After reading the chapter on night, I found the quote by Diane Ackerman very interesting. In the chapter she says, ” What we call “night” is the time we spend facing the secret reaches of space, where other solar systems and, perhaps, other planetarians dwell. Don’t think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far flung galaxies. We are no longer sun-blind to the star-coated universe we inhabit…” What I got from this quote is that night isn’t something that should be portrayed as negative, but instead as a time of discovery. During the day we cannot see past the blue sky that is illuminated by our sun, but when the sun goes down and night emerges, we get to glimpse into the infinite expanse of space without the overbearing light of the sun to hold our vision back. In places that are far from any sources of light pollution at night, you can see the hundreds of stars that are speckled across the sky.
I LOVED this quote as well. I got same thing you did from this and it was very interesting because I definitely never thought of night in this way. While the daytime brightens up life for most of the hours of the day, night comes in and blocks everything on earth. However, when looking up into the sky and beyond just earth, day and night do the exact opposite. The sun blinds people from seeing beyond our planet, while night opens up endless space and galaxies encouraging us to discover and explore new areas and creatures. It’s, like you said, “a time of discovery.”