Star Struck

This is the Dark Sky Park in Galloway, southern Scotland in broad daylight in late October. It was taken following tea, oatcakes and red Leicester cheese and, before that, an evening in the company of two strangers in the middle of a field in the dark.

Newton Stewart was the only area not covered in cloud on Saturday 22nd October. I was a day late for the peak of the Orionid meteor storm but still hopeful of seeing something, so I alerted the Balloch o’ Dee campsite to the purpose of my journey in advance of my arrival.

Feeling like Susie No-Mates, I hurried down there, hooked up and grilled my fishcakes. The van was glaring white and toute seule in the middle of a (dark) green field below a rise. Along the rise stood a gathering of horses, silhouetted against the twilight sky.

By the time I’d finished eating, Caroline and David, two members of the BoD fraternity, had elected to join me. We stood peering at the cloudy sky shielding our eyes from the light outside the toilet block. Realising our difficulty, David turned off all the lights and soon afterwards the clouds parted and we spent the next four hours gazing upwards at shooting stars, pale or startling, in all directions.

My eyes adjusted completely to the dark, a process that takes roughly 30 minutes all in. It’s a measure of my speedy city lifestyle that I haven’t stood still long enough in the dark for this to have happened in a while. The ocular adaptability made the swash of Milky Way distinct and the continued presence of the horses known. We positioned ourselves facing the area we believed Orion to be, the main area the Orionids would be visible, hence the name, but regularly scanned the 180° our necks could manage. It was an evening of delights and frequent gasping at the many shooting stars. We joked that the action was probably all happening behind us.

Conversation was easy, despite my not having met them before and I’m extremely grateful for their calm companionship. After a while, Caroline drifted home. David stoked a fire he’d made in a pot-bellied open stove and offered me a beer. I was chilled in both senses of the word and also deeply happy.

The fire had meant we could stay out longer, but it also affected our vision and made the sky re-darken, so after David went to his caravan, I circumnavigated the camper several times and tried not to look at the dying fire.

Orion crept over the horizon, yes, directly behind where we’d sat, distinctive and unmistakable, and I got to watch through my binoculars the rise of an orange half-moon to Orion’s north.

At last I stood staring north, thanking my lucky stars for such good company, for the beautiful place, the dark, the Milky Way and a fabulous way to spend my time, when one last bright shooting star shot from east to west in exactly the area in which I gazed. ‘Wow’ was all I could say, over and over, and over and over again.

Impossible to photograph the dark, but this was the view in the morning:

And here's a panorama of Balloch o' Dee:

And their website: http://www.ballochodee.com/