Favorite star

 

My favorite star.

Alina Sabyr, an astrophysics grad student at Columbia and Watson Fellow, produced this great video asking people around the world what was their favorite astronomical feature — what takes their breath away when they look up. I’m not alone in thinking Saturn is incredible (see Stammering About God). I loved the choices of the familiar  — the moon or Orion  — and the unfamiliar — my colleague Guy Consolmagno SJ’s choice of Eta Carinae, which we can’t see from the Northern Hemisphere.

Why, I wondered, did the sun not come to anyone’s mind? Mine included, at least at first. Maybe because we can look deeper and deeper into the night sky, but even a glance at the sun is too much for us to bear?