“For me, it’s everything,” said astronomer David Levy.
“If I didn’t have a spiritual aspect to my interest in astronomy, I wouldn’t be doing it. It is everything.
“Not to take away from the science, not to take away from the observing experience, but the fact that there is a spiritual center to it is everything.”
Levy spoke at the annual Jasper Dark Sky Festival in Jasper National Park, where Canada’s magnificent Rocky Mountain lakes and mountains move from center stage and all eyes turn heavenward for life-altering views of the largest accessible dark sky preserve in the world.
The astronomer earned a doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for his thesis on allusions to celestial events in Elizabethan and Jacobean writing.
But he is best known as the discoverer, with Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker, at the Palomar Observatory in northern San Diego County, of the famous Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet. The comet collided with Jupiter in 1994, about a year after its discovery.
Levy, who has discovered a total of 22 comets, is involved with the Jarnac Comet Survey based at the Jarnac Observatory in Vail, Ariz.
For a novice like me, all this heavenly stuff was a bit overwhelming, at once so distant, and yet so intimate, in the chill and deep darkness of this Canadian national park, a World Heritage Site.
So meeting Levy, Montreal-born like me, afforded a kind of comfortable familiarity, which grew stronger as the astronomer turned to his “very Jewish connection” to astronomy through Montreal’s Sha’ar Hashomayim (Gates of Heaven) Synagogue, which his grandfather helped to design.
Levy recalled walking home from the synagogue one Yom Kippur evening and, looking up at the sky, noticing the 10-day-old moon — and realizing that Jewish people all over the world were walking home from synagogues, observing the same 10-day-old moon.
“And then it hit me,” he exclaimed, “that moon has been in that same phase every Yom Kippur … and it is very incredible that people have been watching the same phase of the same moon all these years. … It is part of what drove home the spiritual center to my interest in the sky.”
During stargazing at Palisades Centre, outside the small town of Jasper, the moonless sky was lit up with all sorts of heavenly life, including structural images of the Milky Way, colorful clouds called nebula, where new stars were forming, and star clusters resembling grains of sand.
“Once you’re under skies like that where it’s clear and dark and moonless,” Sky News Magazine columnist Peter McMahon of Canada later told me, “you start to see not only the Milky Way … but you see structure in the Milky Way … like a stretched out octopus.”
Jacob Berkowitz, the author of “The Stardust Revolution,” spoke about the human connection to stardust.
“There is actually stardust, and we are it,” said the Jerusalem-born Berkowitz.
The discovery of the origin of the elements, he said, “turned out to be also the discovery of our own origins, because scientists in the 1950s realized that all these elements — carbon, oxygen, nickel, gold, phosphorous — they all formed inside stars.”
While the best time to see the heavens here is in the deep darkness, Jasper also affords prized opportunities to see the moon in the daytime and the planets at dusk and dawn.
It’s just one of the outdoor experiences available in Jasper, about 195 miles west of Edmonton, which also include hiking, boating, skiing, world-class golf and fishing.
As early as 1915, visitors recognized the special qualities of Jasper when they organized the beginnings of today’s Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge with luxury tents.
The Canadian National Railway took over the fledgling resort in 1921 and launched the Jasper Park Lodge in 1922, with eight log cabins and a golf course.
Today’s lodge also includes the large main building, an outdoor swimming pool, a spa, shops and restaurants, and, of course, rustic guest cabins.
We often saw elk grazing outside our own cabin. Of course, one should keep a safe distance from them, posted warnings noted, because they can be dangerous.
Meanwhile, in the lodge, Levy considered the connection between literature and the night sky that he had described in his doctoral dissertation taken in Israel, a country, he said, “that I love so dearly.”
The astronomer mused about William Shakespeare, one of his “favorite amateur astronomers,” saying: “In a lot of my talks, I … picture William Shakespeare coming back to life … and we all look … fascinated at this ghost of a man sitting there [in the audience].
“And I go over to him, and I ask him, ‘Would you have written Hamlet the same way now … and he says, ‘No, forget it. Don’t ask me these questions. I’m not here to talk about “Hamlet.” I’m here because there’s a bright comet scheduled to come in a few months, and I want to see it and I want to take a picture of it …’”
Levy is “almost convinced” that when the bard was 7 years old, his father pointed to the north sky and said, ‘Look at that red star over there in the northwest. That’s a new star that wasn’t there last week, and everybody is looking at it, and I want my son to look at it as well.’
“I even put that in the thesis,” Levy concluded. “I can’t prove it with … footnotes and endnotes, but it would have been almost impossible that Shakespeare would have missed it back then.”
It’s an interesting possibility, but one thing is certain: From images of the Milky Way to the striking beauty of Jasper National Park, being here provides a priceless opportunity, no matter what your level of astronomy experience, to find your own personal relationship to the night sky.
George Medovoy covers travel at www.PostcardsForYou.com. More information on visiting Jasper can be found at www.jasper.travel, www.fairmont.com/Jasper and www.jasperdarksky.org.