Left on our own by the observing team, my husband and I giddily explored every corner of the big dome. The big Hale scope is BIG. Imagine a semi truck balanced on its nose, dwarfed by the massive dome surrounding it.

We had some fun in our winter coats (it was freezing cold—you always want to keep your scopes the same temp as the atmosphere to prevent distortion), exploring.

One neglected side room revealed a surprise: an antique pool table with ivory balls! Tim and I love playing pool—we did so on our first date—and played wondering whether Hubble and Hale also played on that exact same pool table. Would they be arguing about Newtonian mechanics as they did? Would Hubble gloat when Hale sank the 8 ball? Would he brag about his balls redshifting into far corners of the table?

I was given the incredible privilege of opening the dome. (It amounts to pushing a button on a display, but oh, the machinery!) When I heard the indescribable metallic bass squeal of the massive scope moving in the reverberant dome, I grabbed Tim's arm. I had never heard anything like that before in my life. I begged him.

We HAVE to capture this sound!

Tim happened to have his fancy Sony recorder. He agreed it was amazing. It would be hard to simulate such a sound from scratch.

We used that sound, later, in our movie, for our spacecraft's portal opening. So, if you watch The Emissary Movie, listen for that sound. (We went to a lot of work to enable 5-channel surround sound, if you have the system to hear that, I recommend it, though of course it is not necessary.) It's really the Hale telescope moving in its dome.

Later, I was thrilled to learn from the Palomar folks that George Lucas also recorded the very same sound--that of the Hale telescope moving in its dome, and used it for Star Wars.

I believe this proves that I am the George Lucas of Sister Bay, Wisconsin. May the 4th be with you.

Want to hear what we heard? Click below:

There may be some benefits, after all, to living with a sensory processing disorder that makes me so deeply sound sensitive that entering a grocery store can make me want to throw up. (Thank you, curbside delivery.)

On to my own humble attempts at fiction:

I removed this chapter from my book just to shrink the damn thing.

By the way, I don’t dare to share even a sentence of my unpublished trilogy online, because I was convinced by smarter people that this is not wise. This way, my book can be officially unpublished, until someone wants to publish it. Make sense?

Since this chapter is no longer in my novel, I thought it would be safe to share. It's based on my experience with a couple stays at Palomar in the astronomer's quarters (the monastery) and the ambiance there was something I wanted to capture.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chandra Afumba

On a mountain that was relatively quiet for southern California, the big Hale telescope on Palomar was taking in data. Chandra frowned over the many monitors at her station. Every now and then, a burst of soft keyboard chatter from across the room signaled Dave’s presence. As usual, it was just the two of them working together. The goal this week was to test the new interferometer’s ability to increase resolution, with a secondary goal of keeping each other awake in order to that.

She swept the little frizzle of dark hairs that kept falling into her line of sight and secured them, firmly stuffing them under her headscarf. She rubbed at her eyes and sucked down some more coffee.

She never could get used to this, staying up all night. She was irritated that she had not been able to sleep at all that day to prepare for tonight’s session. Her tired bones cried out for the tiny little cot in the nearby dormitory. The monastery.

That’s what everyone still called the rustic old 1940’s era astronomer’s dorm that was a short walk from where she now worked with the big scope. The popular explanation for the title held that the dorm’s occupants slept during the day to prepare for a night of data acquisition and were therefore required to take vows of silence to avoid waking each another. Signs posted all around the thin-walled dormitory reminded residents to walk softly and to refrain from speaking during the day.

Rumor also suggested that the dorm’s monastic title worked because in the past, the astronomers who used it were once exclusively male. Also, exclusively white. Two things she was not. She tried not to dwell on that.

Since the monastery once housed the likes of Hubble and Hale, being inside it had stimulated her imagination to excess. She couldn’t stop imagining these historic figures that she grew up revering and reading about in her school books. All night she had lain on her cot electrified, picturing them arguing over the expansion of the universe, perhaps arguing over the nature of the cosmos in the very room where she was trying to fall asleep. Her eyes kept skittering over the rough wood walls, half-hoping to be the first keen-eyed resident to find scratched into the wood framing a little Hubble was here. Meanwhile, from the room next door, Dave’s snores had thundered through her walls.

She tossed her paper coffee cup in the trash and refocused on her monitor.

She blinked. In the Observing Information window, under camera 2's T-Guider, a white dot jiggled in the center of the screen. Another artifact. Most artifacts resulted from using the wrong settings for the job, settings that could be fixed quickly. She looked over the photodiode intensity, the settings for stepping, sixteen-bit, piezo loop, random on, feedback, and the SRC diode and tracker laser were on.

She could walk down the hall to inspect the telescope itself but dismissed the thought. She looked at the telescope cam, instead. Parts of the telescope visible on the camera monitor showed its surfaces in shades of black, white, and grey, each of the narrow fields of view not able to convey its entire bulk. Under its dark, cold dome, it poised as improbably as a semi truck balancing on its nose.

This didn’t make sense.

“Hey Dave, can you look at this for a second? It looks like a new object.”

The wheels of his chair squeaked as he slid over to another monitor. “That’s strange, it isn’t…”

His voice dropped away to nothing.

She peeked between the stacks of instrumentation manuals, binders, and monitors on the counter between them. Dave was staring at his monitor, rubbing his beard. He broke the silence with the rapid percussion of typing. “What do you have for a velocity?”

She looked. “Ninety-one kilometers per second!”

“This is weeeeird.” Dave’s face was now just inches away from his monitor. “It’s like it’s not in a passive orbit.” He typed some more, leaned back, and pointed at his monitor. “It’s deaccelerating…hey!” His head rocked back. “Where’d it go?”

She stared at her own monitor again and caught her breath.

The white blip was gone.

“Oh, come on!” Dave was wheeling around to look at all the other monitors. “Get it back!” he cried.

Chandra spent the next few minutes looking at all the camera windows, toggling controls on and off. The object, whatever it was, failed to reappear.

Dave let out a sigh, the sound of air escaping from a punctured balloon. “Well, that was weird. Back to work, then, I guess.”

Her voice graveled from exhaustion. “I guess.” In her sleep-deprived state, if she had been alone, she might have convinced herself that she had imagined the blip.

The wheels of Dave’s chair squeaked again as he glided across the floor to another monitor. In the silence that followed, she guessed that he was still thinking about it. She heard him clear his throat. “Probably another artifact.”

She smiled to herself. She leaned over the back of her chair and angled her head to locate her coworker behind the row of monitors between them. “Or, right now, there could be an unusual object headed straight for Earth.”

He turned. He raised his eyes to meet hers for a moment. Then, they both burst into laughter.

The laughter felt good, energizing her. She rose from her chair to get herself another cup of coffee. “Either that,” she said, still laughing, “Or our iodine reference cell needs recalibrating.”

Many have seen partial solar eclipses. Me too. Not the same.

If you are not sure whether you have seen a total solar eclipse, then you have not seen a total solar eclipse. (Is there any way to say that and not sound obnoxious?)

There will always be more for you to have your chance, but you have to plan in advance (use this chart).

I love birthing new umbraphiles!

I'm lucky to have seen three, so far:

Feb 26, 1998, on the island of Aruba

Aug 17, 2017, Mitchell, Oregon

April 8, 2024, Russelville, Arkansas

Each required a lot of planning in advance to get (fly, drive, sail) into the path of totality.

Solar vs lunar FYI: The eclipse name tells you what object gets eclipsed. In a solar eclipse, the sun is eclipsed, or covered, by the moon. In a lunar eclipse, you watch the moon get covered by the Earth’s shadow. This article doesn’t have anything to do with lunar eclipses.

By the way, I recommend passing on the annular total eclipses, if you have a choice. I've never seen one, but I know people who have seen both and they say it is not anywhere near as impressive. During an annular total solar eclipse, the moon is so distant that you see more of the bright ring (annulus) of the sun around the moon. You can't see the fine detail of the corona. If one came to my backyard, I'd see it, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see one.

Alas, I do not have video of the total eclipse I saw on the island of Aruba in 1998, my first. (Prior to this I was spending a week getting blown away scuba diving on the nearby island of Bonaire. Saw such magnificent colorful corals and marine life and I just hope they are are surviving warming, acidification and plastic.)

What I remember: Thousands descended on this Caribbean island. The skies were briefly cloudy, so we jumped into a madly careening taxi dodging goats on the road pointing to an area with clear skies saying to our poor driver, go! go! go! Made it. Many other members of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society were with me, setting up gear.

I knew what to expect, having read about it in advance. What I did not expect was my emotional reaction. I felt a surprisingly strong primitive horror seeing the sun get blacked out in the middle of this day by this eerie black circle of the moon. It's still one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my life. And then a few minutes of seeing the silvery corona of the sun dance, the sky turn dark, the planets appear, the air grow chill. I knew, after that, that I wanted to share this.

Then, thousands of visitors to the island all hung out and celebrated, packing the restaurants and bars. I did catch a glimpse of nutritional celebrity Andrew Weil dining with a group of people in a restaurant, after. (He was eating a salad.)

Here's a link to the Aug 21, 2017 eclipse.

Here's a link to the April 8, 2024 eclipse.

I like the 2017 video we took better, because the eclipse was low enough that we could capture the eclipse plus people in the foreground simultaneously. This time we were with the Eastbay Astronomical Society of northern California. I think the details are better resolved in this video. At the end of the eclipse, I don’t know if you can hear it, but some guy present cracked me up by shouting, "DO IT AGAIN!"

The first solar eclipse I remember, just a partial, I was about ten. I was in this special program called MGM at Sierra Vista School in La Habra, California where I grew up. We were allowed outside, and sat under awnings that happened to have holes in them. I spread out a piece of paper and saw that the shadows looked strange.

What had been circular reflections of the sun on my paper turned to crescents. I started sketching them, and they formed an arc across my paper. Our teacher, Mr Norris, noticed this, and got excited. I don't remember getting photographed. My childish self still wishes the article gave me credit for the discovery, but they did not. But that is how I remember it happened.

My mom was sweet to tack this little note on this, she had mailed it to me, a while ago.

One of the benefits of going to the Caribbean for an eclipse is getting to scuba for a week beforehand!

Photographers: Tim Erskine; Holly Erskine

Summary Authors: Holly Erskine; Tim Erskine

The eye-catching northern lights featured above were captured from Sister Bay, Wisconsin in March and April of 2023. The bottom photo was taken on March 23, 2023. This auroral event was more energetic than April’s aurora, on April 23, 2023. A third photo (top) shows my husband, Tim, with his camera and tripod observing the March 23 event.

Because we live just a few miles from an official International Dark Sky Park, Newport State Park, Wisconsin, we're afforded wondrous views of the night sky and on occasion the northern lights. Note that on the top photo (March 23) you can detect both Orion and the Pleiades. On the middle photo (April 23), the waxing crescent Moon is setting over the waters of Green Bay.

Sister Bay, Wisconsin Coordinates: 45.1872, -87.1209

Newport State Park, Wisconsin Coordinates: 45.2411, -86.9916

Related Links:

Aurora Observed over Northern Michigan

Night Sky Ventures, Inc.

How to see an aurora

It helps to have an App that will notify you when our sun does a big burp of particles. It also helps to have a friend with that App text you when you ignore that notification. (Thank you Kent Moraga, without which my March photos would not exist.) Or you can just check Space Weather online.

It helps to be further north (for the northern lights or aurora borealis) or south (for the southern lights or aurora australis). However, I've seen the northern lights as far south as Tooele, Utah, and I've met people who have seen more energetic displays further from the poles as well.

I would not have known I was seeing my first rather weak aurora, except that I was with more experienced astronomers who were confident that's what it was. For my first very weak aurora which was in the mid 1990's, I had to use my peripheral vision (see below in tips), and only then did I see a very dynamic white light jumping up and down the northern horizon. I was surprised by how rapidly it moved, like a searchlight, except that it was definitely not a searchlight originating from any particular place. Even for the more dramatic aurorae I've seen after that, I could not detect color with my eyes, I only saw white light racing in curtains and streaks and rays across the sky.

Here's some tips:

1. Get away from light pollution. That's the most important thing.

2. Shield your eyes from any lights. If you must use light, use red lights, which won't blind your retinas to fainter light.

3. Get as far north (or south for the southern lights) as you can and look north (or south)

4. No equipment needed; but a camera will pick up colors you can't detect with your eyes

5. As with a lot of astronomy, you may want to use your peripheral or averted vision. The sides of your retinas have more rods, less cones. Cones are sensitive to color while rods see black and white. You can't see color so well at night so you want to use your rods on the sides of your eyes. This averted vision trick is essential for doing a lot of amateur astronomy and takes some getting used to. What to see something faint in the sky? Don't look directly at it!

6. Don't expect to see color. You might only see white light bands of light rising and falling. If you can take a picture, your photos may reveal the color your eye can't perceive.

For the March 23, 2023 aurora, I was lucky enough to get a message from a friend about what was going on.

For the April 23, 2023 aurora, my husband Tim is half asleep and I am the night owl up in bed reading as usual, and I see a Chicago news story that says "Controlled mass ejection from the sun." That headline cracks me up.

I'm pretty sure the sun doesn't control any of its particle burps. It's coronal mass ejection, folks, not controlled. Note to journalists: control your auto-fill error correction ejections. My old science teacher self is smug. I have to tell Tim about the silly headline.

But Tim has only one response for me. "Go see if there is an aurora," he commands.

"I don't want to," I say, all cozy and warm and not wanting to get up. It's midnight.

Well, I did, there was, and an hour later we are trying to unfreeze ourselves from standing taking pictures on our balcony.

fun aurora facts

Charged particles, (mostly ordinary electrons and protons that you would find in your basic atom) from the sun get caught in Earth's magnetic field lines. This ionizes some gases in our atmosphere, which then emit light.

Different gases produce different colors of light as fingerprints. This isn't as straight-forward as saying that oxygen or nitrogen is red or green, because gases come in different forms: atomic, molecular, ionized, plus depending on how hard they are hit, the same species can emit one or more different wavelengths.

Green (most common color to see): monotomic oxygen (O)

Red: Monotomic oxygen (O) and diatomic nitrogen (N2)

Blue: ionized diatomic nitrogen (N2+)

Purple and blue (hard to see against the sky): hydrogen molecule (H2) or helium atoms (He)

Auroras on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have been observed. It was once thought a magnetosphere was required for for a planet to have an aurora, except that Mars, which doesn't have a magnetic field, does have a version of aurora as well.

The sun goes through an eleven-year cycle of activity. The last solar max was 2014, the next solar maximum will be 2025.

Addendum: Since writing this post, we’ve been graced with more particles! Here’s some of the highlights of Oct 10, 2024’s display in Ephraim, WI:

Credit NASA/JPL/Stellarium

If your mental map tells you that your Post Office is across the street from the Piggly Wiggly, you have what it takes. The skill you will need is the same that you use navigating familiar streets.

Now, with things in the sky, it is a only a little bit more complicated. Imagine our local streets all stay in place with respect to one another, but rotate slowly around a common point. The post office still would remain across the street from the grocery store. You could still find your way around! Since the stars stay in the same place relative to one another, an old name for them is the fixed stars. Hence the cheesy joke:

Who fixed the fixed stars? Quantum mechanics.

These fixed stars will appear to wheel around the north pole, as the Earth turns under your feet, once every 24 hours. As the Earth revolves around the sun as well as rotates on its axis, the wheel of these fixed stars advances all the way around plus a little bit more every night. Just as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so do the fixed stars, for the same reason, but the same star will rise earlier (and set earlier) by 4 minutes each night.

And so, every consecutive night we get to see just a little bit more of the wheel in the east and a little bit less of it in the west, at identical times. This is why constellations are seasonal. (Planets and the moon are never seasonal, they are too close to us, so we can’t call them “fixed”. The word planet comes from the Greek word for wanderer.)

Polaris, the north star, is a rather dim and boring-looking star, but in the northern hemisphere, it will stand out as the only star not moving as it sits directly over Earth’s north pole. All the other stars appear to move in a slow counterclockwise wheel around polaris. (The two bowl stars furthest from the handle of the big dipper can be used as pointer stars to find polaris, and it is a handy trick to know, but you will be disappointed if you think polaris is anything worth gazing at.) I recommend starting out learning three bright stars that stand out in the summer sky.

These three form a large, lopsided triangle called the Summer Triangle. The Summer Triangle is not one of the 88 constellations. Any group of stars that isn’t one of these official 88 territories on the fixed star map is called an asterism. For example, the portion of Ursa Major, (the big bear) that most people recognize is called the big dipper. It’s hard to see this ladle shape has arms and legs and a tail. Most constellations don’t look anything like their name. Ursa Major is one of the 88 officially recognized constellations, but the big dipper, which is a portion of Ursa Major, is an asterism.

The three stars making up the Summer Triangle are Deneb, Vega, and Altair. Vega is the brightest star in Lyra the harp, which doesn’t look at all like a harp (I play harp so I can say this) but more like a small, lopsided parallelogram. The brightest of the three is Vega, a blue-white star. Stars really are different colors, though the colors can be hard to see if the star isn’t particularly bright. The hottest burn the bluest, the coolest burn red. Vega’s relatively short distance to Earth, 25 light years, means that the light you view when you see Vega is light that was made twenty five years ago. (What were you doing 25 years ago?) Yeah, that’s far away, but relatively close with respect to most stars in our galaxy. (Speaking of other galaxies, there an estimated couple trillion of them, but all the stars you see with your eyes belong to just our galaxy, the Milky Way. That’s a question I often get. See, that simplifies things even further.)

Fussy old astronomers declaring “Veega is the star, Vayga is the car,” got me in the habit of calling Vega VEE-gah, but both pronunciations are acceptable. With these ancient names I think pronunciation is more a matter of fashion than science. Of the three stars, Deneb is dimmest, which I remember because Deneb and dim both start with D. Deneb is part of Cygnus the long-necked swan, also called the Northern Cross. Cygnus’s cross of stars snakes its way dimly through the middle of the triangle. Altair, the third star, always comes with two dimmer stars on either side of it, equally spaced apart, like stellar saddlebags. Once you see that striking pattern, you will know Altair immediately. Altair is the brightest star in the constellation Aquilla the eagle. I have never been able to see an eagle there. I settle for Altair and its two dim side car companions.

There are so many fun things to find around the Summer Triangle. The little constellation Delphinus the dolphin is a lovely little diamond of stars and lies outside the triangle beyond the line formed by Deneb and Altair. The tail of Cygnus contains a famous double star, Albirio, that when viewed with binoculars or a telescope separates into a striking pair, one vivid blue, one vivid yellow.

For your first astronomical tool, besides a red headlamp to keep you from frying your night vision, I strongly recommend a planisphere. Most natural park ranger stations and nature centers will happily sell you one. It’s basically a paper map with a window that shows you only what stars are visible, so you don’t waste time trying to find ones that are below the horizon. Most cost more no than 20 dollars. You turn a wheel of paper to the current date and time and see only the stars that are currently visible. The brad or rotation piece on the wheel is, of course, Polaris (for planispheres that work on the northern hemisphere. If you happen to be in the southern hemisphere, you will need a southern hemisphere planisphere.) Planispheres are made for different latitudes, so you will want one for the latitude where you will do most of your star gazing.

This is what a planisphere looks like.

I have plenty of Apps and databases that can tell me where various satellites and planets and Messier objects are. When I started doing astronomy over 25 years ago, no one had smart phones or Apps. Yes, these are useful. I love techy stuff. I swoon over it at times. But the problem with looking up information on your various shiny rectangles is that you can’t immediately view or grasp what what is beyond your virtual screen. Your paper planisphere, on the other hand, lays everything out for you. You can hold the entire hemisphere of the sky in your hands, and not wonder about where everything is off the edge of the screen.

Now, a planisphere can’t tell you where the planets or our moon will be. These bodies are not “fixed.” These wandering bodies trace an imaginary line on across the fixed stars called the ecliptic. There are thirteen constellations in the ecliptic, twelve you may recognize as zodiacal constellations. (The thirteenth zodiacal constellation seems to have been neglected by astrologers, but if you were born in early December as I was, you might be surprised to learn that you were not born under the sign of Sagittarius, but were instead born under the sign of the snake charmer Ophiuchus.)

I try to keep a mental model of where planets are, sort of like nomadic, wandering relatives. Mercury and Venus are easy—they are always next to the sun, and take turns being visible for a while in the morning in the east or in the evening in the west. But when I have lost track, I look their locations up on the internet, typing in “planets tonight” to see where they are exactly now. But I know they will fall on the ecliptic line somewhere, and be in front of one of the 13 zodiacal constellations. So you shouldn’t look for a planet in, say, Ursa Major, which doesn’t lie on the ecliptic.

There is also a winter asterism, the massive Winter Oval, or, as another astronomy joke goes, the Winter Football, prominent in the northern hemisphere’s winter skies. (Featuring the bright stars Rigel, Aldebaran, Capella, Pollux, Procyon, and Sirius.) If you can’t wait to see the winter oval, you can stay up all night, because some of it should be visible in the wee hours of the morning. Use a planisphere to find it.

Holly Phaneuf Erskine is a biochemistry professor and medicinal chemist. An avid amateur astronomer, she has set up hundreds of telescopes for star parties for the public over the past 25 years and once had a blast giving star shows at Salt Lake's Hansen planetarium.

The Stars, Like Dust, Inside Your Body.
The Sagittarius Star Cloud. - (image credit: Hubble Heritage Team (AURA / STScl/ NASA))

Most of the breaths you take and nutrients you ingest contain atoms that have been on earth a long time. A small fraction get lost to outer space. My tattered 1987 copy of Meteorites and their Parent Planets (McSween) might be out of date, but states that Earth sweeps up 10,000 tons of micrometeorite dust every time it sweeps around the sun. So Earth, and those of us living upon its surface, continue to exchange some small percent of atoms with space, to this day. (For an educational science project, you can encourage kids to collect space dust.)

During your lifetime, many of your atoms go through multiple hosts. We just borrow them, rearranging them into our particular configuration.

There are about as many atoms of air in your lungs as there are breathfuls of air in the atmosphere in the whole world (around 10 raised to the 22nd power of atoms or liters, respectively.) After exhaling, it would take about six years for atoms from your breath get evenly mixed with the atmosphere. (This according to one of my not-so favorite physics textbooks, and I suspect the authors are just trying to stun their poor, bored students by writing this. I also suspect these physicists are not thinking as chemists, assuming these atoms are acting like free unsticky, unreactive particles, not getting locked up in the earth or other organisms, giving a best-case scenario as far as having your lung atoms go on some exotic world-traveling cruise. Still, where your lung atoms go is worth considering. You might as well think about it if you are meditating, contemplating your breath.)

If our atoms can get around like that, how much of our atoms do we share with one another? People who play with statistics for sport have gone to some lengths to estimate how many atoms from Caesar's last breath are in our body. Or anyone's last breath.

And the answer is...
Well, it depends.

That is the most truthful anticlimactic answer scientists can give, which is why scientists ought to have publicity agents.

The answers vary depending on your assumptions.

As far as Caesar's last breath, the odds are very low, but not impossible. The longer an organism has been on Earth, and if it has not been entombed in a leak-proof mausoleum, the greater the odds that organism's atoms are in you right now. Dinosaur atoms are in you right now, for example. That is at least one inspiring true thing I have to say about this matter.

You can say for certain that the atoms making up your body now have been part of countless other life forms, of all sorts. Dinosaurs, primitive algal mats, exotic beasts and flora that are now extinct, and perhaps even some from your neighbors. Maybe you don't like your neighbors. I am sorry, but they might be part of you.

Practice:
Set aside a period of time to contemplate your breath. As you breath in and out, consider all the dinosaurs and birds and trees and and plants and fungi and microbes, and yes, even people, that have contributed to the particles in your body. Lions and fruit bats and orangutans. You name it. All life is interconnected.

Sometimes I think of my atoms going out, and I think, all right! Go out there and obey the rules of physics, play nice, and do great things! I don't think we can imprint our atoms with ideas. I don't think they have memories.

It’s a nice thought, all the same. And what do I know? Barely anything. It can't hurt.

This lovely still came from our movie, The Emissary. We are proud of how it came out!

(Background image credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)

I always make a point of asking beginning chemistry students this question: where do they think the atoms in their bodies came from?

They need to know this. Some guess that plants make them, with photosynthesis, or that atoms pop into existence somehow, when we prepare food.

Thoughtful guesses, but they are wrong.

Atoms are older than planet Earth, I tell them. Now where do you think they came from?

Some students know this already, but many look skeptical. It's just something that everyone should know. It is too amazing not to share.

Atoms heavier than hydrogen must have formed by squishing, or fusing I should say, hydrogen and other lighter elements, under great pressure in a star. Possibly several ancient stars contributed to making your heavier elements, stars that existed prior to the formation of our solar system, and that's over five billion years ago. You are ancient. You are, as Carl Sagan said, made of star stuff.

The hydrogen and lighter elements are the most ancient, forming right after the big bang. Thus, there are atoms in you that are as old as the universe. Whether they were made in a star or were synthesized early in the formation of the universe, it's amazing.

Though there is no guarantee that hydrogen and some of the lighter elements were part of a star, all of the heavier elements on Earth are remnants of stars that exploded long before the solar system came into being. Elements heavier than iron were made by a more unique type of stellar explosion, as the synthesis of these atoms does not release energy, but requires energy, and they have their own special story. All of these origin stories are pretty amazing. We have abundant, excellent evidence that the stories of their formation are true.

Practice: Sometimes I will sit and contemplate the ancient origin of my atoms. Grateful for their long journeys, I tell them,

I would like to thank you all for being here today.

Next post I will tell you about Atomic meditation II: We are literally interconnected. We breathe one another, all around the world.