We've brought you all the reasons to go stargazing

Thousands of years have passed since humanity began to observe and follow the heavenly bodies. So much so that astronomy became in antiquity one of the seven arts that every member of culture must know.

 
The sky provided answers for everyone. By turning his eyes upwards, man tried to know what was expected to happen on earth. The predictions did not always work, but in the test of the result in one thing the sky was always accurate - the time. The seasons of the appearance of the stars of the sky and the constellations in the sky gave man for the first time the ability to build a calendar. In this way, the farmers, the scholars, the sailors, and even the caravan riders could know when the harvest season was coming, the time when the fields had to be sown, the dry days when you could go on long journeys, or alternatively the time when you had to create shelter for the flock and cattle from the rain and cold.

The relative position of the stars in the sky does not change (the stars of the Sabbath - hence their name, whose position is fixed in the firmament), but the rotation of the earth around the sun throughout the year slowly changes the appearance of the firmament, so that there are periods when certain stars will appear but in other seasons they will not be seen at all . When a familiar star appeared again at the beginning of the night or a little before sunrise, the ancients knew by it that a new season had arrived or a season had come to an end.

In ancient Egypt, Rosh Hashanah celebrations were held at the height of summer around the days of the Nile's flooding, thanks to the fact that every year the Nile overflows its banks at this time and waters the fields of the inhabitants of the great agricultural power of the ancient world. The one who symbolized for the Egyptians the beginning of the seasonal phenomenon was the star "Sirius" - the brightest star of the Sabbath, which began to appear again early in the morning, after a period in which it was not visible at all in the night sky. Countless stories and myths were wrapped around him that accompanied the culture of Egypt.

In other nations, the star "Spica" represented the oats in the hand of the virgin Persephone - daughter of the grain goddess Demeter, due to the fact that it appears throughout the night during the harvest, and this is how the ancients knew (regardless of the weather that changes from day to day) to calculate when it was time to prepare Place in the barn and go out with the sickle into the field. And these are just 2 mini examples.

Another reason that brought humans to raise their heads, is the fact that the sky was the WAZE in ancient times. The familiar North Star is an example of a star that can give us the exact direction we want to go. If I have located it in the sky I know where the north is located, and thus I have the ability to know where the other directions are.

 
But even if we ignore all these, because today there is WAZE, a clock and a calendar in every mobile phone - so who needs to look at the sky anyway, there is one reason that cannot be ignored: the sight of thousands of points of light twinkling in the sky against the background of the darkness of the night. It is such a beautiful and magical sight that it is hard to take your eyes off it.

Today, many of us have no idea what we are losing. The invention of the light bulb by Thomas Edison during the 19th century did improve the quality of our lives immeasurably, but it distanced us from an ancient heritage of thousands of years and a human history for which the sight of a starry sky was the most natural thing - even for those who lived in the centers of the big cities of those days .

Take for example the astronomer Charles Messier who lived a little more than 200 years ago in Paris. Monsieur fell in love with astronomy after seeing a comet with two tails in the Paris sky as a child, which made him want to hunt comets himself. This is how he was able to record with the small telescope he had, galaxies, star clusters, nebulae and all the most beautiful sights in the sky - even from the center of the French capital.

Today there is no chance to see stars from Paris. But the European City of Lights is not the only one suffering from heavy light pollution. In all developed countries - and even here in Israel, there are hardly any places left that are dark enough to see a starry sky, or the Milky Way crossing the sky in all its glory.

But today, when we come to the desert at night, we can enjoy twice as much as the observers of the past thousands of years. In ancient times, the sky was full of gods and mythical figures around whom fascinating fairy tales were wrapped, and today with the development of the world of science, we are able to integrate the ancient knowledge that has been accumulated and continue to dive into the stars. Understand what they are made of, why they spread light, how big they are, what causes galaxies to move away from us, what are the differences between the planets and the other stars and how can you distinguish them effortlessly, how do you measure the unimaginable distance of the stars from us, and why look at the starry sky There will always be a look to the past.

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I invite you to a fascinating stargazing that combines history, mythology, astronomy and science. I have a feeling your eyes will continue to sparkle with starlight long after you're back to normal.

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waiting for you
Moshe Glantz