Urban travelers seek pastoral peace

Universal appeal

Due to the weather conditions, we barely saw any stars, not even the lightning that sometimes served as a substitute to the camp visitors.

The sky eventually showed mercy, though. During a brief respite between two rain showers, the wind parted a corner of the clouds to unveil three stars from the Big Dipper, with Altair on the other side.

A beam of light pointing toward the stars, emitted from camp owner Fu Caifeng's laser pointer, drew me closer to them. Fu says that, in the past, the Big Dipper and North Star were particularly important for navigating night travel across the expansive grassland.

Listening to Fu explain how she guided visitors to appreciate the starry sky on clear nights in her Ancient Greek-style theater, I couldn't help but imagine the spectacle those stars hidden behind the clouds would have exhibited had the weather been better.

An astronomy and camping enthusiast, Fu accidentally discovered this heavenly stargazing location. Over the past six years, she gradually built The Galaxy Plan camp, which offers astronomy observations, stargazing and relevant study tours. She also livestreams celestial phenomena such as meteor showers on social media platforms.

She compares accumulating knowledge about the stars and the experience of stargazing to the grassland herders who can distinguish each of their animals even though they appear the same to others.

In the rain, I joined Fu and Liu Wei, a 41-year-old teacher from Ganzhou, Jiangxi province, who traveled with her family to view the stars far from city lights, yet failed, like me.

What stars are visible in the summer sky? When is the best time for stargazing? Will moonlight affect stargazing? Why are we able to see the Milky Way even though we're part of it? The topics transitioned seamlessly from one to another.

Fu explains that each planet in the solar system has its own fate. Uranus spins on its side. On Venus, the sun rises in the west, and a day is longer than a year. To our knowledge, only Earth teems with life. Small changes in its distance from the sun can result in us being either scorched dry or unable to sustain water, as it would freeze.