Mary Hrovat is an essayist and a poet with a background in science. She earned a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics at Indiana University in 1988 and has also completed some graduate coursework in astronomy and history of science. Her writing reflects her love of nature and her interest in science and history. You can see more of her work at MaryHrovat.com and in her newsletter Slow Quiet.
by Mary Hrovat Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, by Robert Burnham, Jr., is a classic text. Its third and final volume was published in 1978. Written as a set of guidebooks for amateur astronomers, it’s a product of its time and circumstances. The abundant illustrations are in black-and-white, and the pages may look very plain to anyone…
by Mary Hrovat When I began to photograph the sky every day, the first thing I noticed is how quickly the sky changes. If I want to photograph a particular configuration of clouds, I need to go outside immediately, or stop walking to wherever I was going, and take the picture. Those clouds are probably…
by Mary Hrovat I’m tired of hearing about parades of planets. That term is used by astronomers to describe the presence of more than a few planets above the horizon at one time. Although it’s genuinely unusual to have five or six planets above the horizon at the same time, it’s not always an impressive…
by Mary Hrovat Last year, instead of making New Year’s resolutions, I chose several values to focus on during the year. One of these values was comfort and ease. Well, 2025 was an anxious and uncomfortable year in the U.S., and I’m not sure how much I actually did to make my life more comfortable.…
by Mary Hrovat We sometimes say that someone is living in the past, but it seems to me that the past lives in us. It lives in our houses; it lies all around us. As I write this, I’m sitting on the couch under two blankets crocheted by my grandmother, who was born around the…
by Mary Hrovat Every now and again, I go through my bookshelves to see if there’s anything that I can donate to the Friends of the Library bookstore. I like to think that books are forever, but I live in a small house. Sometimes I find things on the shelves that I not only forgot…
by Mary Hrovat I recently went to see a painting that I love but hadn’t seen for about 40 years, Samia Halaby’s Boston Aquarium. It had been important to me when I was an undergrad at Indiana University in the 1980s, and I’d thought I might never see it again in person. When I learned…
by Mary Hrovat I’ve come to believe that any aspect of nature, large or small, will reward patient, open-ended attention. I’ve been photographing the sky for three years. Here I describe some of the things that I’ve come to appreciate about it. The sky is full of color and light. It’s blue, of course, and…
by Mary Hrovat After my power went out during a recent round of severe storms, I turned on my battery-operated Realistic Weatheradio. I bought this cubical radio at Radio Shack many years ago, and it sits on a bookshelf in the living room, largely ignored until extreme weather happens along. It can be tuned to…
by Mary Hrovat When I was a child, one of my favorite colors in the box of 64 crayons was midnight blue. I thought the deep blue color was beautiful, but I was also drawn to the word midnight. One of my favorite things was to stay up late at night. It seemed to me…
by Mary Hrovat When I was 17, I took an introductory course in physical geology at a community college. I was enchanted by the descriptions of the physical processes that created land forms, and also by the vocabulary: eskers and drumlins, barchan dunes, columnar basalt. I like to know how things form and what they’re…
by Mary Hrovat It sounds like a parlor trick or gimmick, to walk 2,024 miles in 2024—trivial but harmless. It’s not like hiking the Appalachian or Pacific Crest Trail or climbing the highest peak on each continent, or running a marathon. But it is similar to a marathon in that the number involved is an…
by Mary Hrovat When I was growing up, my mother and I would sometimes read or recite poetry to each other. Ours was not a poetic household, and my father would occasionally complain: “If poets have something to say, why don’t they just say it?” But we thought they did say it, albeit indirectly sometimes,…
by Mary Hrovat Mission to Earth: Landsat Views the World, Nicholas M. Short, Paul D. Lowman, Jr., Stanley C. Freden, William A. Finch, Jr. (published 1976) I found this book in a library at Indiana University when I was a student in the mid-1980s. I spent hours fascinated by the beauty of the photographs and…
by Mary Hrovat In the shapeless but often suggestive scatter of stars across a dark night sky, humans have picked out patterns and woven countless tales around them, giving the brighter stars names for their place in these stories. The star names we use today can be fascinating but also baffling—which is not surprising, considering…
by Mary Hrovat When I was a child, my parents saw that I was shy and didn’t make friends easily. It didn’t help that we moved several times when I was very young; I went to four different schools for kindergarten through eighth grade. (I got my high school diploma by home study.) And back…
by Mary Hrovat There are worse places to be a stargazer than south-central Indiana; it’s not cloudy all the time here. I’ve spent many lovely evenings outside looking at stars and planets, and I’ve been able to see a fair number of lunar eclipses, along with the occasional conjunction (when two or more planets appear…
by Mary Hrovat I recently read the wonderfully ambiguous sentence, “The love of stone is often unrequited” in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. It inspired me to write love letters to stones. To the mysterious front-yard stone For a couple of years, when I was a very small child, you…
by Mary Hrovat The other day I was looking up an anthropological discovery I’d seen mentioned online someplace. The discovery seemed a little dodgy upon closer inspection, but in my search I found the Wikipedia page List of places with columnar jointed volcanics. I wasn’t looking for information about volcanic rocks that have undergone columnar…
by Mary Hrovat The other day, one of my grandsons asked me if I’d like to play Mario Kart with him. It goes against my grain to turn down invitations from my grandsons. However, when we’d played Mario Kart a few weeks earlier, I’d been terrible at it. His younger brother, watching from the sidelines,…