I’ve found a new way to annoy companions.

      When walking or driving at night, even with other people, I suddenly stop when I see an unusually bright, unblinking star and spend some time trying to figure out—often making use of my “Skyview” app—which planet it is.

      This is not much of a problem here in Manhattan, where the light pollution often succeeds in obscuring whatever stars the buildings fail to block. But there are still plenty of places in this world where planets can easily and regularly be discerned. And planet discerning—abruptly looking up—has apparently become one of my responses to aging.

      The truth is I always had some inclination to turn in that direction. I took a course in Astronomy freshman year in college. Got to gape at Saturn’s rings at the campus observatory. But who knew so much math would be involved? No more courses, but I have kept up in a Walter Sullivan, Brian Greene, Quanta Magazine, math-free sort of way.

•      So I know that the distance between things in the universe is growing and that the new James Webb Space Telescope, currently orbiting the sun, can capture light from when the universe was only about 300-thousand years old—a baby, just beginning to spread out. The universe is now almost 14-billion years old.

•       I know that much—the bulk?—of the universe is now thought to be held together or driven apart by, respectively, “dark matter” and “dark energy”—which, being “dark,” are ridiculously hard to observe.

•       I know that we (I like that pronoun) now think the universe will keep spreading out until it is all dissipated (like a bunch of second cousins).

•       I know that we don’t know how to think about what our universe might be spreading out into: Itself? Is it really just creating new space? Or possibly—in the fullness of space—is it just one tract in a meta-universe harboring many other spreading-out universes and possibly other versions of the laws (or at least the constants) of physics.

•       In addition, I know—as I showed my son’s friend when we were all out walking the other night in some place other than New York City—that Mars, which has reddish soil, is the only planet in our sky with a vaguely reddish tint. And I believe that, if you were on Mars, the earth would have a bluish tint. This stuff is easier to know.

      And I increasingly treasure opportunities to spy on stuff beyond our planet and its moon and sun. Indeed, I have had the thrill on a few occasions in recent years—on cloudless nights somehow far from any city lights—to see what I used to be able to see from my backyard growing up on Long Island: that incredible star-soup known as the Milky Way—our galaxy as seen from inside, from the side.

      Far out!

      Being old means I’m unlikely to be around should another Einstein come along to figure out what exists beyond this universe. So I’m in a bit of a rush to get, at least, as good a sense of the current state of astronomical knowledge as it is possible to get, without any fluency in the language of physicists: mathematics.

      And, when it is dark and cloudless enough, I look up.

      Staring at the night sky in places that actually still manage to have a robust night sky isn’t going to reduce the amount of stuff that could be known that I’ll never get a chance to sort of, kind of, know.

      But trying to locate Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mercury or Mars on dark, cloudless nights gifts aging me with something else—a present that is a bit embarrassing for a committed atheist to acknowledge.

      With my own expiration date increasingly within imagining distance, it seems somehow reassuring to contemplate that which won’t expire for, say, tens of billions of years.  

      I insist that this is not a religious impulse.

      But it is calming to be reminded of the fact that the universe(s) is (are) large, and I—mortal me—am small.