LflaIruIIig tialt COCSt to cool night, wearing

ops and shorts, I let a storm o f stars swirl around me. I

iber no light pollutionheck, I remember no lights. But I
Lber the light around methe sense o f being l i t b y
itand that I could see the ground to which the stars
I to be floating down. I saw the sky that night in three
dons the sky had depth, some stars seemingly close and
inch farther away, the Milky Way so well defined it had what
liners call "structure," that sense of its twisting depths. I
her stars from one horizon to the other, stars stranger in
imbers than the wooden cart full of severed goat heads I had
at morning, or the poverty of the rag-clad children that
3n, making a night sky so plush it still seems like a dream.
nuch was right about that night. I t was a time of my life
was every day experiencing something new (food, people,
I felt open to everything, as though I was made of clay, and
d was imprinting upon me its breathtaking beauty (and terlity). Standing nearly naked under that Moroccan sky, skin
:he air, the dark, the stars, the night pressed its impression,
ifelong connection was sealed.
tell Berman about Morocco he says, "A sad corollary to
y is when my wife's mom visited us once. And she had spent
ving in either Long Island or Florida, light-polluted places.
the car drive up, heard the trunk close, heard her wheel
ige to the house, and when she came in she said to Marcy,
e all those white dots in the sky?' And of course Marcy
DSC are called stars, Mom.'"
32

"Do you think she was kidding?"

"Nope."
Seeing stars is something Bob Berman has done all his life. And
I 'ere in upstate New York, the sky still offers a wonderful view.
"We get down to about magnitude five point eight, five point
n ine, where you see a good twenty-five hundred stars," he says,
clerring to the scale astronomers use to describe the brightness of
lid ividual stars. "Theoretically, three thousand stars are visible to
I he naked eye at one time, but, in truth, since the overwhelming
hulk of stars are fifth and sixth magnitudethe fainter you go, by
hi r the more stars there areand because extinction near the horiion is so great, the truth is faint stars stop at about ten degrees
rom the horizon and you lose a swath."
We adopted the idea of magnitude from the ancient Greeks,
who called the brightest stars "first magnitude" and the dimmest
"sixth magnitude." When modern astronomy put precise measure" lent to the Greek magnitude idea, a few of the brightest stars actually turned out to have minus numbers, such as Sirius (-1.5). But
t hese values are all relative, reflecting only how we see these stars
Itoin Earth. The brightest star in the history of the universe could
lie fainter than faint if it's far enough from our view.
It's commonly accepted that the naked-eye limit is magnitude
6.5, though some observers report magnitude 7.0 or better. As Berman writes,
bere are few brilliant stars, many more medium ones, and
a Hood o f faint stars. T h i s hierarchy continues with a