What Keeps You Up at Night?

All my life I’ve been an early bird. I want to be tucked in bed with the lights out by 10pm… not the best trait for someone who enjoys stargazing. Few things will keep me up past my bedtime. Two of them are comets and the northern lights.

I was lucky to see both as a youngster. I remember standing inside the sliding glass door in my childhood home, watching the northern lights ripple across the horizon one cold winter night. My memory tells me I was in middle school, so this would have been sometime in the early 1990s.  There were no aurora alerts back then. It was sheer luck (and lack of light pollution) that meant my parents spied them and called me over.  The green lights were mesmerizing, like a silent celestial dance.

A few years later, two great comets appeared: Comets Hyakutake in 1996 and Hale-Bopp in 1997. Like with the northern lights, I didn’t need binoculars or a telescope to see them, just some clear, dark skies. They sailed low on the horizon across my backyard. Their tails seemed to stretch halfway across the sky. I was spellbound.

In hindsight, I got spoiled by being able to see these sights so easily so close together in time. It helped that I lived in a rural part of Pennsylvania under skies without much light pollution. Now I have to work harder and travel farther. It took planning and driving away from home to see the northern lights and Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS in fall 2024. They were worth it. Still, how lovely it would have been to just look outside and see them.

What keeps you up at night? What might tempt you out to enjoy the wonders of a dark sky? Like me, it could be comets or the northern lights. Or fireflies. Night kayaking. Owling. Mothing. Meteor showers. Astrophotography. Night hikes. Listening to the spring peepers or enjoying the spring flights of a woodcock. If you’re adventurous there are entire books dedicated to listing things you can do after the sun goes down. Try Night Magic by Leigh Ann Henlon or 100 Nights of a Lifetime by Stephanie Vermillion. Whatever you choose to do, enjoy the dark.