Ursa Major - The sparkle in the sky
On the trail of the Big Dipper
- Bentley
The future is written in the stars
In the Bentley Continental GTC V8 on the trail of the Big Car. A long drive through the night one short day. There it is. The first star of the dawning night. It's actually a planet. Venus. Illuminated by the sun, which is now leisurely moving behind the horizon. Its last fading rays dissolve a few lonely clouds sailing along. One by one, they disappear. Until the darkening sky is as clean as a sheet. The last lights of the few houses and huts around us also go out. We switch on the headlights of the Continental GTC and glide through the alpine landscape to almost the highest point of the plateau.
In the meantime, it's dark. But not dark. Because the shining moon joins all the flashing stars that condense here and there until the stream of stars of the Milky Way is visible. It bathes the white continent in a mild white light and begins its journey across the night sky. Here, in the star park on the Winklmoosalm, near Reit im Winkl, at an altitude of almost 1,200 metres, the sky appears particularly wide in the crystal-clear air, surrounded by the sharp silhouettes of the forests and mountains.
Convertible driving is usually, at least in Central Europe, in the light of day, the sun and, not least, a warm season. England provides proof to the contrary. On the island from which our companion on a journey through the world of stars comes, there is no season for open-top driving. It's always open. Even at night. Thanks to sophisticated heating and ventilation, it is extremely comfortable, enveloped in warmth, meticulously shielded from cool or icy wind currents. Seen in this light, you are travelling on a starry night under thousands of hours of sunshine.
Because as Manuel Philipp, our guide through the world of celestial bodies, puts it in a nutshell: "The sun is a star. And every star is a sun. Six thousand of them are visible to our perception. There are 400 billion in our galaxy alone. In which the solar system, in which the Earth revolves around its own axis around the central star, is barely larger than a piece of confetti and our planet is a comparatively microscopic speck of dust. According to current astronomical knowledge, there are two trillion galaxies. Astronomical numbers that are almost impossible to grasp. Which is why stargazing concentrates on what is close or nearer. That the moon, which is closest to the earth, is 400,000 kilometres away from us. That our solar system with all the planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune - is a disc (which sheds new light on the traditional world view that the Earth is a disc). That, while we follow the explanations in amazement using models of the sun and galaxy and a laser pointer, we are standing in one place but are actually moving. Or rather, we are being moved. Permanently. With the Earth's rotation, at a speed of 1,200 km/h or even over 100,000 km/h on our way around the sun.
