I began to study stars and their classifications and magnitudes. Blue Giants like Sirius, the Dog Star, which I learned that the Dogon of Mali regard as a god, and Red Supergiants like Antares in Scorpio, or Betelgeuse in Orion. The latter I knew had become so bloated that it was approaching the end of its life, having fused its lighter elements into heavier metals no longer able to be metabolized. Due to its distance from earth it could have, even as it winked above me, already succumbed to the most glorious death:  Supernova. After a cataclysmic explosion, it would shrink 278 million times its size into a tiny ultra-dense, swiftly-spinning body.  Its light, I was told, would outshine the moon. Thinking on this, I'd close my eyes and hope when I opened them that the empty yard where I stood would itself be transformed and bathing in white stellar light—the residual radiation of the ultimate swansong.

 

 

Only the most powerful deep-space telescopes have allowed the earthbound to see such a hole punched into the celestial fabric. No one has gazed at a supernova with the naked eye for nearly a thousand years. It last happened in 1054 when a star in the constellation of Taurus exploded, its brightness rivaling the moon and defying the day. Chinese, Arab, and Native Americans astronomers recorded what they called a "guest star" in texts and petroglyphs. This Supernova created the Crab Nebula, a luminous web of gas and dust surrounding an x-ray spitting pulsar, a stellar body composed solely of neutrons left behind like a bullet casing.