25 sun masses), and it thought 0.1-0.5%, or 1-5 per thousand. But when I asked what percentage of naked-eye stars, it thought 5-10%, based on their having O- and B-type spectrums.  Of course, there’s a strong chance that it’s just pulling these numbers out of its black hole…

Look Up, Look Quick !

Look up naked-eyed on a pitch and inky night,
And what do we see ?
We see youth.
From the barely-there shrug to the brilliant-bright,
It’s winners that we see, to tell the truth.
Big stars, hot stars,
Mutant-freaks-the-lot stars,
From one end of the bell-curve –
All Ohs and Bees and Ays.
The only reds are giant reds,
The newly-borns yet soon-be-deads –
They’re burning-up for all they’re worth
In one almighty blaze.
And quite a few of them will blow
In supernovas (what a show !)
Within the next-odd million years or so.

Magnitude

The faintest stars are faint
Because they’re small.
But sometimes they are faint
Because they’re far –
In fact, they’re greater than them all –
Their neighbours whom I never see –
Only brightest faintest-stars
Can reach to me.

Gegenschein

Have you ever looked up at all those stars –
Looked up at them all
And felt so small ?
No, nor have I.

Some say it makes them terrified,
That endless sky.
But why ?
I couldn’t fear it if I tried.

I mean, I’ve always known
I’m insignificant
To ev’ry passing tree and ant.
So what ?
I happy with my lot.

I guess there’s some who think
“Oh wow !  All this for me ?
I am the lord of all I see !
But then again
I always knew –
The universe exists
Because I do !”

But most of us look up and think:
“Oh wow, the sky is beautiful tonight –
But so are you,
And so am I,
And so is ev’rything in sight !”

And if we should look up and feel
A little less –
No need to stress,
No need to pray.
Just tell ourselves we’re just as real,
And just as dear –
And sure, those stars are very far away,
But we’re right here !

We never can quite get our heads around
How distant they all are –
Yet maybe we can get a little closer
When we get away so far –
Beyond the streetlit towns,
Beyond the constant headlit cars,
To where the sky is bigger,
So much bigger –
So much so, it jars.

I guess we need a bit of both:
A bit of awe, a bit of boast,
To really make the most
Of all those stars.