Tonight, take a few minutes, pull back from the computer, find a window or a balcony and gaze upwards. The mistress of the hunt, Artemis or Diana will be hosting a visit from her father, Zeus or Dias or Jupiter. Here they are about to set, though I know night has not yet fallen for most of you. I see another bright planet a hand’s breadth behind them and I believe it to be Saturn or Kronos (old man Time).
I envy those of you who will have clear sky and I am sorry for all of you who live under perpetual smog. A year and a half ago when a friend of mine and I stayed up all night we caught the pre-dawn show of the century. All five of the classical planets were visible, including elusive Mercury and rare Saturn.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, sprinkled like jewels on the warm indigo of the pre-dawn sky. I don’t think I’d ever seen Mercury before and Saturn only once or twice and never with another planet. Our brother and sister and father planets, all at once. The fact that I knew the surface gravity and temperature of each, as well as their atmospheric composition and system history detracted not at all from the awe that I felt that morning.
more…
My father was introduced to the idea of raw romance (as opposed to silly candlelit dinners) by his mother who had been a nurse during the Balkan Wars. She had taken my then young and small father to the main train station and pointed at two signs. The one said “Orient Express, points East: Salonica, Constantinople, Aleppo, Jerusalem. The other said simply “Twelve horses or fifty men”. “Both are romantic,” she said. A few years later he was the only volunteer in his call-up.
Tonight, please look at the sky and you can think big
or
at least see where so many Islamic flags come from.
Does it detract from a rainbow that you know what it is?
Crossposted at dKos, soon.
I was totally stunned by the big night sky… no clouds, no ambient light… I stood for about an hour every night just watching the sky… It was pitch black and you could barely see your hand in front of your face… You could follow the Milky Way from horizon to horizon… I could actually make out subtly different colors to some stars… I saw the Southern Cross for the first time… I counted enough shooting stars every night to make all my dreams come true for a lifetime…
I really miss that.
but I remember the night sky in the desert of Morocco when I was a kid. It was almost like being in space.
Here too, sometimes in the summer on a really clear night it gets like that and you understand why they call it the Milky Way.
we took our honemoon in Tahiti, Moorea, nad Bora-Bora, leaving Los Angeles on New Year’s Day, 1986. We wen to Bora-Bora first. I remember being how stunned it was to see a night sky with absolutely no ambient light leaking from nearby buildings — I ahd not experienced that since I had been in child summering not far from Traverse City MI and going camping on the shores of Lake Michigan. The sky was disorienting, because we were in the Southern Hemishpere, so the usual points of reference were not there. And oh was it miagnificent, incluidng the Southern Cross.
Smog and lights are a bad combination for viewing the night skies, sadly. I’d love to see this show, maybe I’ll be able to find a dark section, or just imagine them anyway.
Beautifully written, as usual… you make them sound like loved friends and family, with a celebrity or two thrown in.
The weather has been sucking for a week or two now, and the forecast for the next days is not great either. Too bad.
Saturn is actually setting before Jupiter (and the Moon today). If Jupiter and the Moon are about to set, then Saturn’s already been below the horizon for a few hours already.
I don’t see any other planet “a hand’s breadth behind them” (about 20 degrees?), nor any bright star for that matter; except maybe Spica in Virgo, about 15 degrees behind Jupiter?
Anyway, thank you for the nice post and the reminder.
…
Still overcast, meh. Clouds also are beautiful and they wouldn’t be clouds if they didn’t block visible light, would they?…
possibly Arcturus? It was so bright and unblinking that I figured it for a planet. I’ll check tonight.
Hope the skies clear for you.
I think there’s even more of a mystery when you begin to only grasp the concept of the things in space – and mystery does make things more beautiful – at least for me. If you don’t know the things that we know about say, Venus, it indicates that you do not want to know about it. Solving one mystery can open many other doors – and it is striving to solve new problems that give these things beauty, and mystery. Looking at the sky at night makes me feel very small, and I think our understanding of things, on this scale is in its infancy.
Jupiter is beautiful near the Moon during the last couple of days. You can see 4 of Jupiters moons using regular binoculars – that really gives me a sense of wonder to see them.
It probably was not Saturn you saw though because that sets well before Jupiter this month. Saturn is in the constellation Gemini, Jupiter is in Virgo.
The star you thought was Saturn was probably Spica (a bright bluish star) if it was near the Ecliptic (path the sun takes) or Arcturus (looks yellow/orange). You can follow the handle of the Big Dipper and it points to Arcturus (“arc to Arcturus”) then drop toward the horizon from Arcturus to Spica (“spike to Spica”) to determine which one it was. Those are the brightest stars near Jupiter right now.
This is a nice interactive chart at Sky and Telescope (you need Java).
I think it must have been. Thanks for the link.
what are you doing using Roman names for the planets?
Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares… please.
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Living as a teener in Créve Coeur, I was able to spend most hours in the outdoors and countryside on a nursery where my dad worked. Loved the skies at night. During the day, did a lot of speculating in nature and surroundings. One day came across an odd rock, but heavier than stone: its mass was greater. Extraordinary, so as a teener you take it home and display it proudly in your own room, bedside on a cabinet.
During the day, I took it outside and practised with it as a shot put, just barely could hold it in my hand. At night, kept it close by, and used it as paper weight when a breeze would develop and blew away the heat of the day.
Soon got into trouble with my parents, for keeping that chunk of rusty iron in my room, they didn’t think much of the idea to keep it inside the house. Many years I heard their complaint, but as I went off to college I donated my rock to my younger sister. She kept it for a while, but ultimately succumbed to the complaints and dumped the old rock in the outdoors.
At college, on the aside I studied the beginnings of geology: minerals and rock formations. The first book I bought had a nice photo of my old rock — very definite a meteorite, billions of years old.
It’s still out there somewhere. The old nursery has been landscaped into a beautiful subdivision with homes. So, either the meteorite is safe 10 feet under, or …
what I hope for, it’s sitting on a bedside cabinet of an 8 yr old, who proudly dreams of the stars and planets at night. What do you think?
Oui – Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité
I too hope it was picked up by a kid.
Most meteorites originate from the asteroid belt and are about as old as the Solar System itself. To hold a leftover building block from very beginning…ahh! You were lucky.
Years ago, when I told one of my liberal artsy friends that I was going to go to graduate school to study embryology, he said, “But then you’ll lose the mystery, the magic . . .”
I have never understood this attitude.
I used to sit in the lab looking through the microscope at a tiny chick embryo. The heart begins as a tube, that folds and begins to beat. The blood cells though, develop some distance away from the heart along the edges of the embryo. The cells that will make the blood vessels are scattered throughout the embryonic disc, coming together in twos and threes, gradually forming tubes, and then the tubes begin to grow together.
If you watch long enough, at just the right stage, you can see the moment when enough of the tubes have connected so that the blood cells start moving towards the heart. Within a few minutes, the transparent beating heart has become red as the blood pulses into and out of it.
Lose the mystery, the magic? Never.
Knowledge of the nature of Venus, however incomplete, colors my view and makes it more beautiful, not less. Unfortunately, this was not an option in the poll. Certainly, knowledge does not leave Venus unchanged.
When I was very young and camping with my parents, we spent a night in sleeping bags, far from human lights, at an altitude of seven thousand feet. The sky was completely cloudless. The view, to say the least, was astonishing. At one point my visual interpretation became three-dimensional. The brightest stars were the closest ones and I was on the edge of the galactic lens looking inward toward the center. An illusion, of course, but a most beautiful illusion.
Honestly it did not occur to me that the beautiful speck of light in the twilight could be enhanced by knowing that its surface temperature is hotter than your oven on self-clean and that its atmospheric pressure of 100 x sea level is a noxious mixture of poisonous and corrosive gasses. My apologies.
I consider Venus to be the most useless piece of real estate in the solar system, useful only for giving probes a gravity boost and humans a warning about runway greenhouse effects.
Oh, and being fabulous in the pre-dawn sky.