Chapter Eighty-Nine: The Starry Sky

Spring always seemed so brief—one moment you heard her footsteps drawing near, and the next, you had already turned to find only her departing back.

Summer was approaching, and the weather at this time of year was perfect for basketball. Dry, warm, never stifling: if it got hot, you simply took off your coat; if it still got hotter, even the short sleeves came off, and you played bare-chested.

Lin Nan often went to the court in the morning light between first-period self-study sessions, or in the sunset after school, to play a little and loosen up.

Whenever he did, the court where he played would be ringed with people, all of them coming to catch a glimpse of the MVP of the first national high school basketball league championship.

Overall, that league had been run quite well. Its reach and number of participants had spread across almost the whole of China, and public enthusiasm had been fully ignited.

However, events after the season, such as the All-Star Game and the dunk contest, were still far from perfected.

But for young high school players, if they wanted to go farther on the road of basketball, what they needed more was accumulation, not all kinds of showy attention.

They were still minors, and they had not yet reached the peak of their basketball abilities.

Yet none of that had much to do with Lin Nan.

Many people had tried to persuade him, including his school teammates, joint letters from his fan group, famous coaches, and scouts.

But basketball was destined to be nothing more than Lin Nan’s hobby, not his profession.

These days, Lin Nan’s life was simple: listen carefully in class, read with Si Dong during breaks or self-study, and play basketball during gym class or whenever he had free time.

Books are the ladder of human progress.

Lin Nan still had no real idea what his next goal should be, but he believed that reading more would always bring him inspiration.

Then, one evening during self-study, as usual, Lin Nan accepted a piece of extracurricular reading passed to him by the student behind him.

It was a magazine again.

Unlike the business magazine that had once given him enormous inspiration, this time it was an arts magazine.

The entire issue was filled with airy, gentle prose paired with airy, gentle images, giving off a relaxed and pleasant feeling.

And when Lin Nan turned to a page featuring a column themed around the stars, the words struck a chord in his heart at once.

“Do you still remember the brilliant starry sky you once saw that year? With the rapid development of modern society, cities have risen in dense clusters and blaze with light, darkness has been driven utterly away from us, but so too has the multicolored sky of stars.”

“When we were children, every night when we looked up, the heavens were filled with stars, all twinkling endlessly, too many to count.”

“Now, living in the city, the once-vast starry sky has become faint and distant; when the weather is poor or the air is heavily polluted, it is even rarer still.”

“Where can one see the brilliant sky of old?”

Those lines hit Lin Nan straight in the chest. He clearly remembered that in his childhood nights, the sky truly had been crowded with stars.

And now...

Lin Nan glanced out through the window at the night sky. Because of the view, he could only make out five or six dim points of light.

He turned the page and kept reading.

On the next page, there were no longer any straightforward lines of text like before, but rather a few photographs and several short captions.

Every picture showed a haloed starry sky, and some even had a silver-white band stretching across them.

Just from the images, Lin Nan could imagine the beauty of the sky in those photographs, though he had no idea where they had been taken.

Soon, he found the answer in the small print.

It listed the four best stargazing spots in the country:

No. 1: Aba, Sichuan Province.

No. 2: Anji, Zhejiang Province.

No. 3: Zhangye, Gansu Province.

No. 4: Mohe, Heilongjiang Province.

At a glance, Lin Nan saw that he had never been to any of those places, and they all seemed far from Lingnan City. He could not help frowning.

Then he looked at another line of small text:

The four best stargazing spots overseas:

No. 1: Flagstaff, United States.

No. 2: NamibRand Nature Reserve, Namibia.

No. 3: Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, New Zealand.

No. 4: Galloway Forest Park, United Kingdom.

Lin Nan’s brow furrowed even more. He had never even been abroad.

Still, whether at home or overseas, he wanted very much to see these places.

Because Lin Nan suddenly realized that he seemed never to have seen the Milky Way with his own eyes.

Looking at the night sky outside the window, with only a few faint stars scattered across the black canopy, pitifully dim and half-dead-looking, he found it almost impossible to look at them compared with the magazine’s photographs.

Of course, Lin Nan also knew that the environment in Qingshui County was actually not bad, and on ordinary nights there were usually plenty of stars to see. Perhaps it was just tonight’s weather.

But right now he felt an almost unbearable desire to see what the Milky Way looked like. That kind of yearning gnawed at him.

He could not stop himself from longing for the stars.

Thinking of this, Lin Nan directly took his phone out of the desk drawer. Anyway, his homeroom teacher, Yu Xianglin, seated on the platform, would not bother him.

Yu Xianglin had always been especially lax with Lin Nan, and once, during a self-study period, he had quietly walked up behind him and seen him actually using his phone to search for physics problems.

Ever since then, Yu Xianglin had completely stopped paying attention to Lin Nan. He knew this national champion was different from the others. He would not spend all day on his phone chatting or playing games. He had his own thoughts and goals.

After unlocking the screen, Lin Nan naturally opened the MentorNet app and was just about to search the categories for anything related to stars or astronomy, to see whether there was a teacher in that field.

But then he remembered that he was still a complete beginner in this area, and MentorNet had requirements for apprenticeship.

Still, Lin Nan found the starry sky section and clicked into it. What appeared before him was a mentor account called “Flying Sky.”

Lin Nan knew that, generally speaking, each category would have apprenticeship conditions, and there would also be training methods to meet those conditions.

But the starry sky section had none of that.

Lin Nan guessed it was probably because the field was rather niche and the staff at MentorNet had not gotten around to refining it yet.

So Lin Nan clicked on Flying Sky’s avatar, and the user profile displayed: “If you are interested in the starry sky, please join the Lingnan Stargazing Group on QQ. Group number: ...”

Lin Nan laughed immediately. He was lucky indeed—this Flying Sky was actually from Lingnan, the same city as him.

He quickly closed MentorNet, opened QQ, and, after the glance he had just taken, he had already memorized the sequence of numbers.

He entered the group-add screen directly, typed it in, and soon saw the group “Lingnan Stargazing Group.”

He clicked to apply for membership.

At once, a question popped up: “Why do you want to join this group?”

After thinking for a moment, Lin Nan typed: “I want to see the brilliant starry sky and the Milky Way.”

Not long after, his QQ received a message saying he had successfully joined the group.

The moment Lin Nan entered, all kinds of images appeared at once: “Welcome, new member!” and many others.

Dozens of image messages flashing by made Lin Nan feel the group’s warm and lively atmosphere.

After the pictures stopped, another message popped up:

“Please change your group nickname, preferably to something related to the stars.”

The message came from Flying Sky.

Lin Nan also noticed that Flying Sky was the group administrator.

Thinking for a moment, Lin Nan smiled and changed his nickname to: “M78.”

At that point, the people in the group no longer paid attention to Lin Nan, the newcomer. It was a large group with several hundred members.

Lin Nan quietly watched them chat:

“Uncle Xiang, where are you setting up tonight?”

Lin Nan immediately caught two key words: “Uncle Xiang” and “setting up.”

The former was probably Flying Sky, and from the way they addressed him, he must be some sort of expert.

As for “setting up,” Lin Nan still did not know what it meant.

He kept reading.

“I’m heading to Green Orchid Mountain. I’m packing up now and will be driving out soon. Want to come along?” Flying Sky replied.

“Got something to do tonight. Maybe next time,” the other person answered at once.

Lin Nan was astonished again. Green Orchid Mountain was in Qingshui County, wasn’t it?

He had even been there once as a child. It was a place for burning incense and worshiping the Buddha, where most people went to pray for peace.

But there also seemed to be a Green Orchid Mountain School of Martial Arts and Literature up there, and he had heard you could learn martial techniques there.

Then Lin Nan suddenly remembered that there was still an iron sword at home. It was rather heavy when picked up, something he had bought with his parents when they went up there as a child, and he no longer knew where it had been put.

But one question immediately arose in his mind: could you see the starry sky on Green Orchid Mountain?

The clever Lin Nan quickly figured it out. This was an astronomy and stargazing group, and “setting up” must mean going out to see the stars.

Thinking of this, Lin Nan typed into the group: “Can you see the Milky Way from Green Orchid Mountain?”

Soon, Uncle Xiang replied beneath it:

“If you’re lucky, and the weather is good, you can see it with the naked eye, though not very clearly. But with an astronomical telescope, you can usually see it, and much more clearly.”

Seeing Lin Nan’s group nickname, “M78,” Uncle Xiang knew at once that he was a newcomer who had just joined, and he was probably not very old. M78, haha.

So he answered Lin Nan’s question patiently.

After that, Uncle Xiang also posted a photo below.

It showed the tools for “setting up”: an astronomical telescope, a camera, and something that looked like a microscope.

Lin Nan continued asking: “What is that thing that looks like a microscope?”

As soon as he sent it, someone replied: “That’s an equatorial mount. If you want to play with astronomy, three things are indispensable: the main telescope for astrophotography, the equatorial mount, and the camera.”

Lin Nan immediately asked curiously: “What does an equatorial mount do?”

He could understand the main telescope and the camera, but why was an equatorial mount needed? What did astrophotography have to do with the equator?

Uncle Xiang answered below:

“An equatorial mount was designed to improve on the shortcomings of altazimuth mounts. Its main purpose is to overcome the effect of Earth’s rotation on stargazing.

“When using it, you first align its polar axis with the North Celestial Pole. Once it is perfectly aligned, when the telescope points at any star, you no longer need to adjust declination. You only need to have the telescope rotate uniformly in right ascension, or hour angle, at the star’s movement speed, and the star will remain within the telescope’s field of view.

“It’s like filming a movie: the character is moving, and the camera moves along with them. Only here, the character is a star.”

Uncle Xiang’s detailed explanation made everything very clear to Lin Nan.

He had learned in physics that stars were in motion, but he had never imagined that photographing the heavens required moving along with the angle of the stars.

Astronomy, with all its mysteries, instantly aroused Lin Nan’s strong interest.

But looking at the time, evening self-study was about to end. After politely saying goodbye to everyone in the group, Lin Nan put his phone away and prepared to return to the dormitory after school.

What Lin Nan did not know was that, on the QQ account of the friend sitting beside him, there happened to be someone named Flying Sky.