Daniel Pope

The next time you have a clear dark sky look to the Northeast. There you will see the stars that many believe are the basis for the most ancient story ever told by humans about our night sky. This part of the sky also holds humanity’s first greatest look back in time and space – the Hubble Deep Field (HDF). What a coincidence – just marvelous.

Anthropologists have discovered cultures around the world that pre-date the invention of writing had stories about a bear in these stars. When European explorers arrived in the Americas, they discovered the American Indians told their own stories about a bear in these same stars. Perhaps these legends are among the oldest information that got passed from one place to another through the migration of our ancient ancestors. In late 1995 the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was pointed at what looked like a fairly empty place in the sky and it collected light for ten days – to see as far out into space or as far back into time as it could – more than 10 billion years. The spot where it was pointed is marked as HDF on the graphic. Connect the two stars at the back of the bowl of the Big Dipper and extend that line for about the distance between those two stars to locate this spot. Take a pencil and hold it at arm’s length with its point at the HDF mark – just the pencil point itself covers the area on the sky that the HST pointed at. It is assumed that what is found in that direction is found in every direction. How many pencil points would it take to cover the entire sky? There are reported to be at least 1,500 galaxies at various stages of development in the Hubble Deep Field image. This image has been used to estimate the number of galaxies in the visible universe – perhaps 125 billion. The HDF is just breathtaking in color.

The Great Bear stories connected our most ancient ancestors around the world and now the HDF has made us aware of and connected all of us to our ancestral Universe.

“One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day.” – Albert Einstein.

The Big Dipper appears to be standing upright on the end of its handle. If you hold your out-stretched fingers at arm’s length on the night sky then the Big Dipper will reach from the end of your little finger to the end of your thumb. Even though the Big Dipper is quite large it is not a constellation itself but it is the easily recognized part of Ursa Major (ER-suh-MAY-jer), the Great Bear constellation.

The word “Dipper” to describe the seven bright stars in Ursa Major made its first appearance about 200 years ago and it was just in the U.S. and Canada. It is thought to have come from the slaves fleeing the South via the Underground Railroad telling each other that to go north just follow the “Drinking Gourd” in the night sky. Perhaps the Drinking Gourd became the Big Dipper.

Clear skies.