“Most days I live awed by the world we have still, rather than mourning the worlds we have lost. The bandit mask of a cedar waxwing on a bare branch a few feet away; the clear bright sun of a… — Paul Bogard Copy Share
“I had travelled from Spain into Morocco and from there south to the Atlas Mountains, at the edge of the Sahara Desert…one night, in a youth hostel that was more like a stable, I woke and walked out into a snowstorm. But it wasn’t the snow I was used to in Minnesota, or anywhere else I had been. Standing bare… — Paul Bogard Copy Share
“My feeling is that an observer needs to see four hundred and fifty stars to get that feeling of infinitude, and be swept away…and I didn’t make that number up arbitrarily, that’s the number of stars that are available once you get dimmer than third magnitude. So in the city, you see a dozen stars, a handful, and it’s attractive… — Paul Bogard Copy Share
“Most days I live awed by the world we have still, rather than mourning the worlds we have lost. The bandit mask of a cedar waxwing on a bare branch a few feet away; the clear bright sun of a frozen winter noon; the rise of Orion in the eastern evening sky-every day, every night, I give thanks for another… — Paul Bogard Copy Share
“I linger near Galileo’s telescopes, then round the corner and stand transfixed: I did not expect this- a dark, cool room full of globes of the night sky from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Globo celeste , they are called in Italian: ‘celestial globe,’ maps of the night sky… I imagine him making another globo celeste , this one… — Paul Bogard Copy Share
“With my naked eye, on nights the moon climbs slowly, sometimes so dusted with rust and rose, brown, and gold tones that it nearly drips earth colors and seems intimately braided with Earth, it feels close, part of this world, a friend. But through the telescope, the moon seems- ironically- farther away…the gray-white moon in a sea of black, its… — Paul Bogard Copy Share
“At least when it comes to light pollution what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas.” — Paul Bogard Copy Share Image
“When I lie back and close my eyes, this farthest lip of beach right next to the end of the ocean feels like being… — Paul Bogard Copy Share Image
“In these countless stars, in their clusters and colors and constellations, in the “shooting” showers of blazing dust and ice, we have always found… — Paul Bogard Copy Share Image
“These are maybe the most exciting stars, those just above where sky meets land and ocean, because we so seldom see them, blocked as… — Paul Bogard Copy Share Image