The Other Night Sky

Every once and awhile there's a flash in the sky, lasting roughly twenty seconds, and – provided you look into these things – you can accurately predict when the flash is coming. It's thus possible to be there when it happens.
You can point up at the sky for amazed friends, saying watch this – and a light appears, way up above you, beyond even where airplanes fly.

What's passing overhead in this instance is something called the Iridium constellation, an artificial, non-astral pattern made up of 66 telecom satellites (there were supposed to be 77, which would have corresponded with the number of electrons in an atom of iridium).
The whole thing was sold less than a decade ago for a mere $25 million to private investors – after being launched and constructed, in the 1980s, at a price of nearly $6 billion.
The company that initially sponsored the project went bankrupt in 1999 – raising the prospect, like something from the Greek myths as rewritten by Philip K. Dick, or perhaps something out of Arthur C. Clarke as rewritten by Homer, that our sky will someday be full of artificial constellations, their creators having long since disappeared.
Cold, dead objects, they'll encircle the world in silence.

I'm reminded of an experience of my own, nearly ten years ago, hanging out with a friend on an outdoor spiral staircase in Berlin. We were talking about sink holes – how the earth's surface can give way and swallow whole houses, streets, and shopping malls, as if there's nothing solid at all in this life, not even the planet we stand on – when we both looked up to see that the stars were moving. It felt like the world was deliberately robbing us even of that celestial referent, the fixed sphere of known astronomy.
But it was nothing special: we were just looking at satellites, moving wildly out of pace in straight lines against a background of other lights and constellations.
Everything we refer to, moves.

In any case, there's also a new exhibition of photographs by geographer Trevor Paglen, called The Other Night Sky, which opens here in the Bay Area next week. The Other Night Sky "looks to the night sky as a place of covert activity," we read:

[W]orking with data compiled by amateur astronomers and hobbyist “satellite observers,” cross-referenced across many sources of information, [Paglen] tracks and presents what he calls “the other night sky.” Large-scale astro-photographs isolate barely perceptible traces of surveillance vessels amidst familiar star fields, and a digitally animated projection installation covers the globe with 189 currently orbiting satellites.

In other words, Paglen is tracking surveillance satellites – false stars that would otherwise have blent in with astronomy.
It genuinely amazes me to think, though, that 45,000 years ago groups of cognitively modern humans were wandering around Australia and the Middle East and Africa and South Asia, and they were looking up at and navigating themselves by recognizable patterns in the nightly firmament – but, now, we can just install our own stars in the sky.

[Image: The International Space Station, from a series of photos by Dirk Ewers].

We are participating with astronomy – an act of both indescribable beauty and utter revulsion, as if we've designed and constructed the most spectacular cathedral in the world... but it's for a new fun ride at Disneyworld.
We are now partially building ourselves a new night sky – and this surrogate astronomy is being put there so we can make international phone calls.

In any case, I'm also reminded of a line from Richard Kenney's monumental 1993 book of poetry The Invention of the Zero. At one point, Kenney writes: "Imagine, all new constellations!"
But the weird irony of life is that we've done it – and we didn't overthrow the astronomers, or plan a coup in the planetarium of human history, we just launched some telecom satellites and bought a bunch of mobile phones, and now we have it: we have new constellations – what Kenney calls "unfamiliar skies" – flashing through the night at timed intervals.

Meanwhile, I've been tracking these constellations on a little Applet today – but there's a certain sinister side to all of this, too.
Space warfare is the militarization of the earth's high atmosphere, weaponizing low-orbit space. You can thus strike anyplace on the earth's surface within minutes of ordering an attack – including the infamous "rods from god," or non-explosive tungsten rods dropped from extremely high altitude.

These rods, which could be dropped on a target with as little as 15 minutes notice, would enter the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 36,000 feet per second – about as fast as a meteor. Upon impact, the rod would be capable of producing all the effects of an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon, without any of the radioactive fallout. This type of weapon relies on kinetic energy, rather than high-explosives, to generate destructive force.

All these coordinated astronomical stand-ins – patterned groups of satellites moving around the world, a kind of remote puppetry of the sky – might also someday serve as malign horoscopes of impending war.
To what zodiac would such military constellations correspond – and what defensive measures might a person take when a strange metallic glint appears in the evening sky, a 20-second flash on the horizon?

[Image: The Perseus Cluster, photographed by Jean-Charles Cuillandre & Giovanni Anselmi].

And what would we do if we found out that Orion, say, or the Southern Cross, was not a natural constellation at all, but something placed there, installed above us, in our imaginations, in our myths?

(Trevor Paglen's The Other Night Sky, from which this post's title was taken, opens June 1 at the Berkeley Art Museum).