Field and Woodland Wanderings, Nov. 2026: Night Sights
Updated: 7 hours ago
by Martha Wright
A large fiery ball with a stream of flame behind it sizzled across the night sky above my car. I was headed home after work, listening to the radio while my thoughts lazily looped through the shift I had just finished and the things I had to do before I could fall into bed. But now, I was thoroughly awake, feeling like Chicken Little in the old nursery tale, who thought the sky was falling.
That was the most memorable sight from any of my trips home after work. Now that I am no longer doing so, I realize that eight years of driving home in the middle of the night meant that a portion of my time in nature, small though it was, happened under the night sky. Constellations, shooting stars, moon phases, and even satellites were things I noticed while I was driving, or as I walked from car to house after arriving at home.
I found a kindred spirit in the Japanese artist Syo Tatsu, who also loves nature and the sky at night. He posted to his Facebook page a beautiful piece of artwork depicting the night sky, titled “Symphony”:
Tatsu accompanied the artwork with this poem:
The night is full of life
A chorus of the living things
Songs of the stars and moon
A symphony of the night
There were many nights, usually in the winter, when the chorus of the stars was so bright and the sky so deep that I just stood in the yard gazing upward, my breath steaming around me, until I had to go in to warm up. In the summer, I could bring out a reclining lawn chair and fall asleep while contemplating the symphony of the Milky Way and the constellations.
The Big Dipper is the easiest star pattern for me to find, and I can locate the Little Dipper by following the path that liquid would take if poured from the Big Dipper. This leads to Polaris, the North Star, and the last star in the handle of the Little Dipper. The dippers are not constellations on their own — they are parts of larger constellations known as Ursa Major, the Great Bear, and Ursa Minor, the Lesser Bear.
A constellation I look for in winter is Orion, the hunter. His distinctive belt of three stars points to Sirius, usually the brightest star in the sky. Sirius is part of the constellation Canis Major, the Great Dog, and is known as the Dog Star. I developed an affinity for Sirius when I read the children’s book “Dogsbody” by Diana Wynne Jones. In the story, the star is trapped on Earth as a dog and must solve the mystery of his exile from the heavens.
Dozens of shooting stars have caught my eye over the past eight years. These are meteors, small pieces of space debris from a comet, or an asteroid, burning up as they enter Earth’s atmosphere. Meteor showers have an annual schedule because the earth completes a circuit around the sun once a year, passing through the same debris each time.
Most of my shooting star sightings happened during one of the regular showers, especially the Perseids which occur in August, peaking around Aug. 12. Peak dates and viewing information for all of the meteor showers can be found on the American Meteor Society’s website. On a clear night at the right time and place they can be spectacular shows with as many as 100 meteors an hour.
The American Meteor Society has an explanation for the spectacular show the night my sky was falling. The fireball I saw on Jan. 24, 2026 around 12:30 a.m. was visible from several states in the upper Midwest and even into Canada. They deemed it a dead satellite that reentered the atmosphere, burning up as it fell.
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