Keep Looking Up

Size Matters.

Author: July 15, 2022 2 Comments

Asteroid 7335 (1989 JA), which made its closest pass by the Earth on May 27, 2022, has been described as being “the size of 350 giraffes”.

 

Asteroid 2017 VL2 which came within 70,000 miles of Earth on November 9, 2017, has been described as being “the size of a whale”.

 

Asteroid 2022 EB5 which landed in the North Atlantic between Norway and Iceland on March 14, 2022, has been described being “half the size of a giraffe”. And also “the size of a grand piano”.

 

Asteroid 2021 GT2, which, at its closest, was 2.2 million miles from Earth, has been described as being “the size of three blue whales”.

 

Asteroid 2022 KP3 passed by Earth at a distance of a little over eight hundred thousand miles the week of June 1st and was described as “the size of an average male giraffe”.

 

Asteroid 2022 NF, which passed just 56,000 miles from the Earth on July 7th was described as being “the size of a bus”.

 

Asteroid 2019 NW5, which will make its closest pass of around 3.5 million miles on July 18, 2022, has been described as “bigger than the Statue of Liberty”. And also “airliner-sized”. And “bus-sized”.

 

Asteroid 418135 (2008 AG33) at its closest was about two million miles form Earth on April 28th, 2022 was described as “the size of two Empire State Buildings”.

 

Asteroid 7335 (1989 JA) which passed the Earth at a distance of about four million miles on May 27, 2022 was described as being “the size of a small island”.

 

Asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) which passed by Earth at a little less than two million miles on January, 18, 2022, was described as being “four times the size of the Eiffel Tower”.

 

Asteroid 2020 QG which came within just 1,830 miles of Earth on August 16, 2022, was described as “car-sized”.

 

Asteroid 2007 UY1 which passed Earth at around 3.3 million miles on February 8, 2022, was described as being “the size of the London Eye” and also “football-field sized”.

 

Asteroid 469219 (2016 HO3), also known as Kamoʻoalewa, discovered in 2016 at the University of Hawaii, remains at least 9.1 million miles from Earth as it orbits the Sun and has been described as “comparable in size to the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy or the Cinderella Castle in Disney World”.

 

The asteroid that hit the Earth, creating the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatán Peninsula, and wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago, has been described as “mountain-sized” and also “the size of San Francisco”.

And finally…

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”–Douglas Adams

 

Keep Looking Up, The Weekly Essay

Line ‘Em Up.

Author: June 27, 2022 8 Comments

Source: Secrets Of The Universe

Unfortunately I slept through the great planetary alignment of 2022, or maybe fortunately because missing sleep can really throw me off, and also we live in a neighborhood with a lot of trees so I miss some opportunities to witness celestial events unless they happen in the winter, unless they’re due east in which case my view is blocked by woods, or if they’re almost directly overhead, or if I get up and drive somewhere with a low horizon and low light pollution, which is getting harder with each passing year.

Of course I do have a couple of astronomy apps on my iPad that allow me to see what’s in the sky regardless of what’s in the way which is why sometimes I’ll stand in the den and point it straight up at the ceiling and when my wife asks what I’m doing I can say, “Looking at Uranus,” but that’s another story.

In other words circumstances would have to line up in just the right way for me to see the great planetary alignment, but I’m okay with that. I remember when I was in second grade and there was supposed to be a solar eclipse that, while not total, would still be partly visible over Nashville. Of course it was cloudy that day. I’ve witnessed other eclipses since then, including the total one of 2017.

I’ve seen multiple lunar eclipses, most because I specifically planned my schedule around being somewhere where I could see them, and I’ve even gotten up in the middle of the night just to watch some.

One year my wife and I got up in the middle of the night and drove out to a farm where we watched the Perseid meteor shower which was supposed to be spectacular that year, and, lucky for us, it was. I’ve also seen meteors I wasn’t looking for; my eyes just happened to be in the right direction at the right time.

And then, Sunday afternoon, I fell asleep in front of the TV, because I hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before in spite of not getting up to see the great planetary alignment, with the Science Channel on, and I woke up just in time to hear an astronomer say, “Astronomy is a very serendipitous science!”

We can predict the movements of the planets—the next big one will happen September 8, 2040, but sometimes the best events are the ones that can’t be predicted.

Adventures In Busing., Keep Looking Up

Ring Around The Moon.

Author: January 21, 2022 5 Comments

There was a ring around the moon.

We’d had snow then rain then more snow and periods of bitter cold and periods of cold that wasn’t bitter but wasn’t exactly sweet either, and I was really starting to hate going outside for anything, especially at night, especially on clear nights when the empty sky is cold, dark, and hungry, and just stepping outside meant pulling on heavy boots to avoid the risk of slipping on the frozen patio, or even on the frozen mud out in the yard. It wasn’t really a time for looking up, although when we had snow it did offer a nice view, especially at night when it was a luminous blue, like a seascape seen from a submarine.

I remember when I first learned about lunar rings. It was eighth grade and there was a whole chapter in my school science book about clouds and other meteorological phenomena. It also had a whole chapter entitled, “Will We Ever Reach The Moon?” which just reminded my friends and I how badly funded science education was, but that’s another story.

There was a picture of a three-quarter moon, like an opal, with a ring around it, and an explanation that sometimes ice crystals high up in the atmosphere would cause the moon to shine like a gem. Somehow I’d never seen this, although it must have happened—and in fact that very winter I’d see my first lunar ring, and understood why I might never have noticed one before. Unlike the one pictured in my science book the one I saw was enormous, stretched out almost to the horizon. It was unusual, but I suppose I never noticed rings around the moon before because, as much as I liked to look at the night sky, I must have been focused on the moon itself. Other times I’d see rings that were indistinct. Like the Pleiades on certain nights some lunar rings couldn’t be observed directly; they were elusive and couldn’t be seen if I looked directly at the moon. They only existed at the edge of my vision when I looked somewhere else.

According to folklore a ring around the moon means bad weather is coming: rain or snow, which makes sense. Since a ring around the moon is caused by ice crystals, or, more specifically, flossy clouds, it’s a sign of moisture in the atmosphere. I can’t understand why something so amazingly beautiful would be considered a sign of bad luck. I was glad to be outside to see it.

Keep Looking Up, The Weekly Essay

Light Up The Sky.

Author: November 6, 2021 7 Comments

Aurora borealis seen from space. Source: NASA

I have friends in the Pacific Northwest who’ve been making me jealous with their pictures of the recent aurora borealis, apparently generated by a large solar storm that may or may not have affected power grids and other communications. My wifi has gone out a couple of times but that’s pretty typical—in fact a couple of weeks go it went down right in the middle of a conversation with my boss and when it came back we talked about how wifi tends to go out when it’s too sunny. Or too cloudy. Or dark. Or if it’s too hot. Or too cold. Or if temperatures are too average.

There have been a few times when the aurora borealis has been intense enough that it’s been visible from Nashville. I’ve never seen it at those times–mainly it seems to have only been spotted from places like the Dyer Observatory, but one of these days I hope to see it in person. Or the aurora australis which would be equally cool–maybe even cooler since Antarctic temperatures dip even lower. Until then, though, I’ll have to make do with pictures.

And they always made me think about our little planet’s place in the solar system, and the greater galaxy and the universe beyond, something I also think about on cool nights when the stars shine with a crystalline brightness. Auroras are a phenomenon we know isn’t unique to Earth, although we have to go all the way out to the gas giants to find others. Yes, there may even be auroras at either end of Uranus, but that’s another story.

At this time of year I also usually reread Wallace Steven’s poem The Auroras Of Autumn, which makes me feel connected not just to the galaxy beyond but to this little world we stand on too.

American Graffiti., Keep Looking Up

Lord Of The Rings.

Author: October 15, 2021 4 Comments

Source: SkyView app

The Moon and Jupiter are very prominent in the southern sky right now in the early evening, but my eye is also drawn to a less luminous object between them. It’s Saturn, which, back in the days when astronomers thought the heavens were composed of crystal spheres, must have been the weirdest of all the wanderers, being the slowest—it takes nearly three times as long to orbit the Sun as Jupiter, although in those days astronomers also believed everything revolved around the Earth. Saturn was also, for most of human history, the edge of the solar system. Things got even weirder when Galileo turned his telescope to it. He’d already discovered that Jupiter had four moons of its own—and those would be followed by dozens more—and Saturn at first looked to him like a planet with two very large moons, but he couldn’t figure out why they sometimes disappeared. Once they were recognized as rings, and that those rings are held in place by the influence of some of Saturn’s moons, it made sense. We see Saturn at an angle and the rings are so thin that when they’re flat from our perspective they’re practically invisible.

Maybe it was because of its distance that Saturn got its name. The other planets were all named after Olympian gods, but Saturn, mythologically speaking, was the father of the Olympians, the one who swallowed all of his children except Jupiter, and who was defeated, sent down to a second-tier position but kept some of his original glory, becoming the scythe-wielding god of the harvest and time, and through the Dark Ages and Renaissance people who were born under Saturn were believed to be moody and cynical, but also ambitious—most artists were believed to be influenced by Saturn’s position at their birth.

I’m a skeptic when it comes to astrology, mostly, but I do think it’s possible planetary movements have some influence over our lives, and who we become as we move through time. The Earth isn’t a closed sphere; our little planet is affected by the Moon and the Sun, and it’s not unreasonable to think the powerful tug of other planets plays a part too. There’s even the idea that regular meteor impacts on the Earth—the most famous being the one that wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago—could be the result of where our solar system happens to be as it moves around in its outside arm of the Milky Way. If the universe beyond our solar system can affect, even destroy, life on Earth imagine what effects our closest neighbors might have.

And, looking up at Saturn, I remember one fall night when I was a kid and I was talking to a girl who lived across the street. Neither of us knew enough about astronomy to identify anything other than the Moon, and she said, “You know what would be cool? If all the planets were close enough or big enough that we could see them all clearly.”

That would be pretty cool but, with the way gravity works, I’m sure having every planet crammed in so close would have some powerful effects.

Keep Looking Up, The Weekly Essay

Eine Kleine Knowledge.

Author: July 16, 2021 5 Comments

Source: SkyView App

Arcturus was directly overhead, so bright I thought it was a planet, and it didn’t have the twinkle that stars are supposed to have compared to the steady glow of planets since stars generate their own light while planets merely reflect it. Or maybe it was twinkling and I just couldn’t see it without my glasses, although you’d think a twinkle would be pretty obvious, especially since Arcturus is the fourth brightest star in the night sky and fifth overall if you include the sun although you probably shouldn’t because the sun is so bright it’s just not a fair comparison.

Anyway I didn’t automatically recognize Arcturus. I know a few constellations—Ursas Major and Minor, Cassiopeia, Orion, but Arcturus is in the constellation Boötes. Actually it’s in the foot of Boötes and I guess no one’s made a joke about it being in Boötes boot because no one’s really sure how to pronounce Boötes and also no one’s sure who Boötes was. It’s always seemed strange to me that even modern constellations named for figures from Greek mythology don’t get named after A-listers or even B, C, or D-listers. Sure, Aquarius, Castor and Pollux, and, my personal favorite, Sagittarius, get to be part of the Zodiac, but as far as the Olympian crowd is concerned they’re third cousins twice removed who only showed up that one time at their great aunt Gaia’s nephew’s friend’s marriage to Monoceros. If that’s the case Boötes was probably the guy who swept up the amphitheater while everyone else was enjoying a wild wrap party at Aristophanes’s house and someone felt bad for him and thought he deserved a constellation prize. And then there’s Arcturus which is also a proper name and the origin there is just as fuzzy although the star is sometimes also known as Alpha Boo which sounds like something astronomers write in Valentine’s Day cards to each other, but that’s another story.

As I said I didn’t automatically recognize Arcturus and I probably wouldn’t have taken a ride on this runaway train of thought had I not been able to use an app on my phone to identify it—although speaking of fuzzy terminology I’m not sure it’s fair to call something a “phone” anymore when making calls is lowest on the list of things I do with it. And then I used my phone to look up information about Arcturus because, hey, what else was I supposed to do with it, call somebody?

Arcturus is approximately 36.7 light years away, which partly explains why it’s so bright. In celestial terms that’s, while not exactly next door, at least on the same block. I did some calculating and figured that the light from Arcturus that’s now reaching us started on its way in late February, 1984, a little over a month after Apple aired its legendary Superbowl commercial for the Macintosh.

Back then being able to recognize Arcturus, and knowing it was in Boötes, would have been impressive. It would have made someone seem smart if, perhaps sitting under the stars with their Alpha Boo, they’d been able to rattle off those facts. Now it’s information that’s easily accessible, and while I don’t think there’s such a thing as too much information I don’t think it’s making us any smarter. Sometimes I worry it may even be the reverse.

 

Keep Looking Up, Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Look! It’s Uranus!

Author: March 13, 2021 6 Comments

Source: Wikipedia

Exactly 240 years ago today, on March 13, 1781, the astronomer William Herschel peered into his telescope and saw Uranus. That makes this an especially important Uranus Day, a major milestone for the great gas giant, and the first planet to be identified in the modern era. Although ancient astronomers had occasionally seen Uranus—it’s almost sixteen times bigger than Earth, which makes Uranus really impressive—it’s still almost two billion miles away. That’s why Uranus can be really hard to see.

Uranus is a gas giant which is mainly composed of hydrogen but it also has helium, methane, and small amounts of hydrogen sulfide, which is why under the right circumstances Uranus would be highly flammable. It also contains ammonia and other compounds in ice form, so you’d never want to smell Uranus.

Since two billion miles is a long way to travel you can experience Uranus here on Earth by visiting Uranus, Missouri, a small town along historic Route 66, although I think they should rename the stretch that leads up to and through Uranus the Herschel Highway. The town of Uranus is known for its fudge factory and other attractions, including The Axehole, a place where you can work out your frustrations, and the Sideshow Museum, where you can take in some of Uranus’s magic.

Promotional image from the Uranus General Store.

Or if you’re looking for something even closer to home you can stream Journey To The Seventh Planet, a 1962 film about a trip to Uranus, on Amazon Prime, or, if you have a telescope, you can go out and try and find Uranus. It’s currently in the constellation Aries, which I guess means Uranus was born under the sign of the Ram.

Whatever you do, though, don’t overlook Uranus.

Adventures In Busing., Keep Looking Up, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval.

To The Moon.

Author: December 29, 2020 1 Comment

So there have been thirteen full moons in 2020, with the last one appearing tonight, December 29th, and in most years that would be a minor note of interest, but the fact that it’s 2020 casts a pallor over everything. It’s been the year of no cheer, three-hundred and sixty-six days in a haze, eight thousand eighty four hours of glower, twelve months of stormy fronths. And of all the numbers thirteen is considered the unluckiest. It’s the only number with its own phobia, triskaidekaphobia, which has its first recorded use, according to the OED, in 1911, which is ironic because if you add up the numbers in that year they only add up to twelve. There are hotels that skip the thirteenth floor and manufacturers who try to avoid putting the number 13 on their products. In Tarot decks the Death card is number 13 of the Major Arcana, and let’s not forget the Friday The 13th Movies that got increasingly terrible as they went on and it’s ironic that there are only twelve. At the Last Supper there was Jesus and the twelve apostles, which may be the origin of a belief that it’s unlucky to have thirteen dinner guests. Twelve is considered luckier, at least at the end of the year—traditionally there are twelve days of Christmas which used to mean celebrations could spill over into the new year.

What’s so special, or so dismal, about thirteen anyway? It’s an odd number but so is seven, usually considered the luckiest number. It’s also a prime number but those are also supposed to be lucky, or at least have their own special appeal.

And thirteen’s not always unlucky. Unless you’re counting calories it’s lucky to get a baker’s dozen, especially if you’re ordering doughnuts, there are Thirteen Postures in Tai Chi, and many cultures consider thirteen to be the beginning of adulthood. It’s the beginning of the teenage years so, yeah, I can see why that would be considered unlucky.

The significance of thirteen may ultimately be lunar in origin, though. Most years have twelve full moons. A year with thirteen isn’t unusual but occurs about every three or for years, so whether you consider it lucky or unlucky pretty much depends on the kind of year you’ve had.

Keep Looking Up

Moving Traditions.

Author: December 14, 2020 1 Comment

One of the things I’ve missed about not taking the bus this year, specifically this season, is seeing the decorations. I’ve missed my afternoon commute getting darker as the days get shorter but brightened with the lights that decorate houses and shops along the way. Most years my wife and I will also drive around the neighborhood to see how houses we pass by without a thought most of the year are decorated, taking on a new distinctiveness. There’s at least one house we used to go by on our way to work each morning that had both a giant inflatable Santa and an inflatable Hanukkah Bear, and it always made me smile even though I had another day at work ahead of me, but that’s another story.

Some years too we’ve driven out to the country to see the Geminids. It was too cloudy this year but I knew they were still there, and most nights I can look to the East and see Jupiter and Saturn getting closer and closer to conjunction, something that hasn’t happened in almost four centuries, and a reminder that even when we’re staying still the world under our feet and the universe we’re part of keeps moving.

This year especially these traditions hold out the hope that next year will be better.

 

 

Adventures In Busing., Keep Looking Up

Boundaries.

Author: July 17, 2020 9 Comments

Source: SkyView app for iPhone

The other night I stepped outside, just to the edge of the patio, away from the faint light cast from the window, and through the trees I could see a bright object. It was Jupiter, hanging high in the southeast in the constellation Sagittarius, with Saturn below and slightly to the east of it. Checking an astronomy app on my phone I could see that Pluto was there too. It’s too small to be seen without a telescope, but I thought it made an interesting addition: two planets and one ex-planet.

The boundaries of our solar system, and probably every other solar system, are fuzzy, and constantly changing. Even after Galileo proved Earth moved around the Sun and not the other way around Saturn was believed to be the most distant planet. And then came the discovery of Uranus in 1781, followed by Neptune in 1846, and Pluto was added in 1930, before being demoted to “dwarf planet” in 2006 because it’s one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Kuiper belt objects hanging out past the orbit of Neptune but still within the Sun’s grasp.

I went outside to check out the sky because I was looking for Mars. Like the Sun it was below the horizon, but still out there, out of sight but not out of mind. On July 30th, if all goes according to plan, NASA will launch the Perseverance rover, bound for Mars, due to arrive in February 2021, where it will search for life. That makes the name Perseverance especially fitting; scientists have been looking for and hoping to find life on Mars since, well, probably as long as it’s been understood that Mars was a planet like Earth. Scientists hoped and even expected to find at least vegetation on Mars until the probe Viking 1 sent back pictures in 1976 that showed what a cold, hostile place Mars is. And yet there’s also a persistent belief that, having landed humans on the Moon, Mars is our next big leap.

Mars also seems like an end. The distance from Earth to Mars is roughly less than seventy million miles. It’s about another three hundred and forty million from Mars to Jupiter, and what we’d face out there makes just crossing the distance look easy. Jupiter has no solid surface. Maybe we could land on one of its bigger moons, one of the four first spotted by Galileo, but Io is one giant volcano, Europa holds the possibility of life and we’d have to ask whether we could risk contaminating it, and Callisto and Ganymede are bathed in Jupiter’s intense magnetic field. The other gas giants aren’t much better as far as human exploration is concerned.

In fact, moving outward, Pluto, former planet, could be our best next step. Terrifyingly cold and more than four and a half billion miles from the Sun it’s a solid, rocky island rich with water, at what we used to think of as the edge of the solar system. It’s even less like Earth than Mars is, and yet Pluto is the New York of space exploration: if we can make it there we can make it almost anywhere.

Before I went back in I turned to look at the rest of the sky, as much of it as I could see, anyway, considering boundaries and limits, and how they constantly shift in a universe in motion.

Keep Looking Up, The Weekly Essay