I hiked out with a bunch of friends to Inspiration Point on Saturday night. It’s a bluff above the mission that looks out over the entire city. It’s about three miles uphill. We took it pretty fast and when we got to the top some of us were a bit winded, others wheezing, but the skyline had opened up, and all of us were happy to collapse on the ground and enjoy the view.

The city lights stretch for miles and as you look out they never quite end. At the coastline, sailboats and oil platforms take up the shining torch, stretching out toward the horizon where they meet the sky, and turn the entire world into one giant field of stars.

It’s the kind of sight that releases the pins from your brain - lets it float about. It can make you think about a lot of things; about humankind’s great technical achievement or the threat to the environment, cliché phrases from Steinbeck novels or even the size of the world, which seems to stretch out boundlessly.

Or you can think about the stars - which is what I did. They were everywhere burning and pressing themselves into my eyes and my mind. At times like these I always struggle to hold onto what I know. Some of the stars were city lights. There’s State Street and there’s the harbor. That’s Storke Tower over there.

Then, looking up there were the constellations. The big one there is Orion who was killed by the Scorpion, which is still under the horizon. Orion has a sword, but the second star on the scabbard isn’t a star - it’s a nebula. His foot is Rigel, which is a blue supergiant star 40,000 times brighter than the sun. His shoulder is Betelgeuse, a red giant star around 50,000 times brighter than the sun. It’s due to go supernova any time. Maybe a million years from now, maybe right this second. My friend points out that if we see it tonight, it actually happened around 430 years ago. Not bad.

Betelgeuse and Rigel are perversions of Arabic names meaning “shoulder” and “foot.” For them the constellation represented another sacred figure, “The Central One.”

Looking on, there’s Perseus who killed the Gorgon and Andromeda, his girlfriend. There’s Cassiopeia and Cepheus, her parents. There are the Pleiades.

“What’s that one?” my friend asks, pointing to a collection of stars so bright and well organized that they must be a constellation. Greek philosophers were good at connect-the-dots.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

And I’m stumped. All I can do is stare in silence at the sky. I’ve reached the edge of what I know, like a swimmer who’s hit his limit and now the tide of stars washes over me.

It’s a scary feeling, a good feeling. It’s why they call it Inspiration Point and it’s why I go there at midnight on slow weekends. It reminds me of how much I don’t know - of how much no one knows. The night sky has been a wellspring of reverence and faith for every civilization that ever left a footprint on the earth. We’re just the latest in a long line.

The stars make us feel small. So we box them in with rooftops and choke them out with streetlights. We like to forget.

But God it feels good to remember.

Josh Braun is the Daily Nexus science and technology editor. He just learned the constellation Taurus.