A Star in the North

 I woke up.

In the dim blue light of the plane, the glint of the steel hands of my analog watch appeared to say 2:30. Ugh. Only 2.5 hours since they turned the cabin lights off and 3.5 since we took off from Dallas. It was going to be a brutal 14 hour flight. The flight was nearly empty by all accounts. Most people were sat in rows by themselves, myself included. So I had set out the 3 pillows and stretched out across the seats with the plane blanket over me to get some sleep. But having woken up with a stiff hip, I happened to glance out the window.

Oh, the sky!

Like any good astronomer, I thought 'to heck with sleep, let's see what's out there.' Putting my nose to the window and pulling the blanket over my head, the blackness was consuming. With a new moon, the only light pollution was coming from the plane's beacons. Below, we appeared to be flying just above thin clouds. There was some haze around the wing tip and the effect was that the horizon was indistinguishable from the sky. Below was jet black. Across and above was star-studded inky black. And the stars near the horizon faded in and out of view mysteriously.

After getting my bearings, I noticed that Cassiopeia was just above the wingtip, the iconic W of the sky. 

"Wait, what? Where are we?" I immediately turned on the in-flight navigation and opened the Stellarium night sky app. You see, Cassiopeia is a polar constellation, so for it to be straight out from my window, rather than higher in the sky, we must be quite far south. And sure enough, we were southeast of Hawaii. It was only then that I saw the clock in Stellarium: 6:20 central time. I'd slept 6 hours. I had gotten the watch hands mixed up in the dark.

Feeling smug about my full night of sleep and having made it through half the flight, I returned to the window. As my eyes adjusted, the Milky Way was barely but distinctly visible passing through Cassiopeia. This portion of the Milky Way looks out towards intergalactic space rather than towards the galactic center, so the milky band is hard to see here even in the best of skies. Above Cassiopeia, Perseus filled the top of my window. To the left, towards the front of the plane, Andromeda and Ares could easily be seen. I think I could faintly make out the Andromeda Galaxy, but only with averted vision. To the right of Cassiopeia, the back of the plane, a dark empty-ish void where some faint stars presumably showed Camelopardalis. And far to the right, quite close to the horizon: Polaris. The north star. Most of Ursa Minor was below the horizon.

A searing blaze of light crossed from right to left through Perseus. A Leonid metorite. I wonder if I was the only human to see it? Not likely, but an interesting thing to think about. Maybe someone in British Columbia or Russia or Guam or Chile. Wouldn't that be cool?

I looked at my clock. 6:50 CT. Having pondered the cosmos for 40 minutes I decided to get some bonus sleep. Thankfully I could feel my hip again.

I woke up. That happens a lot on planes. 8:50 CT. Still pitch black out. One thing that's interesting about such a long westbound flight is that we follow the night: the entire 14 hour flight is in darkness. Looking out my window again, Perseus was square in view, having barely moved to the right, thereby signifying that the plane was kind of keeping up with the east-west movement of the stars. That said, Cassiopeia was gone and Perseus considerably lower in the sky. The Pleides star cluster and Taurus entered view from the top left of my window. The feeling was predominantly that the sky was setting in the north rather than the usual west! 

At time of writing, we've just crossed the equator and the north star has just gone out of view. If I were on a mountain I would be able to see all the stars from north pole to south pole. Out my northwest window it is still pitch black, but looking across the plane, the southeastern horizon is dark red and orange with the slowly advancing dawn. 10a CT Wednesday. 4a Thursday Fiji time. 3 hours left to go... and here comes breakfast.