Search for the Starkindler: Brightness in the North

Northern sky. Can’t get enough of it.

During the past few weeks I've been able to enjoy our Finnish winter the way I love it the most: by looking up to the wonderful, cold and clear night sky. Since I suck majorly at physics and generally all things that have even the slightest connection to mathematics there is very little I actually know about stars and space. However, I enjoy reading about them and happily ignore the fact that 98 % of the text is completely incomprehensible to me. I find especially black holes very fascinating – I've been trying to imagine something cooler than a hole in the time-space continuum but haven’t succeeded so far.

The moon was really bright last week but I was able to see at least Perseus,

Orion, the Pleiades, Auriga, the Great bear and Cassiopeia.

As childish as it is, I love stars because they’re beautiful. I love their cold, slightly bluish light and their silvery brightness, I love the constellations and the stories behind them. I didn't even know until now of catasterismi, a term deriving from Greek mythology and meaning ‘placing among the stars’. According to the belief ancient heroes or other characters were transformed into constellations and sent to the sky after their death. Most of these stories are still unfamiliar to me but I’m eager to find out more about them; since The Iliad is the only Greek mythology related book I've read there’ll be much to learn…

I see the stars and constellations as signs of permanence and continuance – not just because they've been in existence for a time so long I cannot even comprehend but also because they've been beheld, admired, studied and written about throughout all human history. The stars are still up there even though their beholders have changed. That thought is, in a way I can’t fully explain, beautiful but also very encouraging.

Frost makes the stars seem very bright but it is able to work miracles also beneath them: