Keep Your Head Up—Literally

My love for astronomy probably originated from watching Sailor Moon, in which magical superheroes named after various planets fight evil. For the longest time, I wanted to be an astronaut because I loved learning about the Solar System. That is until I watched Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity where Sandra Bullock’s character gets stranded in space. Although I quickly gave up on being an astronaut, I still loved learning about the Solar System and the vast depth of space in general.

That’s when I began stargazing. After all, it was the closest thing I could get to space. I would spend my summer nights staring up at the stars in my quiet neighborhood. Without any light pollution, I was always amazed at how the sky glittered with stars. In my life, which I mostly spend with my head down, it was refreshing to look up for once and observe the world above me a little better. 

So in a way, stargazing became my way to distance myself from reality to appreciate the things we don’t appreciate enough. Our lives are spent mostly with our heads down, focusing on the small things. Meanwhile, the sky–which is a literal piece of history that’s been “living” since the beginning of time–is above us. 

How many of us know about the star Betelgeuse, which actually glows red in the sky instead of blue because of its low surface temperature? Or how the constellations are based mostly on Greek mythology? The backstory of the Cassiopeia constellation comes from the Greek goddess Cassiopeia, whose boastfulness ultimately led to Poseidon placing her in the sky as punishment. Greek mythology has continuously been interesting to me (probably due to my mild obsession over the Percy Jackson series as a kid) so learning about these backstories brings me a little closer to those celestial beings in the sky. 

I’ve yet to find someone who also enjoys stargazing as a hobby and doesn’t see it as boring. A lot of us take the sky for granted and choose to focus on the trivial things in our daily lives. So I encourage you to keep your head up and take a look at the night sky once in a while. The constellations up there have seen the world evolve and develop in front of them—so it wouldn’t hurt to try to understand their past.

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