Closing up shop

I'm closing up shop at this blog as of today. I will continue to post photos -- astronomical and otherwise -- at my Flickr homepage.

And I'll still be writing at my first blog, Rose and Rock, about religion, science, politics and war.

As I mentioned a little while ago, my handwritten astronomy journals stopped when I started Catching the Sky. I plan to resume writing in them now; handwritten journaling is one of the underrated joys.

I don't ever plan to delete this page, and it's certainly possible that I will pick it up again at a future date. But for the time being, think of it as a closed shop.

If I update The Conjunction Project, it will be a regular web page.

Many thanks to all who have stopped by to read and/or comment. Clear skies to you!

The Conjunction Project

For those who remember the Moon-Venus-Jupiter conjunction of September 2005, this will be a treat: below I've collected a few links to photos of that event as seen over the course of four days from various places around the world.

111 links to be precise, from 96 photographers in 21 countries.

I've organized the links so that you can check out the photos in roughly the order that they were taken. As the Earth turned in an eastwardly direction, photographers farther to the west got to see the conjunction when dusk fell on their part of their world. So the links are ordered according to the longitudes of the photographers (to the best of my information). This does not produce an exact chronological order, as I discuss in the essay that follows, but it suffices to give a sense of the Moon moving across the sky in its monthlong orbit around the Earth. On each of the four days of the conjunction, the Moon appears in a new place with relation to Jupiter and Venus, as in the two photos above, which I took on September 6th and 7th. And the Moon's progress across the sky within a single night can also be observed, quite easily.

A note on linking. Most links below will take you to photographs that appear in full context, amid galleries and writings about the conjunction. Below I have sometimes linked directly to an individual photo, but there is usually a way to surf backwards or forwards to other pages providing the context. Occasionally no such pages are available, but in those cases where one or more pages from the photographer exist which provide context, and surfing to them is not possible, I've provided an extra link.

Do enjoy.


SEPTEMBER 5, 2005

The conjunction "event" might be said to have begun on this night, in Australia, where Ian Musgrave caught the three bodies in a single photograph from Adelaide, South Australia, on the day after New Moon. Just about 39 hours old, the Moon appears as a slender crescent almost at the horizon. The next three lights up from the bottom are Jupiter, Venus, and the star Spica. See Ian's full blog post for more.

The Moon is hard to capture on the evening after its New phase because it is not visible for very long after nightfall, so closely does it follow the setting Sun into the horizon. You can see the difficulty from another perspective, by looking at Australia as it would appear to an observer standing on the Moon. The image below, courtesy of the U.S. Naval Observatory, shows what the Earth would have looked like on September 5, from the Moon, as Australia rotated into night.



The day before, at New Moon phase, the Moon would have been between the Earth and the Sun, and an observer on the Moon would not have seen the shadow of night on either the far left or far right edges of the Earth. In the image above, however, a very slender shadow has begun to cover eastern Australia. Half of our planet, of course, is always in darkness, but this slender shadow is the narrow part of the Earth's night-time half where the Sun has set but the Moon can still be seen, though it too is about to set: a narrow window of time for Moon-spotting.

As the Moon orbits the Earth, it is moving to the "right" of the image, slowly coming around to the half of the globe that is facing away from the Sun and in nighttime. If you looked from the Moon, each passing minute you would see more of that nighttime half of the Earth, until Full Moon is reached, when the Earth, now placed between the Moon and the Sun, would appear to be dark from the far left edge to the far right.

But we are not going that far: we're only covering four days. Below I've provided images intermittently depicting the Earth's rotation; and underneath each image I've placed links to several photographs taken in those places falling into evening.

A half-day after Australia saw the Moon in the sky along with Venus and Jupiter, the eastern seaboard of North America has fallen into night, and the Moon has moved a little more out of the space between the Sun and the Earth:


The following links from North America show the bodies of the conjunction setting in a diagonal line that's close to horizontal, for a simple reason. Note that the dotted lines representing latitude are wrapping around the right edge of the Earth in varying ways. Imagine one more line running parallel to the top and bottom edges of the rectangle, and cutting the globe exactly in half: it represents the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, or the ecliptic. (The Moon does not orbit right in the plane of the ecliptic, so a view from the Sun would be necessary to draw the line of the ecliptic with greatest precision, but the Moon at this point was very close to the ecliptic and will serve the purpose). The dotted line cutting through Australia is arriving at the right edge of the globe almost parallel to the ecliptic, which means that an Australian observer looking out in the direction of the Sun at other objects in the ecliptic -- such as the Moon, Venus, Jupiter and Spica -- will see them setting in the sky in a nearly straight line down into the horizon. The dotted line cutting through North America is arriving at the right edge of the globe at a shallow angle to the ecliptic, which means that the same bodies will be seen hitting the horizon in a manner that looks almost horizontal.

Eric Schandall facing Liberty State Park from Manhattan, New York, U.S.

Steven D. Adams in Rochester, New York, U.S.

Ronnie Sherrill in Troutman, North Carolina, U.S.

Bob McBroom of Kansas Wind Power in Holton, Kansas, U.S.

Ginger Mayfield of Divide, Colorado, U.S.

Judy A. Mosby in Lovelock, Nevada, U.S.

Edgar of San Leandro, California, U.S.

The next stop is in Australia, only six time zones away -- but since we're crossing the International Dateline, we add a day.


SEPTEMBER 6



Beche-la-mer in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Shevill Mathers at the Southern Cross Observatory in Cambridge, Tasmania, Australia

Damian Sparkes of Famous Daisy in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Ian Musgrave (from his blog post) in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia



Ami B.B. of Flickr in Israel

Yilmaz Akyol of Kusadasi, Turkey

Domenico Licchelli in Lecce, Italy

Peter Wienerroither (from his website) in Vienna, Austria

Leonard Ellul Mercer in Mdina, Malta



Pete Lawrence in Selsey, United Kingdom

Selsey, which is on the southern coast of England, was the farthest north of all the photos I found, at 51 degrees of latitude. The city barely got a look at the night-time Moon before being rotated behind the Earth, and like all the Northern Hemisphere locations so far listed, it is hard to find in the images. The United Kingdom is in the image directly above, but it is just floating on the edge. The reason, I hope, can be explained simply.

In all these images, you can see that the dotted line representing the equator looks a bit more like a frown than a smile. It looks like the Northern Hemisphere is slightly turned upward, like a snob whose nose is turned up and whose mouth appears like a frown. And indeed, at this time between the March and September equinoxes, the equator is slightly turned upward on the side of the Earth facing the Sun. That is due to the Earth's 23-degree tilt with regard to the ecliptic.

The effect that I'm describing is exaggerated in these images because, as noted already, the Moon does not orbit precisely in the ecliptic. At this point, the Moon is below the ecliptic and heading further down. But the Moon's orbit around the Earth is inclined to the ecliptic at only 5 degrees, and in the image above, it has not yet traveled that far below the ecliptic. The frown is merely exaggerated: an observer on the Sun would see it too.

In any case, the effect of having the Northern Hemisphere turned slightly upward is that north of a certain latitude, astronomers trying to get a look at the Sun or at any bodies near that same line of sight (such as the New Moon, or Venus and Jupiter at this time) are being tilted away from a direct view. Imagine pulling up the equatorial dotted line, into a deeper frown: Greenland and the top of North America would disappear entirely.

Because the Northern Hemisphere was turned a little away from the Sun, we can say in general terms that the Southern Hemisphere got better, longer looks at the conjunction.

Laurent Laveder on the Île-Tudy (near Quimper), Bretagne, France

Pablo César Pérez González in San Agustín, Canary Islands, Spain



Pedro Mohr (see the second photo on the page) in Capela de Santana, southeastern Brazil

Mariano Ribas (from this gallery) at Planetario Galileo Galilei de Buenos Aires, Argentina

Facundo A. Fernández in Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina



Glane in Nova Scotia, Canada

Steven Pinker (from his gallery) in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, U.S.

Jay Ouellet near Quebec City, Quebec, Canada

Bob Ribokas in Hull, Massachusetts, U.S.

Guillaume Poulin in Bromptonville, Quebec, Canada

Phil Harrington looking out at Belle Terre from Cedar Beach, New York, U.S.

Bill Bradley at Fire Island, Robert Moses State Park, New York, U.S.

Tony Hoffman in Queens, New York, U.S.

Myself in Brooklyn, New York, U.S.

Eric Schandall looking out at Ellis Island from Manhattan, New York, U.S.

A.V. Ketterer (from his page) in Piscataway, New Jersey, U.S.

Jerry Lodriguss in Voorhees, New Jersey, U.S.

Dick (Gussie) Fink-Nottle in Lindenwold, New Jersey, U.S.

Drew Evans (see his gallery) in Holland, Pennsylvania, U.S.

Steven D. Adams in Rochester, New York, U.S.

Gerry Hintermeister in Apex, North Carolina, U.S.

Narayan Kovvali in Durham, North Carolina, U.S.

Tom Carney in Waynesboro, Virginia, U.S.

Steve Browne looking out at Jordan Lake, south of Durham, North Carolina, U.S.

David Illig in Perryopolis, Pennsylvania, U.S.

Robert T. Smith of Stoneville, North Carolina, U.S.

Ronnie Sherrill of Troutman, North Carolina, U.S.

Charles Tilley of Statesville, North Carolina, U.S.

Matt Hawrysko in Canton, Ohio, U.S.

John H. Schmidt, M.D. in Charleston, West Virginia, U.S.

Yurii Pidopryhora in Athens, Ohio, U.S.

Jeff Stevens at Whitmore Lake, Michigan, U.S.

Parag Sahasrabudhe south of Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.

Dave Quint in Spring Hill, Tennessee, U.S.

Suzanne in east central Minnesota, U.S.

Dick Locke in The Woodlands, Texas, U.S.

Paco Flores in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico

Lloyd Overcash (from his gallery) in Ft. Davis, Texas, U.S.

Thad V'Soske near the Colorado National Monument, U.S.

William Olson of Ammon, Idaho, U.S.

Heron Herodias of Flickr outside Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.

Joe Orman in the Sierra Estrella mountain range south of Phoenix, Arizona, U.S.

Michael Wilson at the Great Salt Lake, Utah, U.S.

Mike O’Leary of El Cajon, California, U.S.

Kevin Baird in San Diego, California, U.S.

Nathan Hubbard in San Diego, California, U.S.

Kevin north of La Jolla, California, U.S.

Neil Schneiderhan in Orange, California, U.S.

Ed Johnson in Los Angeles, California, U.S.

Ryan in Santa Monica, California, U.S.

Paul Keen in the San Fernando Valley northwest of Los Angeles, California, U.S.

F. Ringwald (from this gallery) at Fresno State, California, U.S.

Andy Skinner at Hensley Lake, California, U.S.

Mattie_Shoes of Flickr outside Sacramento, California, U.S.

Dan Oneal of Santa Cruz, California, U.S.

John Koetsier in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada

Cathy near San Bruno, California, U.S.

Dave Ward (download the full size) near Bellingham, Washington, U.S.

Jack Amsden in Medford, Oregon

Malcolm Scrimger (from his gallery) looking out at Vancouver Island from Esquimalt, British Columbia, Canada


SEPTEMBER 7




Brenda Anderson in Masterton, New Zealand

Scott Macleod Liddle in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Steve Massey (see the top photo, taken with a camcorder) in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Beche-la-mer in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

snappinhappy of Flickr at the Centrepoint Tower in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Shevill Mathers at the Southern Cross Observatory in Cambridge, Tasmania, Australia

Firdaus Webgrrl in Ferntree Gully near Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Roland Gesthuizen in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Marcello Avolio of Gorge Creek Orchards in Dimbulah, Queensland, Australia

This was a unique view of the conjunction because it was so close to the equator. Check out Marcello's single page of 21 full-size photos.

Incidentally, Dimbulah was above the plane of the ecliptic when night fell there. One half of the equator (like one half of the Earth) is always above the ecliptic, so a few places close to the equator are taken above and below the ecliptic every 24 hours. Those are called the tropics, defined as the regions of the Earth within 23 degrees of the equator (corresponding with the 23-degree axial tilt of the Earth).

For a conversation about the conjunction, see this page's audio interview of Graeme White, from JCU’s Centre for Astronomy, by ABC Far North Queensland.

John Kazanas in Brunswick, Victoria, Australia

Shane Ekerbicer of Geelong Stormchasers, Geelong, Victoria, Australia

Damian Sparkes of Famous Daisy in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Paul Schilling (from his gallery) in Morphett Vale near Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Ian Musgrave (with extra photos) in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia



Junichiro Aoyama on a post-typhoon evening in Kyoto prefecture, Japan

Two things about Junichiro's photo.

First, as noted above with regard to the Northern Hemisphere, Junichiro had relatively little time to see the conjunction. In New Zealand, Jupiter did not set until almost 3 hours after sunset. In Japan, Jupiter set 93 minutes after sunset -- a period of which only about half would be dark enough to see the planets.

Secondly, note how close the Moon passes by Spica in Junichiro's original, and how far from Venus. By contrast, the photos from Australia on this night nearly caught the Moon passing over Venus.

The cause is very simple, and it's called parallax. When looking out into space from the half of our globe that sits above the ecliptic, Venus and the Moon are like two tennis balls set out on the desk in front of you, with one close to you and the other closer to the computer screen. You see a space between the two balls, but if you lower your chair, the space starts to diminish. Lower your head all the way to the level of the desk, and you may even see one ball eclipse the other.

In Australia, they nearly did see it. But I have no photos of the Moon eclipsing Venus, because Australia is not far enough below the ecliptic. Shevill Mathers in Tasmania was the farthest south, at 43 degrees of latitude, but he could not have seen the eclipse. As far as I can tell from SkyView Cafe, only the Pacific Ocean below Australia, and the southwestern tip of New Zealand's Stewart Island, would have seen the Moon, just as it was hitting the horizon, eclipsing Venus. Antarctica would have seen the eclipse quite high in the sky, and would have had enough time to see Venus emerge from the eclipse.

At the South Pole, the Moon would have entirely escaped the apparent corridor in the sky between Venus and Spica; and on SkyView I see the possibility of a grazing occultation, with Venus winking in and out behind mountains on the edge of the lunar disk.



Paul Watson in Cape Town, South Africa

Harald Wochner (with other photos) at Lake Constance near the German-Swiss border in Radolfzell, Germany

Patrick Bornet (see the second photo down) in Saint-martin-sur-Nohain, Nièvre, France

Laurent Laveder on the Île-Tudy near Quimper, Bretagne, France

Rafa Gallego in San Roque, Andalusia, Spain



Supersnail of Flickr in Aruba, Kingdom of the Netherlands

Aruba was the closest of all the photos to the equator, at 12.5 degrees North. It is the only photo that clearly shows the three bodies in a classic diagonal line.

A. Pasten, A. Gomez and NOAO/AURA/NSF for the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory near La Serena, Chile

Patrick LaFreniere at Pequawket Pond near Mount Washington Observatory, New Hampshire, U.S.

Myself in Brooklyn, New York, U.S.

Tristan Panek in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.

Dick Locke in The Woodlands, Texas, U.S.

Judy A. Mosby in Lovelock, Nevada, U.S.

Ed Johnson in Los Angeles, California, U.S.

Jasmine008 of Flickr in Stumptown, Oregon, U.S.


SEPTEMBER 8

MisterPH of Flickr in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Shevill Mathers (with an extra photo) at the Southern Cross Observatory in Cambridge, Tasmania, Australia

Shonteen of Flickr in Hsinchu City, Taiwan



F. Ringwald (from this gallery) at Fresno State, California, U.S.


MISSING PHOTOS

There must be many thousands of photos out there. What I have here is a sampling from the internet, mostly via Google, Google Images and Flickr (the latter hosts 42 of the links by itself -- including 10 of the 16 links from California).

There are very large regions, and cities, not represented in this project. As discussed above, there is an astronomical reason when it comes to the Northern Hemipshere. Selsey, U.K. was the farthest north, at 51 degrees latitude. The largest country in the world, Russia, has no photos here, but most of that country lies above Selsey's latitude. Moscow is north of that line, as are Warsaw, Berlin, Brussels and London. The Scandinavian nations lie entirely above it, and so do Holland, the Baltic States, Belarus, Ireland, and Iceland. The same goes for Greenland, Alaska, and most of Canada -- though of course these places are not heavily populated.

But there are large regions missing for no astronomical reason. Connection to the internet, and perhaps the prevalance of digital photography as a hobby and a profession, seem to have been large factors. Most of the 64 links from the contiguous United States came from the western and eastern coasts, where light pollution is thick but internet connection is well-established. All 20 of the links from Australia, the second-best represented nation, came from the eastern half of that country and from many of its largest cities.

Of course, a large majority of the links come from countries where English is the dominant language. Here my own linguistic limitations played a factor. Using the free translations at Babblefish, I did run searches on Google and Flickr for the terms "Moon", "Venus" and "Jupiter" -- and occasionally "Spica" -- in Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Russian. (A search in Dutch is what turned up the Aruba photo). I also attempted some tentative searches in the scripts of Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew and Arabic, without any luck. Yet I have to imagine that many more internet photos in the missing regions could be found with a basic command of the corresponding languages.

I don't know why no photos turned up from Hawaii, and I still hope to find photos from there or from any Pacific island not already included.

I found nothing from mainland China and India, each with over 1 billion people. The same goes for large regions of South America and Africa around the equator.

In fact, only two of the photos -- Dimbulah and Aruba -- were taken within the vast 47-degree path that lies between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The tropics contain the most economically impoverished regions of the world, where at least half -- and I have seen an estimate of three-quarters -- of the global population currently live.


THE LONGITUDE PROBLEM

I have the photos organized according to longitude, which is a bit of conceit. It gives a rough sense of new photographers getting to view the conjunction as the Earth rotated them into darkness but, as became increasingly clear in the images above, lines of longitude did not correspond exactly to the line separating day from night (the terminator) in early September.

The exact dates of the equinoxes and solstices differ from year to year, but in general you can say that a line drawn along the terminator on March 20 and September 22 will correspond to a line of longitude. You can see the correspondence in the images below, which show that neither pole is turned toward the Sun on September 22.

On the September equinox, New York would have seen sunset at the exact moment that it occurred on the same line of longitude (74 degrees West) in a Southern Hemisphere location just as far from the equator (41 degrees).

Now compare with this image, which corresponds to the evening of September 6th in New York:





On that date, New York saw sunset 42 minutes after its southern counterpart.

In short, the conjunction was seen "first" by denizens of the Southern Hemisphere, because they crossed the terminator before their northern counterparts of the same longitude.

Now it may be that 42 minutes makes a large difference, but it is not as large as the three hours of difference that exist between New York and its counterpart on the June and December solstices, when one or the other hemisphere is heavily tilted toward the Sun. This is a typical June 21 view:




Secondly, the order of the photographs was not much impacted, because the longitudes of the Southern Hemisphere photographers did not overlap with those of the North. That was purely by chance, since of course there are longitudes shared by North and South America, by Australia and East Asia, and by Africa and Europe. But on each day of the conjunction, photographers on those southern continents saw the Moon from longitudes east of the corresponding Northern photographers. For example, the South American photographers were all done before the first North American photographer came to the terminator. That means that the Earth's easterwardly rotation, by itself and without a tilt in the Earth's axis, would have carried the Southern hemisphere photographers first into the terminator. The fact that the Earth's axis tilted them in early September "ahead" of their Northern neighbors just made them arrive even earlier at the terminator.

That does present an interesting question. How would the order have looked for a conjunction on the other side of the equinox (e.g., early October), when Northern photographers would be tilted first toward the terminator? I'm going to leave that one alone.

The important thing is that no pair of photographers experienced sunset anything like 42 minutes apart due to different latitudes, except those ordered accurately (e.g., South Africa before New York).

Some differences do exist within single continents. Dimbulah, Australia, has two neighboring cities about 20 degrees to the south that are listed after it on September 7 but actually experienced sunset 10 minutes earlier: Brunswick and Geelong. The day before, Suzanne in Minnesota also had a distant southern neighbor listed after her who experienced sunset before her, by 5 minutes: Dick Locke in The Woodlands, Texas, about 15 degrees to the south. And many other discrepancies exist on an even less significant scale, for instance in the thick cluster of photographs listed from California.

What I really need is a Google Earth overlay that will display the terminator at any given time during those four days of the conjunction. I have all the photographers marked off on Google Earth, so I would need only to spin them into night to get the order -- with the added requirement that Google Earth would enable you to spin the planet on its axis, and to move the clock forward just by spinning the globe, with the terminator being updated continuously. I don't know how educational it would be to use such an application (as opposed to creating one), but it would be supremely cool.

THE PARALLAX PROBLEM, OR: HOW I LEARNED THAT THERE IS NO CONJUNCTION

My original intention for this project was more ambitious than to refer to the photographers according to when they experienced sunset. I had intended to put the photographs themselves in order -- to pick one photo per shoot, whether taken early or late in the evening, and to place it in an exact chronological list of all 111 shoots. The method was to use the Moon's position in the sky with relation to the planets.

Comparing two different days in the photographs, or even two different hours, you can see how much the Moon has traveled in its monthly orbit around the Earth, but the Moon is so close that even a minute's traveling time shifts its position in the sky noticeably, if you measure carefully -- as I tried to do against the laptop screen with a simple ruler. For the days that the Moon was approaching the two planets, I figured that the smaller the distance between it and Venus (or Jupiter), the later the photo; and that after the Moon passed by Venus (or Jupiter), the greater distance marked the later photo.

Of course, the photos came at different scales, so I couldn't just do a straight comparison. It became a matter of measuring two lines in each photo and coming up with a ratio that could be compared against another photo. For photos on September 6, when the three bodies formed a small triangle, I compared a Venus-Moon line with Venus-Jupiter. On the days when the three bodies were closer to forming a line in the sky, it was more straightforward (the pun is really not intended).



Trouble is, trying to distinguish measurements becomes unreliable when using photos of ordinary resolution, since blowing them up to get an exact calculation often leaves the bodies with fuzzy edges. Moreover, the photos come in varying time exposures, with the bodies consequently more "stretched" in some photos than in others, meaning that the center or edge of every body cannot be precisely compared. Then there is the problem of parallax, defined formally as the apparent difference in position or direction of an object as viewed from different points. Let me explain.

The original idea was to differentiate, let's say, between an early-dusk photo taken on September 6th in Cleveland, Ohio and a late-dusk photo taken 650km (400m) farther east in New York City. Two hypothetical photographers from these places, which share the same time zone, take photos in which the conjunction itself looks strikingly similar. Hypothetically, the two photographers have snapped their shutters close to simultaneously. And being in the same time zone, each records his photo as being around 8:30 p.m. local time. Of course, in Cleveland there is more sunlight remaining in the photo, because Cleveland arrived at the terminator 31 minutes after New York did. But which photo was taken first?

Well, reported times are not enough, because watches and clocks are often inaccurate. I planned simply to look at the "conjunctions" in the two photos, and to determine which one looked younger, meaning which one showed the Moon more distant from the planets. And you can do this, if the photos have enough resolution and the calculated difference is outside the margin of error (i.e., if repeated calculations turn up the same result). For the most part I had no trouble, though with some pairs of photos I couldn't be certain. But the chief uncertainty arises from the parallax that occurs because the photographers are viewing from different places.

Let's say I have two people in my field of view: you are two meters in front of me, and I can see someone else about 100 meters somewhere behind you. If I get on a stepladder, you appear lower in my field of vision. The person 100 meters back, however, will hardly appear lower to me. Because I climbed the ladder, you appear to have changed position relative to the more distant person in back: now I can see right above you to that person.

Now, if I see the Moon and two planets, and perhaps a star like Spica, in my field of view as I stand at the "top" of the globe -- the spot farthest above the ecliptic, which is not exactly at the North Pole since the Earth is tilted with relation to the ecliptic -- I can look "over" the Moon to the more distant bodies behind it. In the sky I will see the Moon passing underneath the bodies, and it will pass the planets at a greater distance than it will if I watch from the "bottom" of the globe, near the South Pole.

The same thing occurs at the "side" edges of the Earth. Two meters away from you, if I take several sideward steps to the left, you appear farther to the right side of my field of vision. If a person watches the Moon, Venus and Jupiter from one "side" edge of the Earth, where it is night, and another person watches simultaneously from the opposite edge, where it is day, they will see the Moon in noticeably different positions relative to the planets. Of course, the unaided eye could only watch the conjunction from the "side" edge of the Earth that was in night-time, but even on that slim portion of the Earth -- the shadow in all the "Moon view" images above -- there was a parallax, and a difference in what people saw.

Cleveland and New York, being at different longitudes, are like that person who steps sideways and gets a different field of view: a case of side-to-side parallax, you might call it. The two cities are at the same latitude, so you would think, as I assumed, that they are not like that person who gets a different view by climbing a stepladder: an up-down parallax. But because the Earth is tilted with regard to the ecliptic, we all change our distance from the ecliptic continuously as the Earth rotates us in space. The step ladder analogy does partially apply to Cleveland and New York.

Further complicating the matter is that in the images used here, because the lines of latitude are not being viewed edge-on, those lines are clearly taking a downward curl toward the ecliptic at the rightmost edge of the planet. This is what you can expect, I guess, when you're observing a sphere. So if we regard the two cities at the same point in time, which is higher above the ecliptic? Is New York, when it reaches the terminator, higher or lower than Cleveland as the latter city approaches the terminator from 650 km away? I confess I'm not sure.

To what extent would parallax interfere with the measurements I was making? In a way, the impact would be small. The side-to-side parallax -- which arises chiefly due to different longitudes, we can say in general terms -- has a great potential impact, because the Moon is traveling side-to-side, vaguely speaking, with regard to the ecliptic: its orbit is inclined only 5 degree to the ecliptic. And it's the Moon's orbit that we're measuring when attempting to order the photos, so a side-to-side parallax can be expected to interfere with our attempt to measure the orbit. But this potential impact is minimized because only one edge of the Earth, the one falling into night, was watching this Moon and its two planetary neighbors: so the side-to-side distance between an early-dusk photographer and a late-dusk one is very small.

The up-down parallax -- which arises chiefly due to different latitudes, we can say in general terms -- also has a great potential impact, in that differences in latitude among two simultaneous observers can be immense. But this difference in "height" with regard to the ecliptic cannot greatly effect our view of the Moon's orbit, which is, as we said, nearly side-to-side with regard to the ecliptic.

Perhaps such differences only have an impact when comparing two photos taken within seconds of each other. I don't know if I found any pair of photographs so close together, but some discrepancies did show up in the order. In any case, the photos themselves were not resolved enough to deal with small differences.

Stick with me for one more thought experiment.

Let's say that the photographer in Cleveland actually took his photo one second before the New York photographer took his. Because New York is farther over to the "side" when looking at the three bodies, the effect is that the space between the Moon and the pair of planets will look slightly larger from New York. It's as if I've stepped to the left to get a more direct view of the space between you and the person 100 meters behind you. Well from that apparent closeness in the Cleveland photo between the Moon and the pair of planets, we would normally decide that the Moon has traveled farther in its orbit -- that the Cleveland photo is later. Our perception would be wrong.

So in a number of ways, there really is no conjunction "out there". We have a close analogy when it's said that constellations in the sky would look entirely different from other parts of space, and that constellations don't have an objective existence. But in that case, everyone on Earth is seeing in effect the same thing, and even sensitive instrumentation cannot pick up the parallax due to distances on the Earth's surface. With a conjunction that occurs between our solar system bodies, especially one involving our nearby neighbor the Moon, different "conjunctions" are observed and documented by simultaneous observers at differing latitudes and longitudes: the positions of the bodies with respect to each other are not the same for every observer.

Such variations have long been noted, to be sure, in comparisons of simultaneous photos taken in different places, but what hits home for me is that two simultaneous observers cannot even trust that they share equal perceptions of motion. That's the thing that has come home for me in this project, which has been all about the movement of the Moon. It's one thing to see a unique view of the Moon very close to Venus on September 7th, or even eclipsing that planet, because you're standing at the South Pole, since that is just a question of seeing the bodies of a conjunction in different positions, or arrangements. Our own diverse positions, on the surface of the Earth, naturally have an effect on the positions that we see other bodies take. But it's another to observe the movements of the bodies toward each other -- gravitational movements, or orbits, which are all that make them appear to converge into a conjunction in the first place -- and to measure a movement in a way that is not shared by others standing on our body, largely because we are being continuously rotated to different vantage points in space.

When we watch objects move into a conjunction, we observers are also moving. It's not a straight observation of one objective thing by many static observers. It's a dance between many participants.


I want to thank all the photographers for their photographic work, their stories, and the information they lent to this project. More of the same -- and corrections from anyone -- are most welcome.

EDIT: This post has been edited to update the links; content will remain unedited.

Some links to this post: Ad Astra; Astroblog; Plakboek's Livejournal

Record new moon

Very exciting news tonight. I caught sight of the new moon this evening when it was only 19 hours and 19 minutes old. This is beyond what I had ever expected to see from New York, and it completely shattered my old personal record of 26 hours and 41 minutes, from June 7, 2005. But what I'm particularly happy about is getting a shot of this one, not just in the 9x63 binoculars, but in the telescope (thanks to our friend Kate's roof!)

I watched from Brooklyn as always. The sun set at 8:17 p.m., and after waiting a little while I started sweeping the skies near the point where the sun had gone down. At 8:45 I actually saw Mercury first, and holding my binoculars at that height, I moved just slightly to the right, and saw the moon instantly. Four minutes later I took this shot through the telescope, at a magnification of about 30 (the orientation is adjusted here to a right-side-up view):

SkyView Cafe has Mercury at an altitude of 4 degrees, 25 minutes at 8:45, and the moon slightly higher at 4 degrees, 50 minutes. But I think the crescent was lower, because SkyView seems actually to be measuring the altitude at the center of the moon's body, which was largely invisible tonight. The moon itself takes up nearly half a degree -- its angular diameter tonight was 31.41 minutes -- so if you subtract half of that from SkyView's altitude for the moon, you get the crescent at nearly the same height as Mercury, which is how I remember it (though I did not think to note it at the time).

At 8:51, I put in another lens for a magnification of 90:

Here the moon, again at 30x, is about to set behind a low building at 8:56 p.m., when it was about 3 degrees above the horizon:

I moved over to put some lower buildings between us, and took this one at 9:01 p.m.:

I could no longer see it in binoculars at 9:08, when it had not yet descended behind the lowest buildings on the horizon; the thickening gloom just consumed it.

And no wonder: its face was just 1% illuminated, and its magnitude was just -5.1 (compared to 1.4% and -5.2 on June 7). Like the June 7 moon, and unlike all previous record new moons that I'd spotted, I never saw this moon with my own eyes.

SkyView Cafe has the full body of the moon setting at 9:23, but in the enlarged-moon page you can see that the bottom portion, where the crescent extended in a grin that looked like no more than a third of the moon's circumference, had already disappeared at 9:20. That was really when no more moon would have been visible tonight.

Fantastic stuff.

Missing the morning moon

Because of my new night job, I rarely get on the roof anymore to do morning astronomy. So it was a delight to make the effort and get up this morning for the Moon-Venus conjunction.

Click on the photos for the best views of the two bodies.





I plan to go back to taking down precise notes of what I see in the sky, as I used to do before I started this blog. My astronomy journals ended when this blog began, and that can't be good. So I will have to change this blog to become more detail-oriented, or else retire it.

But I do have one conjunction project to publish here -- and it's almost finished. For those still reading, I hope you'll stay tuned.

Warehouse blaze

These are some pictures I took of a large fire that broke out in an abandoned 3-story warehouse along the East River at 5:30 this morning. The warehouse is the site of the old Greenpoint Terminal Market, and it collapsed around 9:30. It's one of three buildings that have caught fire.

The local television news called it New York's largest fire in 10 years, including 9-11, in terms of manpower. I don't know how that can be true, but 350 firefighers were reported to be at this fire. It's 1:30 now and, although the fire is under control, I am still hearing fire engines rushing past our apartment, which is about 3/4 of a mile from the fire. I saw some EMS on the scene, but it's not known whether there were any squatters living in the warehouse.

A shot from our roof, followed by photos that are self-explanatory:

This is how the main warehouse looked immediately after its collapse, which I saw from about 500 feet away, corner of Franklin and Oak:


In this last shot you can see, in front of the Empire State Building, streams of water, probably from fire boats on the river.

A Flock of Dodos

I saw A Flock of Dodos earlier today as part of the Tribeca Film Festival, and I stayed for a very brief Q&A with the filmmaker, Randy Olsen. A Harvard-trained marine ecologist, Olsen fully supports the theory of evolution, but with a twist. He endorses evolution directly, but the heart of his support seems to be expressed in criticism. He likens scientists to a flock of dodos and warns that science could go the way of the dodo if it's not communicated with greater concision, personability, and humility.

It occurs to me that all three of these traits are often found in humor, or at least in varieties of humor that are not meant to ridicule. Olsen's movie is in fact concise, personable, and humble in its sense of humor. The movie gave me my first chance ever to laugh at the subject, and it's apparent that Olsen likes people and likes to laugh with them -- not at them. He asks himself in the movie whether he would want to sit down for a game of poker with some of the dry, respectable scientists that he's interviewed or with the various colorful personalities that he's found among supporters of Intelligent Design, and he has no problem expressing how much he likes the latter. He says that his first note in his research was his discovery that ID advocates were not the close-minded Bible thumpers, he implies, that he had expected.

Ultimately this is a movie about people more than evolution. At the Q&A, Olsen was asked why he didn't go more deeply into what was wrong with the concept of Irreducible Complexity, and he noted that the medium was, relatively speaking, more of a motivational than an educational tool. He said he considered adding a few minutes of hard scientific details, but he chose to raise the issue rather than try to settle it on film, which would be hard to do. As an ordinary viewer, I think that's a good approach. A different kind of documentary, perhaps for public television (as was alluded to in the Q&A), could delve into the details more fully.

And Olsen said that it would not be easy to describe in a few minutes why Irreducible Complexity was wrong, which is an indication right there that he does not consider such concepts to be on par with basic children's errors. He did mention someone else who he thought had summarized very quickly what was wrong with IC, which just showed his admiration for concision as well as his belief that evolution cannot win its debates so long as scientists are long-winded about it.

In that way and many others, A Flock of Dodos is a call, in the best sense, to popularize science. There is an idea out there that popularization of anything dumbs it down, but Olsen is just not an elitist about this. For him, popularization seems to mean a direct connecting with people. That's how you popularize among great numbers of people -- just talk to them.

And listen. Olsen spends a lot of camera time listening while ID advocates have their say; and most of these conversations, it seems, do not proceed into arguments over scientific data. Olsen is really more interested in talking to people about the controversy, which is what his movie is about. He's done a great job of teaching the controversy -- in the best sense.

He has less sympathy as he looks higher up on the food chain of ID, so to speak. The Discovery Institute comes off as a secretive, impersonable glass-windowed facade that won't speak to people -- which is true in the case of Olsen, who tried repeatedly to obtain an interview. There are also strong implications in the movie that the Institute is more a successful child of wealthy and skillful marketing than an honest broker of science. There will be food for argument here, but I have to say that my own sympathy with ID also rests with the ordinary people who are interested in it.

Even here, though, Olsen is not offering a wholly negative judgment. He does not view skillful marketing as a bad thing in itself, and he considers it essential for scientists to adapt to the current age or, well, you know the rest.

One more thing I appreciated about Olsen's take is that he does not introduce ID as originating with the Discovery Institute. He begins instead with the philosopher William Paley (d. 1805) -- who used the famous God-as-watchmaker analogy -- and introduces ID almost as if it stepped out of a tradition with deep philosophical roots and straight into the 1990s. I think he's missed, or chosen not to dwell on, the connections between creationism and ID. A Flock of Dodos does repeat the finding of the Dover trial that ID is repackaged creationism, but there is no more on that subject. In fact creationism appears in the narrative often as a contrast to ID and not as an ancestor.

Olsen's final judgment on ID is that the movement is stuck at the level of intuition and has not yet proceeded to make a scientific theory. He sees ID as residing presently in the heart (he says his own heart is with evolution), and he plainly sees its advocates as heartful, personable people. His contention that ID is not a scientific theory cannot be tested in the movie, which does not offer much scientific content -- but it is the view I hold, and I have yet to see anything from ID that counts as a rival mechanism to mutation and natural selection.

It's a good movie and worth seeing. It is not a hard-hitting movie, either in terms of teaching science or even teaching the social controversy. There is no mention of such a prominent atheist as Richard Dawkins, for example, which is something of a lack in a movie that is largely about how scientists can lose a debate which is theirs to win or lose. Still, if you've never laughed about this subject and you want to, or if you're simply interested in the subject, it's very much worth checking out.

Bullhorn Moon

Tonight the Moon appeared next to a naked-eye star that showed up in the camera without any binoculars or telescopes. The star was Alnath, the tip of the upper horn in Taurus the Bull. I saw Alnath with my own eyes 47 minutes after sunset and began taking some photographs.

This first photo is a crop, the camera in zoom mode. Alnath, a 1.6-magnitude star, can be seen by double-clicking on the photo, just above the moon.


With the camera's digital zoom:

Tycho series

I often wonder if there's a better way, with the basic equipment I own, to produce a photo that communicates a sense of what it's like to look through a telescope at the moon. I cannot reproduce the clarity without getting a telescope that will automatically track objects as they rise and set. When I watch the moon, it moves. I thought that the photo below, taken this past Sunday (April 9th), got across something of what it's like to watch the moon taking up room in a circular field of view:

I take photos with an Olympus digital, and my constant challenge is to minimize the exposure time. Longer exposures produce blurry pictures of a moving object, and they also make the moon, which is so bright, into a large white blob. The shortest exposure I have available is the flash setting, which is fine, since it adds nothing to the brightness of the moon and only occasionally gets reflected back by the lens of the eyepiece. Often I'll use the zoom function on the camera, which allows less light to come through the aperture; and in those cases I'll turn the flash off in order to use the settings for longer exposures.

A few months ago I started noticing, when photographing planets and stars, that the camera focuses differently than my own eye. The camera "sees" a different picture than I do. On digital cameras, you have the view-screen, where you can see in real time what the camera sees. I notice that a scene which appears crystal clear to my eye if I look directly into the telescope eyepiece looks blurry in the camera's view-screen, and vice versa. The difference is significant when the eyepiece magnifies the view at a low power, for instance 30x magnification. With eyepieces that push the power up to 180x, I notice no difference.

On Sunday I was photographing the moon at lower powers, with flash, no camera zoom, and at a lower exposure than the default for ordinary indoor photos. This low exposure appeared in the view-screen as a paler moon, and I found that it allowed me to freely photograph the bright areas far from the terminator (that is also possible by using higher powers or the camera zoom, both of which allow less light to come through).

I started watching the view-screen of the camera when I held it up to the eyepiece, and I turned the telescope's focus knob until the camera, not my eye, saw the picture clearly. That produced the series of pictures in this post, which all prominently show off the crater Tycho and its rays.

The photos appear as they do in the telescope, turned upside down by the mirrors. As always, click on the photo for a larger version.

I like this one especially:


The large sea right up against the terminator is Mare Humorum. The large crater sitting on the sea's edge is Gassendi. Leading away from Tycho is a parallel set of rays that look like a tunnel or gorge -- or even a canal! When Tycho was formed by an impact about 108 million years ago, ejecta from the blast formed that pair of rays. They lead directly to a crater called Bullialdus, and if you follow that line you eventually hit Kepler, which is visible in the second photo above.

At about 10:30 with relation to Tycho sits a very large crater called Clavius: you can see in this photo why I sometimes called it double-dimpled. The first large crater at about 12:30 is Longomontanus. The dark craters very far back at 11 o'clock, near the terminator, are in the region of the Leibnitz mountains.

You can "drain" the light, or brightness, out of a photo without losing resolution by adjusting the middle dial in Photoshop's "Levels". Doing so also drained the dim color of the original, but it highlighted Tycho's ejecta rays all the more:

Pleiades Occultation report

Ben, who reported his experience with the Pleiades occultations in the comments section of this blog, has his own blog and a detailed report here:

NYC Nova Hunter: Pleiades Occultation: Celaeno Graze 1-Apr

See in particular the comments section of that post for a computerized profile of a single mountain on the moon.

Pleiades eclipse gallery

Spaceweather.com has gathered a gallery of very nice photos of this star/moon conjunction on this page.

Pleiades eclipsed

Through a cloudy sky, I got a few brief glimpses tonight of the Moon passing over the stars of the Pleiades (the Seven Sisters).

This is a snapshot at 7:27 pm New York time, with Alcyone, the brightest of the cluster, only 27 minutes before the moon's dark limb caught up to it and covered it. Very close to the moon, near the lower left of the lunar disk and much dimmer than Alcyone, is a star called Maia.



This shot at 8:34 p.m. captures, going counterclockwise from the star closest to the Moon's limb, Merope, Electra, Taygeta and Maia. Alcyone was then behind the Moon.



Finally, this shot at 8:56 captures Alcyone hanging above the Moon's bright limb like a rocket taking off from the lunar surface, just two minutes after the star reappeared on that side.


Before tonight I had never seen a star at the instant that it "winked" out and got eclipsed, or watched one while it winked back into view. Tonight I did get to see one such event, through murky clouds almost dark enough to obscure it entirely: I saw Atlas, a multiple star and the second-brightest of the pack, wink out behind the Moon's dark limb at 8:39 p.m.

It was a very frustrating night, with the clouds moving all evening over the Moon and leaving a wide open patch of sky in the south, where the Moon was not. Still, I saw a rare sight. The photos above, taken at a magnification of 30, give a blurry representation of a few moments; but the best sight was in the binoculars at 7 p.m., when the Moon had not yet eclipsed the Dipper-shape of the entire Pleiades cluster but had approached so closely that it seemed the stars were wrapping around the lunar ball.

[Post edited on April 6 to brighten photos].

ID debates

I have been reading some excellent arguments from a biologist who believes in God and has been engaged for many years in debates against prominent creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design. His name is Kenneth R. Miller. His essay, "The Flagellum Unspun", is the best single rebuttal of ID that I have come across, by which I mean that it is accessible to the layperson but still technical enough to demonstrate specifically where ID is wrong, from the point of view of science. A more philosophical overview and rebuttal is offered in this excerpt from his book, Finding Darwin's God. But also see his home page, and particularly his page for Evolution Resources. All the links on the latter page will be useful to someone interested in this subject, but I can particularly recommend his PBS debate, for anyone seeking a place where the strongest arguments on both sides are laid out against each other succinctly.

I particularly appreciate him because he sees no necessary conflict between science and religion. This is a badly needed voice in our cultural wars.

As for my own recent debates on the subject, I can say that my position remains the same, if not stronger: ID does not offer a scientific theory, but it can be appreciated in some ways (but not others) as a social movement.

I have found this position to be easily misunderstood, so let me try to put in on record briefly.

Intelligent Design tells us that the known mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection cannot fully account for either the complexity or the diversity of living organisms. There is nothing wrong with this claim in itself. But a scientific theory must propose another mechanism. A mere criticism of the theory of evolution as insufficient does not amount to a rival theory, unless a rival mechanism can be proposed. When it is merely proposed, as in ID, that an Intelligent Designer must be responsible for the natural features of life that we cannot account for, this does not tell us at all how the Designer worked. It only tells us that a Designer is responsible. And that would be no different from non-ID, non-creationist theism, which tells us that a Designer is responsible. All theism which is reconciled to the theory of evolution tells us that the Designer worked via the mechanisms identified by Darwin and later generations of scientists. ID and creationism tell us that the Designer did not work through these mechanisms at all, but that the Designer's work can be detected wherever these mechanism fail to explain what we see. In what way the Designer worked is left undescribed. If it was described scientifically, we would have a scientific theory. Therefore, ID is not a scientific theory. It is not a scientific, mechanical description. It is an inference from scientific work, and this is commendable in that good inferences may be made from good science -- but it is a philosophical inference. It is not a theory about the mechanical, material workings of the world. It is a theory about something un-material and, presumably, unexplainable.

If such a philosophical inference were to become widely regarded as a scientific theory, it would stop scientific research wherever current explanations are deemed unsatisfactory. Some of Kenneth Miller's essays above demonstrate the answers that genetic scientists were eventually able to give to ID's questions about evolution, precisely because they kept at it. Had they merely invoked an indescribable process, they would surely have stopped looking for the scientific description that they were eventually able to obtain.

That is the danger, as I see it, of having science schoolclasses pronouncing ID to be a rival scientific theory. ID does not propose a rival mechanism/description. It proposes instead that when students have questions, they think only the thought that an Intelligent Designer is responsible for the mystery.

Now, I do appreciate some aspects of ID as a social movement. It is a movement of dissent, and as I grow older, and more aware of my own dissent from orthodoxy, I've grown to appreciate dissent. Part of the reason is that debate often moves me to understand problems more deeply. ID, strange as it may seem, moves me to understand the theory of evolution better than if there had been no challenges at all. And surely any truth that never experiences challenge will stagnate; so challenge almost always has some good benefits.

On a slightly different but related note, I can appreciate ID for challenging scientists and telling us, for instance, that scientists are not a uniquely self-critical species, and that science itself is not a uniquely self-critical enterprise. Religious faith can be extremely self-critical; and scientists can be dogmatic. Certainly, like all of us, they're inherently resistant to being challenged on basic points.

And that is where I seem to get in trouble with some opponents of ID, probably because it seems I am merely repeating the implication made by ID, and by conspiracy theories, that the establishment is resistant only, or especially, to good ideas. I actually cannot say that this is true. Human beings are often resistant to bad ideas. I've seen that in both religion and science.

My only claim is that ID and, yes, even creationism, can be viewed as complex things. As science they do not pass muster, but they also represent the public faces of millions of ordinary people who are not loonies and who have philosophical opinions on reality worth listening to, and even valid political views. (The latter is much harder for me to affirm, but I still affirm it). When such theists tell us, for instance, that they see evolution being used to push atheism, it is time to enter the conversation constructively, not time to dismiss them. That is a must in a society that values religious freedom; and it is the best basis upon which to ask for the same freedom of thought in return.

For this reason and others, I think it's wrong to refute ID by telling others that it is already rejected and not worth looking at. One of the ways that this gets done is by saying that ID is merely creationism, as if to say, that was already rejected, and this is no different. I don't object to the claim, in itself, that ID is creationism; that is a claim that can be discussed, and tested against observation. I find it to be a questionable claim, given the formal acceptance by ID of the earth's old age and the lack of any focus by ID on Genesis. But it's okay to debate ID's relationship to creationism. What is not okay is to make the claim as a way to make the refutation of ID easier or automatic.

My recent debates have been a profound learning experience for me, because I have been known to dismiss dissident theories in politics and religion by saying essentially, "This has already been discredited." As I note above, such a claim may or may not be true, and it's worth debating. But what I've learned is the degree to which such a claim is unconvincing in itself. It certainly braces you when you hear that something was discredited long ago. It is, in that sense, a very powerful way to induce good debate and deep learning. But that just makes it the start of the conversation, not the end. As an answer, "This has already been discredited, and all its questions have been answered," is astoundingly unsatisfying. You long to find out for yourself what actually happened; and you long for the actual answers to the questions raised by the dissenting theories. Hearing merely that the answers were given long ago does not cut it. Hearing it too often positively induces suspicion, even hostility.

In my debates I ran into an opposition to ID that was so automatic that I was assumed to be making conspiracy theories in support of ID. Even though the misunderstanding occurred with only one person and was cleared up, it was not easy to clear up, and it has left me somewhat unnerved -- all the more because, as one isolated event, it is merely anecdotal and not something that I can draw general conclusions from. What I mean is that I remain uncertain as to what happened, and to what degree I am myself to blame. What I do know is that because I was misheard in such a basic manner -- more basic than in any misunderstanding that I can recall being a part of -- I felt for the first time in my life the barest twinge of discouragement with regard to studying the theory of evolution. It was an emotional reaction, and a logical fallacy: you cannot associate a theory with the personal interactions that you have in debating it. Maybe you can judge people as people, but that is not the factor upon which the theory that they hold should succeed or fail in your judgment -- not if you mean to study it intellectually. And all of us should study the theory of evolution. I remain committed, as a Christian, to truth, which would make it impossible for me to stop listening to true science; and I remain blessed with a happy enjoyment of scientific discovery and literature. Yet I'm troubled by an experience where I sought to learn about ID, making it plain repeatedly that I did not buy ID as a scientific theory, but was told just as often that I had no cause to regard ID as science, and no cause to regard its questions as having foundation anymore.

I've learned that a sure way to drive people away from solid mainstream knowledge is to tell them that their questions are already answered, instead of simply giving the answers, and to imply in any way that their questions are merely hostile challenges akin to conspiracy theories. This is a failure to acknowledge that people have good questions. A teacher who actually knows the detailed answers is certainly free to tell his or her students that their questions are no good, or to suggest that their questions arise from something other than curiosity and a love of learning, discussion, and debate; but such a teacher would be profoundly wrong to do so. I say that if you have questions about gaps in the fossil record, then you have a good question. If you wonder why there are no stars in the photographs of the Apollo astronauts standing on the moon, you have a good question. If you want to know more about Marx's critiques of his society, you're asking good questions. And I have said this before in personal debates, but it should be worth repeating here: if you want to know why Jesus Christ had no biographies written in his own lifetime, I say you have a good question. My having good answers to these questions does nothing to make your question bad. If I take my own knowledge as evidence of your own ignorance, bad faith, or stupidity, I guarantee that I will have contributed to the perception among conspiracy theorists that elite purveyors of knowledge are controlling access to the truth.

The only bad questions are those that occur when the answer is sitting right in front of the questioner; or when the answer is sitting in a place that is easily identified and accessible. And I mean very easy, for even the slightest inaccessibility, however temporary, can warrant a friendly question or request. What is truly objectionable is when good answers are given, and people persist, usually in some open or unidentified bias, in the kind of conspiracy thinking that allows them to conclude that answers are impossible, withheld, or irredeemably tainted. That, frankly, is an attitude in whose shoes I have not been able to walk. Creationism seems to have walked there in many of its claims, and I suspect the same of ID.

For now it is simply enough for me to know that in some very important debates in my life, I now understand how unconvincing I must have been at those moments when I merely and heatedly insisted that the challenge had already been answered, as if to say, we need not look at it anymore. Anything that stops inquiry rather than encouraging it may be called a mistake.

The Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum (BAUT), where I had my recent debate, has Forum Rules that link to a certain thread as recommended reading for anyone arguing alternative theories (they're called ATM theories, or Against The Mainstream). The whole thread is useful and interesting, but this short post especially.

intelligence in the universe

Some recent reflections.

We know with certainty that the universe has come to reflect upon itself in some sense because we, who are a part of the universe, reflect upon it. When we reflect upon its ultimate origins, we are left contemplating a mystery. But it hardly seems uncertain that consciousness has arisen where once there was only unconscious matter.

For the moment, let's think of unconscious matter as unintelligent and merely obeying the laws of nature. We look out on the universe and we see conditions that are, in the immediate sense, hostile to any life or consciousness that might come into contact with it. Nothing, for instance, lived in the early seconds after the Big Bang, when temperatures prevailed which were so high that atoms did not yet exist; nor do we detect the possibility of life in the much reduced infernos at the centers of present-day stars. The heat is too hostile, and so is the crushing gravity.

When we look out in the universe and back into time, or we look directly at the craters of the moon, we see a history of violent attraction between objects. The earth is a rock in a stable orbit around a star. This orbit is a remnant of a violent history; it is an orbit that allows life to grow and finally to look out upon its universe in contemplation of repeated patterns and consistent laws of nature. What we have here is matter that has moved sufficiently away from violence to achieve consciousness. What once dumbly obeyed the laws of nature and was therefore caught up in violence, now finds itself not merely aware of those laws, but also contemplating free will.

Let's acknowledge, however, that moving away from violence into quiet stability is not sufficient by itself to produce consciousness. Many objects in the universe, while no longer colliding with other objects, have ceased also to produce very much activity of their own. These cold bodies we might contrast with the intense violent activity inside stars. Neither extreme can produce or sustain life and consciousness.

Hinduism has certain Sanskrit terms describing these extremes and a middle ground: tamas, rajas, and sattwa. Tamas can be translated as inertia, though the term is not restricted to what a physicist would call inertia. Certainly, gravitational inertia would be called tamas, but the idea can also be applied to a rotten apple, decay, illness, sleep, laziness, stupidity, and death. The moon is, relatively speaking, tamasic. It is inert, or mostly so.

Rajas is all anger, power, and violent movement. The sun's nuclear fire is rajasic. So is war and aggressiveness.

Sattwa is often translated as light. What physics terms as light would be called sattwic, though the term is also used to denote lightness of foot, lightness of being; nonviolent but productive activity; and cleanliness. It denotes fullness of life, not in the broad scientific sense of everything that reproduces, but in the narrower poetic sense of that which lives beautifully. It is not the same as enlightenment, but enlightenment would be called sattwic. To say it another way, sattwa is a prerequisite for enlightenment.

Earth is not merely a rock that ultimately escaped violence; it is full of all the ingredients of life. Most of the elements of the universe are found and gathered here in sufficient abundance and stability, in an environment that is neither too hot nor too cold to produce complex activity. Here the elements interact in such a way as to produce, well, all life that we know, and all life that we are moved to call living or conscious.

Our human history is a story of coming to learn how rajas and tamas lead to death -- or to put it in the language of spirituality, how rajas by itself destroys life, and how tamas merely obeys death. Our greatest teachings remind us not to murder, steal, or give in to any vice; they teach us not to fear or obey death, and to work.

When I step back and try to meditate on God's plan for creation, I do so as a Christian; and Christ's turning the other check to evil is in my eyes the farthest along on the path to consciousness I have described. But all the great teachings, like Hinduism's ahimsa (nonviolence), seem to me to come as God's grace: ways by which God has helped us to understand the laws of nature and our relationship to them. We are no longer material merely obeying the physical laws; we are conscious of our will, and of what circumscribes it; and in being aware of these things, we become the conscious matter of the universe.

From this it follows that the violence that we perceive as natural evil, in what we call natural disasters, does not represent God's intelligence or God's intentional will, anymore than what we call man-made evil represents those things. What seems certain is that God has willed conscious and unconscious matter to co-exist, which means that the latter, being unintelligent, will drown or destroy anything weaker than itself.

The tsunami, we can say, is a part of God's intelligent creation with its natural laws, and is in that sense willed by God; but it is not the direct representative of God's will for the universe, which seems to be that consciousness arise from unconsciousness and live in its midst. Consciousness does not arise separately in a painless universe of its own, because God wills that all matter co-exist. All matter seems related, in deeper ways than the mere fact that we are made of the same stuff. The violence of nuclear fusion may be immediately destructive to life as we know it, but it is tremendously creative; it produces the elements from which all life springs; and then it directly sustains the life that comes into being.

That aspect of the relationship is clear. The obligation on the part of conscious matter toward that which is unconscious is less clear, though much has already been affirmed within the human realm: those who have seen the Light are to love the unconscious doers of evil no less than their own friends. That is clear, if controversial.

Does that extend to the natural world? Certainly, the part of the natural world that we call living calls for our respect. Perhaps that which is destructive and cancerous calls for our respect less than what is living and plainly intelligent, like humpback whales; but there is no question anymore that it all deserves to be honored as life.

And what of the nonliving material world? Is there some sense in which that matter which became human and intelligent can find an active positive meaning in co-existing with earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, floods and other material events that have no consciousness of the death that they cause? Of that I'm not sure -- not because I bear any ill feeling to this part of the natural world, but because I can't really conceive of a relationship with nonliving things.

Environmentalism has sought to invest not just animals and plants, but the material Earth itself, with a consciousness and consequent value. That consciousness does not seem to me to exist, because that which comes into contact with life and destroys it -- even while sustaining life at other times -- cannot be conscious in the sense of enlightenment. That which is destructive in the human world, such as Hitler, can be intelligent, but it is not enlightened, since it destroys when it comes into contact with life and even with knowledge; that which is destructive to consciousness in the material world can be no more enlightened. And unless we invest it with a conscious hostile intent, we cannot even call it intelligent (hence another reason that we cannot find it to represent God's intelligence).

But I do have some positive thoughts about this, which follow from realizing that there is no hard distinction between what we call natural evil and man-made evil. A plague exists right at the border of these two things. Its chief agents are not human; but they are not like the nonliving magma of a volcanic eruption, either; they are living things. And people can bring about a plague, for instance by warring with one another; or they can do very little to stop it. So if there is an unclear border between "living" and "unliving" evil, and we know already that we are called to arise from, live among, and minister to living evil, then something similar must follow with regard to what I call unliving evil.

That plainly cannot mean subjecting the earth to whatever we think is best. Such unreflective confidence would be merely falling back into the imitation of the nonliving violent history from which we arose. Any return to such history, by this paradigm, takes us away from enlightenment. To the extent that we have behaved aggressively with natural resources in the past, we have been merely acting out of our own immaturity.

What I can say tentatively is that we are called in some way to cultivate a material environment conducive to life and consciousness.

God's mind is surely a great mystery. What I observe from looking around is that God has willed us not merely to co-exist with unconsciousness, but to arise from it. In short, it is not merely a tragedy that we take injury and suffer death at times from unconsciousness; we arise from it, and for that reason live with it. Love co-exists with lovelessness, and that seems to be how God wills it.

Evolution is plainly ugly. In the early universe, we see unimaginable radiation, vacuum, supreme cold, collision; on earth we see predator and prey, and truly ugly things like cancer. It is even possible, as recently proposed, that life began in viruses.

And then we see all these things in early human history, and too many of them in the present.

We cannot look into the past and expect to find only the wonders of God’s benevolence. What we can expect to find instead is unconsciousness, and God raising consciousness from it.

Asking for ID

At Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog, I've been posting several comments in an ongoing discussion/debate about the nature and origins of the Intelligent Design movement. This is not a question I'm currently working on, and I doubt I can give it much time, but I would like to get a better grip on this question since it's so much in the news. And it's an important issue in itself.

The focus of my postings so far at Bad Astronomy has been whether and how ID can be classified as a form of creationism.

I've started a thread at the BAUT Forum seeking opinions on this, and would welcome any thoughts on it -- here or there, in writing or in person, or by phone, email, chat, singing telegram, carrier pigeon, whatever.

Mini conjunction

This is the mini-conjunction I've been seeing around Jupiter. I took this photo through the telescope, and adjusted the orientation to match what would be seen through binoculars. In my binoculars (9x63) I saw a triangle made by Jupiter, the star, and the right-most moon.

It should go without saying that the whole scene looks quite crisper than this photo, which is a blurry shot taken with the camera held up quickly to the eyepiece. Well worth checking out; the moons are constantly shifting, so no two conjunctions will be alike.

From left to right, the moons are Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede. The star to the lower left is Nu Librae, or SAO 159028. Photo taken March 2 at 3:21 a.m., New York time.

Cold dome

Above you can see the view that I had from my roof at 6 a.m. yesterday morning. Venus, when sitting alone in a clear sky, is just entrancing, no doubt about it. And I'm also sure that photographs don't get the magic across. Photos are just rectangles, really. There is no substitute for actually going out and standing, sitting, or lying down beneath an all-encompassing sky. I've been doing too little of that in recent months, which is why I'm making a big deal of going out yesterday.

And it was unbelievably cold, because of the wind. The highs in New York these days are just below freezing, but it's the wind that gets you. I blocked the wind by getting behind a chimney on the roof. I sat down, closed my hood, put away my gloved hands and waited another half hour for sunrise. My hope was to see the crescent moon, just about a day and a half away from new -- and no luck. Too many clouds on the horizon.

I noticed that Jupiter, in the binoculars, was making a triangle with two star-like dots to its left. One was in the plane of the ecliptic ("pointing" to Venus from my perspective) and was sure to be one of the Galilean satellites. But below it was another dot, and that did not seem like it could be a moon of Jupiter. It had to be a star. It's just that I'd never seen such a lovely mini-conjunction in the sky. It was truly gorgeous.

The star turned out to be SAO 159028, shining at 5.2 magnitude from 765 light-years away. Just above it, Ganymede was shining at 4.6 magnitude. The conjunctions with this star are still occurring and can be seen anytime that Jupiter is up.

Later that night I visited my sister, nephew and niece in Dobbs Ferry, New York, about an hour north of the city. Leaving the light pollution of the five boroughs is always exciting, and I invited my sister's family to take a little lark with me just after sunset, on the Hudson River. Since the river was barely a minute away, we all went, and the sky was crystal clear -- but the winds were so strong that we stayed in the car almost the whole time, spying on the river with binoculars, and looking for Mercury. I could not locate it until we started driving away. Then we all got out briefly -- very briefly. It was around 6:30 p.m., forty-five minutes or so after sunset. Everyone saw it with the naked eye, including 9-year-old Ian and 6-year-old Maddie. But we all shivered uncontrollably, and Ian was pushed around by the wind when he tried to steady himself with the binoculars.

It was great to show Mercury to my family, since hardly anyone ever sees the planet -- but the night was not fit for observing. I don't even have a photo, because the bones in my hands could not stand being out in the air long enough to play with the camera settings.

Riding home in the car with my father, I could see through the car window an object that I never see in the city without binoculars -- the "sword" in Orion, where M42 is located. It's a shame that cloudy days are warm, and that clear days are so cold, as if we were lying exposed under the cold of space and not just its stars.

Life as Science

I don't usually repeat on my blog the posts I make elsewhere on the web. But earlier today I left the following comment at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site, responding to an analogy he was making -- and the comment I left there just seems to touch on everything that I tend to write about, so I'm pasting it here. I'm also putting it on both my blogs, which is also something I've never done; but as I said, it touches on everything I care about.
_________________

I just want to point out some problems I see with Phil's analogy.

"Those organisms that can handle the input from their environment survive, while those that cannot deal with it fail. Those that can adapt, even marginally, to outside influence are able to better cope with whatever comes next.....

"A scientist who is too stiff, too resistant to change, will find themselves extinct if the evidence from observation becomes overwhelmingly against them.

"Evolution is a fact, both in nature and in science. If more people realized this simple truth, and the beauty inherent in it, then a lot of nonsense would become extinct as well."

Phil is talking about adapting to an environment of ideas. This seems correct; as a layperson not studying evolution myself, the theory of evolution is not a thing that comes to me apart from the ideas of others; it reaches me not as a material fact, but as an idea from the environment of ideas.

But Phil slips into talking about how people should realize that evolution is a fact in nature as well as in science: how we should adapt to the input of nature itself as well as to the input of scientists. All this is true, of course; but the way it's put is problematic. It's the environment of ideas that we're adapting to. People adapt to the ideas that are prevalent in their culture. If I'm religious and I see friendly ideas out there, and other unfriendly ones out there, I live among the friendlies and fight, or take flight from, the unfriendlies. That's how our adaptation looks: it's not so much a rational focus on mere material facts in intellectual theories; what we're interested in is whether everything we care about (including nature, or science, or God, or family, or material facts and intellectual theories) can find a friendly environment in which to grow.

And so creationists and scientists take flight from, or fight, each other, while attaching themselves to friendlies. And both sides regard their opponents as not really paying attention to facts (or at least not to the important facts).

Anyway that's how our adaption to the environment works. We adapt to cultures. We also adapt to material facts, but those tend to be facts about our present material condition, not about whether the earth existed 10,000 years ago. Cultural evolution does not favor necessarily those who have the correct theory about the past. It favors those who can find friendlies, avoid or defeat unfriendlies, adopt life-enhancing ideas (a lot of people, myself included, find religion to be life-enhancing), and influence others.

I'm certain that Phil's analogy will strike a too-broad range of religionists as unfriendly. Religionists are, after all, essentially metaphysicists (like all of us, in a sense, since we all care about much more than intellectual theories concerning material facts). An analogy likes this tells them essentially that they're maladapted creatures. I fully accept evolution, and regard both creationism and ID as wrong, so I'm not particularly vexed by all this; I happen to love Phil's work against bad thinking. But even I feel as if I'm appearing in this analogy like a maladapted creature, just for being someone who thinks that we're responsible for adapting to much more than the theory of evolution.

Like all of us, I care about things other than intellectual theories about material matter; and like creationists, I care about God and about whether my religion has friendlies or unfriendlies. I care about things other than theories about material matter, which is, for me, a problem with an analogy in which the primary thing that makes us well-adapted and destined for prosperity is not anything metaphysical (and certainly not our belief in God), but our adherence to intellectual theories about matter, as brought to us by scientists. Those theories may be correct (and evolution certainly is), but as a non-scientist dealing with much more than matter, my prosperity rests on much more than these theories; and it certainly does not rest on what these scientists have to say about God and all the rest.

If it were the case that adapting to intellectual theories about matter were the most important factor in our prosperity, scientists should have a privileged place; and what they say about anything metaphysical should trump what any non-scientists has to say. I doubt that Phil, for one, believes this; but I see his analogy as having this consequence. A different analogy, in which we're all adapting to cultures and fighting for the things we care about, puts us all on a more equal plane; and it does not suggest that we have to listen to scientists or materialists when it comes to God or religion. That is the great fear of creationists -- that evolution (besides being wrong in their view, because they follow the Bible literally) will be used to promote a worldview in which everything they care about will be marked with labels such as "irrational," "maladapted," "headed for extinction."

A little more attention should go to the cultural war, and into models explaining how we take flight from it, or fight in it; or seek a truce. It seems to me that long lifespan can be expected for all of us if we find a way not just to avoid war (flight) or win it (fight), but to defuse it.

The Googolplex

Time to laugh a little.

The googolplex is a famous number so large that it cannot be written out in a conventional manner. The number of digits in a googolplex exceeds the space available to put them in, even if you printed each digit at the size of an atom and used all the space in the known universe.

A googolplex is unimaginably larger than a googol, which can be written out as a 1 followed by a hundred zeroes, or 10 to the power of 100. Let me write that out (with some help from cutting and pasting):

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Another way to write it out is as 10 to the power of 100, which is 10 multiplied by itself in a string that includes a hundred instances of "10".

10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10.

That's a large enough number. The estimated total number of electrons, protons and neutrons in the known universe is 10 to the power of 80, which is just a tiny fraction of a googol. If you took away the last 20 zeroes in the number above, you would have the total number of elementary particles in the universe. If you imagine that number as P, you get a googol by multiplying P in the following manner:

P x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10.

or,

P times 100,000,000,000,000,000,000.

How would you say this equation? "P times a hundred ..." What? What's the term that comes after millions, billions, trillions, and zillions? Well, if you type "millions, billions, trillions, zillions" into our old friend Google, you find that Word Reference lists a certain "jillion" coming after zillions. Unfortunately it is merely defined as a term for any indeterminately large number. Other sites list a slang term, "kazillion". A more formal table of terms is at Zillions and Zillions!, where I found out that my way of looking at it is American; the European scale is different.

In the formal terms, zillions don't even exist. In the American system, trillions are followed instead by quadrillions, and then by quintillions. So an American would say the above equation as, "P times 100 quintillion." In England you'd say, "P times 100 trillion." Sticking to the American terminology, you would say that the total number of elementary particles in the universe is estimated to be a hundred-quintillionth part of a googol.

A googol, incidentally, would be listed in the U.S. as 10 million trigintillions. I have no idea, even with the table in front of me, how to say that in Europe.

So that's a googol -- 100 quintillion times the number of elementary particles in the known universe.

Here is where it gets funny -- the googolplex. This is a number with a sense of humor. You arrive at it by multiplying 10 by itself in a string such as the one above, where "10" appears one-hundred times -- except that you have to write it out a googol times. That's right. The number typed out above, with a hundred zeroes, is the number of times that the "10" has to appear in such an equation. And each time it appears, of course, the total number grows ten times larger -- but that is by no means the hard part of trying to imagine a googolplex. What's beyond our normal reasoning is the number of times that "10" appears in the equation. If you take on the process of stuffing a "10" into each elementary particle in the universe, and do that entire process 100 quintillion times, you get to write out the equation. Never mind the result.

And that is still just so much talk.

Take your average person weighing around 150 lbs., or 70 kilograms. That person is comprised of about 7 octillion atoms, written out with 27 zeroes. The body's total number of electrons, protons and neutrons is 64 octillion, or 64,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000. That's the number we're starting with.

Multiply that by 1 quintillion (that's 18 zeros). Take 85,000 of those and you've got the mass of the earth. Take 300 earths and you have Jupiter. Take 1,100 Jupiters, and you've got our sun. According to Sten Odenwald's Back to the Astronomy Cafe, estimates for the total mass of our galaxy, the Milky Way, tend to fall around 700 billion times our sun's mass -- contained in around 1 trillion stars. The total number of stars in the universe is estimated -- give or take a factor of 10, of course -- at 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's 80 sextillion stars. (A sextillion comes after quintillions). If you want to say it in terms of the Milky Way's trillion stars, you'd say 80 billion trillion stars. 80 billion Milky Way masses.

Now take the result and multiply it, as we worked out it above, by 100 quintillion. That's a googol.

And that's the number of times you will write out the number "10" on the black board, just to write out the equation for a googolplex.

But I did promise a little laughter.

A very funny site is Googolplex. That will spin your brain. It's one of the oldest pages on the web; back in 1995 it was awarded a distinction as one of the top 5% internet sites.

The page shows you how to print out a googolplex, if you're so inclined. Maybe that's why it's also listed as one of the most useless sites on the Web.

I say that laughter is vastly useful, however. From that site, and with a little exploration, I found myself laughing harder than I have in years -- especially at a site called Gizoogle. Translate any text, or even a web page, into jive.

Now a Googolplex has a 1 followed by 10 ta tha powa of 100 zeroes.

Gizoogle is listed at a page called Pointless Sites. Another distinguished member on that list: The Infinite Cat Project.

All this madness started a week ago by watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Episode 9, "The Lives of the Stars." That's the one that has Carl explaining the Googolplex, trying to write it out on a roll of paper, explaining mathematical infinity (a googolplex is no closer to infinity than is the number 1), exploring the Table of Elements, describing the fates of stars with enormous masses, flattening Alice's tea party under excessive G's, and threatening to cut a slice of apple pie down to atoms (it takes 90 successive cuts). Best of the "Cosmos" episodes.

I highly recommend meditating on the googolplex. A bit of madness will take hold of you for a while, but it will pass.

Cell phone moon

Our friend, Kate Magram, of Kirkos fame, took these shots of the moon last November 20, 2005, just as it was rising. This was her first time taking any astrophotos, and she used a unique camera -- her cell phone. The other instrument was my telescope, which I lugged over to her roof that night -- the same night that Mars and Venus appeared at the potluck. A memorable astronomy session.

The Blizzard

Well, we broke the record. New York got nearly 27 inches of snow by the time the blizzard ended several hours ago. That's half an inch more than the previous record in 1947 -- and the greatest snowfall in this city since these kinds of measurements began.

Ten years ago we got a storm that was called the Blizzard of the Century, and that was just above 20 inches.

It's been a weekend of shoveling snow and reading books. I didn't travel far, but I got a few photos.

The Greenpoint Blues

We're losing our sky here in this part of Brooklyn. Large buildings are going up everywhere in Greenpoint and in neighboring Williamsburg. Look at this picture of two buildings under construction right in front of our kitchen windows:


That's directly west -- where I've taken lots of photos of sunsets, new moons, and conjunctions.


I don't really know how much my astronomy will be effected by this. Much depends on how high these twins go. But it does stick in the craw.

This makes me want to go back to the Southwest -- where Dess and I took our honeymoon -- more than ever. I remember a lot of flat horizons there. Already there's only so much I can do with the telescope here. I can climb up the fire escape to the roof with a camera, but not with anything heavy like a telescope. Except on occasional trips to friends' houses, the scope has to stay on our fire escape, where I sometimes get some nice photos -- but always photos of the same hemisphere of the sky, the western half.

Urban astronomy is something unique, however, that I could never really regret. And now that these twins are going up, I will appreciate any photos I take in the west that much more. I just wish I didn't have to take photos of tall buildings blotting out the vistas that this neighborhood once enjoyed.

Theophilus

Got some fine shots of the moon at around 8 p.m. last night. The moon was 5 1/2 days old, and almost 37% illuminated. Below you can see a close-up near the middle of the terminator. The left-most prominent crater, with a very noticeable mountain in its center, is Theophilus.


From Virtual Moon Atlas:

Type: Crater
Geological period: Eratosthenian (From -3.2 billions years to -1.1 billions years)

Dimension: 104x104Km / 61x61Mi
Height: 4400m / 13300ft
Height/Wide ratio: 0.044

Description:
Circular formation forming a remarkable trio with Cyrillus and Catharina. Tormented and steep slopes overhanging Sinus Asperitatis from 1200m and supporting Cyrillus to the South-East Theophilus F to the West and Mädler to the East. Very high walls with terraces overlapped by Theophilus B to the North-West. Flat floor. Imposing central mountain 1 400 m high with 4 summits. Line of crests hills and craterlets.

Interest: Exceptional formation
Observation period: 5 days after New Moon or 4 days after Full Moon
Minimal Instrument: 10x binoculars

Longitude: 26.4° East
Latitude: 11.4° South
Quadrant: South-East
Area: Theophilus crater North-West region

Name Origine:
Detailed Name: Theophilus
4 th century greek Philosopher born in Greece
Born at: Alexandrie? in ?
Dead at: ? in 412
Name Author: Riccioli (1651)
Name by Langrenus: Ferd. Francisci Imp. Rom. F.
Name by Hevelius: Mons Moschus
Name by Riccioli: Theophilus


Finally, you can see the horn of the crescent, below, near the South Pole. I thought it was cool how far it extended into space.

Venus flashes in Sky & Telescope

Just plugging myself a little here. The March 2006 issue of Sky & Telescope, on newstands since February 1st, contains a photo from my opening blog post back in September. The author, Fred Schaaf, mentions my observations, including the flashing of Venus. The article is not available on the website, but the title is "Return of the Venus Green Flashes -- Part 2" (p. 72). Part 1 was in February's issue.

My thanks to Fred and to the magazine.

Sky of blackness and sorrow

Twenty years ago today, Challenger disintegrated into a fireball and took the lives of seven astronauts. I was 15 at the time and had not lived through any space program disaster: I have no memory at all of Ed White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee. Yet I can remember their names without looking them up, while no name sticks to me from Challenger (or Columbia) except Christa McAuliffe.

I do remember where I was. We were home from school, and my sister came away from the television to tell me that the space shuttle had exploded. Many hours were spent in front of the television that day, hearing the anchors speculate that the crew probably did not survive, and watching the fireball over and over again.


I remember Columbia's loss (above), three years ago this February 1, quite well -- but not necessarily better than the Challenger disaster. I walked into a grocery store on a Saturday morning, bought the NY Times, and looked up at a television playing the news. The anchor said that radio contact with Columbia had failed to be re-established after re-entry, and I think I gasped. Within a few moments I was thinking of a possible terrorist attack. Such were our thoughts then, a year and a half after 9-11, and little over a month before the eventual invasion of Iraq. But in the weeks ahead I just came to grips with the simple idea -- impossible for me to accept in 1986 -- that the shuttle was an unsafe vehicle.

I do not think that the shuttle has been anything less than our most successful manned space program for earth orbit. And its contributions to unmanned programs like Hubble, Magellan, and Galileo -- all of which the shuttle delivered into space -- mean that its contributions to space science as a whole are indelible.

I remember waking up early on a Sunday morning, April 12, 1981, to see the first space shuttle launch. I had been too young to remember the previous U.S. space launch (Apollo-Soyuz in 1975), so it was exciting, and one of the fondest memories of my childhood. In those days I followed every launch of Columbia, every astronaut's name, and practically every orbit. Columbia was my favorite ship -- in space or otherwise. And I admired all the astronauts, John Young especially. Neither of the two subsequent disasters took the life of any astronaut that I knew much about (other than Christa), but I do hope that the shuttle is retired and that something safer takes its place.

As an adult I have been able to imagine the final moments of the lost fourteen with more readiness than I had as a child or a teenager. There is something in these reflections that is more painful, and disturbing, than I allowed myself when I was younger.

So I want to post their photos here, and to leave a reflection by Bruce Springsteen. It comes from his song, "The Rising," and was intended for the victims of the twin towers -- but I find myself thinking of it when I reflect on these losses.

Left to right: Ellison Onizuka, Michael J. Smith, Christa McAuliffe, Francis "Dick" Scobee, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair

Left to right: David M. Brown, Rick Husband, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla, Michael P. Anderson, William McCool, and Ilan Ramon

Sky of blackness and sorrow (a dream of life)
Sky of love, sky of tears (a dream of life)
Sky of glory and sadness (a dream of life)
Sky of mercy, sky of fear (a dream of life)
Sky of memory and shadow (a dream of life)
Your burnin' wind fills my arms tonight
Sky of longing and emptiness (a dream of life)
Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life

Sun shadow

Another shot from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near Broadway and 116th street. At sunset.

Shadow on the wall

Most of my pictures have to do with the sky, but I found this one worth keeping. That's me taking the photo -- and maybe a bird? I took it two days ago at sunset. The yellow-lit building at left is Riverside Church, on 116th Street. The main wall belongs to the Interchurch Center, a blockish sort of building sometimes known as "The God Box."


My apologies to anyone who has been checking this blog and finding nothing new. I've been considering the idea of publishing more frequent and shorter posts. More soon.

Albategnius

This was the southern limb of the moon at 8:33 pm, earlier tonight, at a magnification of 180. The moon's face was 53% illuminated. The crater with the most conspicuous mountain right in its middle, about a quarter of the way down from the top of the photo and almost at the terminator, is Albategnius.

Its description at Virtual Moon Atlas:

Type: Walled plain
Geological period: Nectarian (From -3.92 billions years to -3.85
billions years)

Size:
Dimension: 139x139Km / 82x82Mi
Height: 0
Height/Wide ratio: 0.0287

Description:
Damaged circular formation.
Steep slopes riddled with craterlets.
High walls ridden by many craters whose Klein to the West and
Albategius B to the North.
Large flat floor. White spot to the West. Central mountain.
Depressions and craterlets.

Observation:
Interest : Exceptional formation
Observation period: First Quarter or 6 days after Full Moon
Minimal Instrument: 10x binoculars

Position:
Longitude: 4.1° East
Latitude: 11.2° South
Quadrant: South-East
Area: Ptolemaeus crater region

Atlas:
Rukl map: 44 Ptolemaeus
Viscardy page: 204
Hatfield map: 13e5 / 13f5
Westfall Atlas: 357C 003C/S 161C/S 167C 174C
Charles Wood article: MM137
Lunar Orbiter: IV-096-H2 IV-101-H2

Name Origine:
Detailed Name: Muhammad ibn al-Battani
9 th century arabian Astronomer born in Araby
Born at: Harran in 858
Dead at: Qasr al Djiss in 929
Important Facts: Author of the 'Zidj' improving considerably
astronomical knowledge of his period. Measure of the obliquity of
the Ecliptique.
Name Author: Riccioli (1651)
Name by Langrenus: Ferdinandi III Imp. Rom.
Name by Hevelius: Mons Didymus
Name by Riccioli: Albategnius

Venus at 7 percent

This is something of a disappointing photo of Venus. I've been watching it in binoculars as it grows into a longer and thinner crescent every day. Last night, about 8 hours ago, was the first time I could clearly see a crescent shape at a magnification of 7x. Only 6.6% of Venus' surface was illuminated. But the sky, though clear, was turbulent, and this photo through the telescope shows a crescent that's a little too fat. I took 70 photos, and this was the best. Oh well. Nice way to see out the old year anyway. On January 13, Venus will pass in front of the sun (above it, actually), and will become a morning star again. I look forward to increasingly conspicuous crescents until then.

Last day of strike

The transit strike is over, after 3 days. I've been walking across the Williamsburg bridge every day just before sunset. This is tonight's view from the bridge, with the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges in the distance, and their respective namesakes both visible.

New Venus

Yesterday, New York had its first transit strike in 25 years. On a cold afternoon I started walking to work, from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I walked through places I had never visited before, and got some cool photos; the sky was clear and cold (really cold), on the last day of autumn. Here is Venus above the American International Building (the third tallest building in New York), as seen from Chinatown.

Mars approaching the Moon

Each month, the Moon is coming a little closer to Mars. Last month they came within about two degrees of each other. This is how they looked a little over 24 hours ago, about 3/4 of a degree apart:



In fact they were close enough to photograph together in the telescope, at about 36x magnification:



On January 8, Mars and the Moon will be separated by no more than 1/3 of the Moon's width (or about 1/6 of a degree), shortly past noon in New York, just after the Moon rises. Mars will not be visible to the naked eye, but I hope to try to capture the two bodies thru the scope.

A final note for perspective. It's relatively rare for two planetary bodies -- except a planet and its own satellites -- to come so close that you can see them at once in a telescope. In fact the only other such photo I have is this one at 180x magnification, from June 26, when Mercury and Venus were just 1/5 of a degree apart (Venus is the larger one):

Conjunction in two hemispheres

Here is the Moon, approaching Venus, this past Saturday night, as seen from Brooklyn.




And here are Venus and the Moon twenty-four hours later. The moon's orbit has taken it farther to the left of the sky, as in any photo taken in the Northern Hemisphere, and it has slipped past Venus:


In Australia, Beche-la-mer caught the Moon and Venus at a midway point between these two photos: see this photo, where the moon has not yet reached Venus. In photos from the Southern Hemisphere, as I love to talk about, the moon's orbit takes it to the right of the sky.

Venus over the city

This is Venus last Wednesday, looking down Broadway, near Trinity Church in Manhattan.

Mars and Venus at the potluck

This is Venus two nights ago. It's about 40% illuminated these days, and every day that passes it gets slimmer and taller. This was not the first crescent Venus I've seen, but the first I've seen in a telescope, or photographed at all.

I got to show it to a whole party of people who came to the roof in the cold; the telescope was a hit as usual.


This is Mars a few minutes later. Like Venus, it was photographed at a magnification of 90x. It's actually almost 99% illuminated, since it's at opposition. I'd hoped to get a photo that showed off some surface features, and there are only a few more days before Mars starts to fade and shrink noticeably. I did see some faint brown splotches across the top half of the disk -- which in this visually corrected photo means the bottom half. They were the first I'd ever seen. In the next few days I will try to get a photograph at 180x.

Luna's moon

The Moon, with Mars to its lower left, last night. This was an hour or two after they passed each other in a very close approach. Clouds have obscured their meeting each of the last few months, so I was very glad to catch this one. In the photo, the bodies are only about two degrees apart.


A few minutes earlier. Sometimes clouds produce beautiful effects around the moon, though few are as striking as this one.


Mars alone, in Luna's glow.

Planet and plane

An hour past sunset, two days ago. From our living room window.

Naming the moon

I've been told I have a love affair with the moon. And I believe it. Mars comes to its closest approach tonight, in less than an hour from now, and I'm asking my wife what she thinks the moon should be named. She suggests something Japanese.

Actually I did try to take a picture of Mars tonight, during a rare break in the clouds. Results unsatisfactory. More to come later.

In the meantime I've started a thread at the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today forums, asking for suggestions on naming the moon. I'd love to hear your opinion.

And do I have a name for the moon? None. Not yet.

A photograph I took on August 25th, probably the best I have:

Venus at the kitchen window

From earlier tonight.

At the Empire State Building

Clouds can be nice, too

I saw the sun today after 9 days of clouds, fog and rain here in New York. I can remember longer cloudy periods, but none so intense.



Those were clouds during a sunset in Greenpoint last October. The brilliant red, they tell me, is due to New York's smog.


This was the same scene, more or less, later that month on Thanksgiving morning. Within twenty minutes almost all the clouds had gone.


And this was the full moon the evening of the next day, as seen from Great Barrington, MA. I caught it when it was due East, which tells me that the photo was taken at 7:59 pm, though I have no other way of knowing.

This happened to be the first time I ever saw Titan, the big moon of Saturn. My father-in-law got out his birdscope (magnification of 75x), and the whole family got to see Saturn's rings. It was a terrific evening all around.

Great Barrington was the place where I took a 10-day solitary retreat, shortly before my wedding last year. I was new to astronomy and completely in love with it; I hardly did anything else that week. I wrote 100 pages in my journal about very basic topics, like why and how the sun comes up in a different place every day. I had only brief access to the internet, and I hardly knew any astronomy sites, so I was trying to figure out for myself things that these days I just look up, like the nightly position and identities of Jupiter's moons. I had a birdscope but no telescope, and for much of the time I had no globe of the earth. It was a great experience trying to understand the universe with one's wits and a few instruments. It really gave me a sense of how far our species has come, and how much work was involved -- not to mention mistakes -- in coming to know what we know now.

I got religious about studying the moon's waxing face that week, and clouds were a big deal for me every time they appeared. Two days passed without a glimpse of the moon or anything else, and then this excerpt from my journal:

Great Barrington
June 1, 2004
9:52 pm
In the murky, turbulent, dark clouds I caught patches of strong white light about 20 minutes ago, and I knew the moon was there, well behind its transit of two days ago -- no more than 35 degrees above the SE horizon this time, and nearly turned sideways from my angle. Very eerie scene. At first nothing but white light shone through, and then it would be covered again by clouds, which rolled in all 4 directions and kept opening and closing. Then the moon began shining through, with dark clouds abating but thin and black wisps, or cloudy mists, gliding quickly over the disk.

In my 8x21's I could see the point where Mare Frigoris "spills" its western flank into the Ocean Procellarum, which is now fully visible. To the sea's left, just S of the equator, I could see Grimaldi (crater or sea?), near the western edge of the disk. In the bird scope I could see more, and for a brief moment the clouds revealed a disk so bright that my eye hurt; and many craters, moreover, became hard to distinguish. When the moon is that bright, craters with rays are the most apparent -- Tycho especially. I thought I caught a faintly outlined Longomontanus, while Clavius looks like it's out of view for now, though I can't be certain (and the disk's edge is shimmering as thin clouds pass over). I could also see two craters to the W of Grimaldi (adjacent to it) that are both on my map, though unnamed; on my map there is but a thin sliver not yet revealed.

It's covered now; and nothing else is visible. Not cold tonight at all, and the country is peaceful.

What are planets and moons?

The recent discovery of a planet which has been [nick]named Xena, more distant and larger than Pluto, is stimulating a widespread discussion over the definition of a planet. I've suggested that Pluto should be demoted from the status of a planet, but I find that when I try to define a planet, there is no real need to demote Pluto. I'd like to describe why, but I want to emphasize two things. First I'd like to approach the problem by trying to defining "moon," which is a closely related concept. And I'd like to emphasize the question of time, namely how our categories need to accommodate not just change in our knowledge base as we explore and discover new things, but also dynamic change in the universe.

Let me note right at the start that there are many terms in astronomy which express old concepts but are no longer accurate. We speak of bodies rising and setting. We say that there is a sun and that there are stars, but only in relatively recent times have we started thinking of our sun as another star, or speaking poetically of the stars as other suns.

We speak of the moon, but now we know that our moon is just one among many. Jupiter has four moons, discovered by Galileo, and today we call them the Galilean satellites. When Sputnik launched, we called that satellite the first artificial moon. But increasingly we think of everything in the universe as either bound up gravitationally with other bodies or in actual orbits. The earth, Halley's comet, our sun, and perhaps even the Milky Way galaxy are all satellites of something larger.

Our common sense is that "moons" orbit planets, but since the latter term is ill-defined, I'm not sure we really know anymore what a moon is. But let's say that stars should not be classified as moons. Can we restrict the term "moon" to bodies where gases have never collapsed into nuclear fusion? Jupiter and Earth are two such bodies. So let's restrict the term further to bodies that do not orbit stars or former stars. Well, our Moon orbits the Sun. The latter's gravity acts on the Moon and is enough to keep it, along with Earth, in solar orbit. Astronomers sometimes speak of the Earth and Moon as a double planet system, because they orbit around a focal point located deep inside the Earth, close to the geometrical center of the Earth but not quite there. If the Moon were much larger, the focal point would lie between the surfaces of the two planets: then we would have to decide whether indeed to call them two planets, or to call the more massive one a planet while naming the other a moon. We need to restrict the definition further.

Let me suggest that a moon is a body which orbits a focal point inside the "surface" of at least one body that is non-stellar (by a stellar body I mean an object in which gases are, or once were, igniting in nuclear fusion). If the said focal point lies outside another body's surface or atmosphere (note that the latter's boundaries may have to be defined arbitrarily), then we may speak of a double-body system, rather than a body and its moon.

Suppose that a small body like a comet were to pass by our Moon and be captured into lunar orbit. We would call it a moon of our Moon. The new moon fits the above definition: it is orbiting a focal point inside at least one body that's not a star (it also happens to be in orbit around the earth, and in an orbit around the sun). The original moon retains its status as a moon, because it continues to fit the definition. A capture, unless it changes the original body in some drastic way, should not change the definition of that body. Now, the earth will have two moons: unless drastically changed, Earth will retain its definition, whatever that may be. But Earth will not be called a moon, because it does not orbit at least one non-stellar body. Its primary orbit is around a stellar body. Is that the definition of a planet? That it orbits primarily a stellar body? I think it is, so long as the orbiting body is not itself a stellar object. But I'd like to get at this by exploring one more issue: change.

A capture of an asteroid or comet seems like an unlikely event. But in the early solar system, such events probably occurred. Mars and the gas giants seem all to have captured smaller bodies at undetermined moments in solar system history. We hear today of asteroids passing "dangerously" close to the Earth-Moon system (we even think our moon formed from a collision of a former planet with earth), and though our aged and stable solar system may not be producing captures and collisions now, there is nothing in the law of physics preventing such a thing. There is much perhaps in our models of solar system formation that would argue against the probability of such a thing, but there are many solar systems in our galaxy, all of which will probably challenge our models of how solar systems form.

And even if we stick with our own, let's look at the big picture. In the early years, planets, moons, comets and all the rest were moving around in a riotous roullette; and when the sun begins expanding a few billion years from now, much of the current stability will again be disturbed. The histories of solar systems may contain, what is to our minds, long periods of unstable conditions in which it is not possible to say which bodies are the planets, how many moons they have, which bodies still retain large masses of gas and which ones are "terrestrial", etc. Orbits and masses are variable for much of the life of a solar system.

I think we'd be better off speaking of planets that are currently of a certain class or type: this planet over here currently has its gases and looks like a gas giant; that one over there retains gases but is in an elliptical orbit, and looks like a comet-type planet; another is a terrestrial-type planet with some gases; these others are irregularly shaped planets, of the asteroid-type; still others are Kuiper-type planets; and finally there are what we call Moon-type planets, orbiting not the star primarily but another planet. And for all of these we say, "currently", or "now."

The issue of change seems critical to me because our short lives, and our short history on the earth, makes the universe appear static to us, when actually it is not. It is alive with constant activity, much of it unstable or nascent -- and our stable conditions at this point in time, in this corner of space, make us still less aware of the universe's essentially dynamic character.

A planet much larger than Jupiter might live what we would consider a long time, several million years perhaps, before igniting into a sun. What we called its moons, if it had any, would cease to be moon-type planets (i.e., planets orbiting other planets), and would then become planets of another kind, depending on what the stellar fusion did to them (it could destroy them).

Other factors have restricted our vision of what planets are. Early in human history we saw only lights in the sky and called them stars, with some of them marked off as wandering stars, or planets. Modern science revealed that these wanderers were worlds of great size, comparable to our own world. But we have not seen them in their full glory -- or rather, we have only begun to see them as great, fascinating worlds. Until very recent human history, other planets, and even our Moon, have not pressed upon our consciousness as anything more than lights larger than the stars; they were reputed to be much more, but the details have been slow in coming. Earth-based photographs have started to change our impressions, as have visits by planetary probes; and critically, so have the photos from Hubble. Meanwhile, ground-based telescopes have gotten larger, and more accessible. Now we're starting to realize that all these bodies, even little asteroids and comets, are worlds of size and great interest. And when we visit them personally, our consciousness will regard them with greater equality, as non-stellar worlds.

The more I regard and study the Moon, the more I tend to think of it as a planet. It switches places with Earth twice every month as the third rock from the sun. It is sometimes called a failed planet, but it only failed to become an Earth-type planet. It is quite a massive world when seen in some of the best composites of Apollo photographs from the lunar surface; and it is an interesting world with the same planetary structure (core, mantle, crust) as Earth, and a similar historical process (up to a point). The Moon once had flowing lava and an atmosphere: at one time we may have had to include such a world in a different category of planet, closer to ours. Planets, even in a stable solar system, evolve enough to change categories -- or to push us to change our categories.

In sum, a moon is any object which orbits a non-stellar body; a planet is any object, but not a star, which orbits a stellar body.

Morning Moon Conjunction

This is the photo now appearing in Night Sky magazine. Venus and Jupiter are near the moon, with Jupiter closer. I took it last November 9 at dawn, from our roof in Greenpoint. I wrote very little in my observation journal:

November 9, 2004
7:02 a.m. (26 minutes past sunrise)
Our moon arrived at Jupiter today, so close (just half my 9x63 aperture) that no Galilean satellites were visible (they were IG/CE). Venus and Jupiter now take up almost a full length of my aperture. This is the closest that the moon will get to either planet this month (1.5 degrees perhaps). I took many photos, most from my window, and ventured for only 2 or 3 minutes onto the roof, so cold has it become. Very beautiful sight.

The Spider and the Fly

This fly was a resident of Great Barrington, MA when I photographed it. It lay very still for its portrait, and we wondered if it was dead, but it did fly away after a minute or two. Maybe it was on its last legs.


That's the full photo. Compare with the photo below, which appears in Michael Light's coffetable book, Full Moon.


That's the lunar module Challenger, sitting on the moon in December 1972, during the last of the moon missions, Apollo 17. Geologist Jack Schmitt took this picture with a 500-mm lens while almost 2 miles away from Challenger, which is about 23 feet high. The mountain in the background, the South Massif, of which we can see two white slopes rising steeply, is another 5 miles back. Even the darker embankment between Challenger and the white slopes lies nearly 4 miles behind the lunar module!

The remains of Challenger are still sitting there in the Taurus-Littrow Valley, which was formed when a large meteor struck the moon nearly 4 billion years ago and left mountains on all sides.

The photo captures the full width of the valley. I downloaded it from a website that has a great archive of Apollo photos. On the web there's also a 360-degree panorama of the valley.

Below is a photo of the valley from lunar orbit. I've marked off the spot where Challenger later landed (near the middle of the plain), and the spot where the photo above was taken (at the foot of the mountains to the right).



The first lunar module produced, for Apollo 9, was nicknamed Spider. The most famous of the spiders was the Eagle, seen here with Buzz Aldrin.

Now have a close look at the next photo, from yet another mission.

This is David Scott, the commander of Apollo 15, in the summer of 1971. The mountains behind him, known as the Swann range, are 10 and 1/2 miles away.

The distances in these photos are so deceptive, as the astronauts reported experiencing during their visits. It makes the Apollo photos doubly interesting; you don't know exactly what you're seeing, at first sight. Before reading Michael Light's book, I had always assumed the mountains in Apollo photos were hills. But there are no familiar objects on the moon to give a sense of perspective.

A few weeks ago I was showing my 9-year-old nephew some Apollo photos. I explained that if you were to look at a mountain on earth, you would see valleys, rivers, forests, roads, and perhaps clouds in front of it. That's how you'd know that the mountain was very distant. Remove all those things, and there's no way to know. You could make your way toward an apparent hill and find yourself walking a very long time. The plain in front of you would open up endlessly, tirelessly offering up craters and boulders, and more ground, until you arrived at the base of a 15,000 foot mountain.

I remember being deceived by distances in the Sinai desert, where there are comparatively few objects to give perspective -- fewer than in the American Southwest, which is less deceptive. But the Moon must be something else.

'Scuse Me While I Miss The Sky

Check out this episode of "The Simpsons," which I just saw last week. I love this show.

Meteor Crater

Here are two pictures I took during my honeymoon last August. This is Meteor Crater, also known as Barringer Crater -- a very large hole in the ground in eastern Arizona. It's 4,150 feet wide and 570 feet deep. Dess and I stood near the rim with the evening summer winds blowing very hard at us -- but not quite hard enough to throw us in.


The picture below was taken the next morning.



The Crater shows up quite nicely on Google Earth, especially if you tilt the view; then you can actually make out a depression in the earth. The surrounding rim, which rises 150 feet, is noticeable. Look for it about 20 miles west of Winslow, AZ (the coordinates are 35 degrees, 1 minute, 37 seconds North, and 111 degrees, 1 minute, 22 seconds West).

An image taken from the web:



On the web there's an estimate that the meteor was 150 feet across (compared to the one that is proposed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, at perhaps 10 miles across). It weighed roughly 300,000 tons, and was traveling at a speed of 40,000 miles per hour. The force generated by its impact was equal to the explosion of 20 million tons of TNT, or about a thousand Hiroshima bombs. (A few nuclear bombs have been more powerful than Meteor Crater). It happened about 50,000 years ago, which was probably well before humans had ventured into the Americas from eastern Asia, although these days theories are being overturned so fast that you never know.

The most interesting thing I learned from the onsite tour? That the native inhabitants of this land probably stayed away from the crater and regarded it as an evil place.

A great site about the crater is here.

Green River redux

Here are my two photos from the post below, as nearly as I could reproduce them on Google Earth. I set the altitude in each case for nearly 30,000 feet, to match the plane's height, and then adjusted the tilt in order to view the ground at a slant.



Is it just me, or does Google Earth seem to stretch the earth's surface vertically in their images, especially in this second photo? I can get a Google image that looks closer to the photo I took, but only by flying the plane at 40,000 feet and at other heights that cannot be right. How photo-realistic is Google's imagery?

Google Moon

Speaking of Google Earth, this is a very similar page at which you can zoom in on the surface of the Moon. The highest zoom reveals a surprise:

http://moon.google.com/

Google Earth

I sometimes call this photo "Earth," and I keep it in my astronomy collection. I snapped it a year ago, on the last day of my honeymoon in the Southwest. Dess and I were on a plane headed back to New York, and flying over many places we had just visited, so it was possible to recognize a few things from that far up. The way I remember it, I recognized the Grand Canyon and got the camera out, a little late; by the time I took the photo above, I did not recognize the terrain I was seeing outside the window and I feared that we'd left the Canyon behind; but I still regarded my photo as showing the easternmost reaches of the Canyon. I just figured that such a winding river must be the Colorado. I was almost right about that. But the photo does not actually show any part of the Grand Canyon. I know because I found photos of the very same terrain on Google Earth this past week. Don't read any further if you're into the challenge and you want to try to find it yourself. Be my guest -- it took me 4 hours to find.

When I took the photo, the plane was actually about two hundred miles from the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If you look just above the center, you'll see something like a heart shape. It's much clearer in the next photo, taken with a zoom of 3x. Look at the top right.


That "island" in the shape of a heart was actually carved out by the Green River, somewhat north of the place where the Colorado and Green rivers meet. The gorge around the little island is called Spring Canyon, and it's in eastern Utah, actually not too far from Arches National Park. Follow the Colorado on Google Earth until it forks off into the Green River, then follow the latter to Spring Canyon: the satisfaction at finding something so visually similar to what you're looking for is quite memorable. Google Earth allows you to view any given terrain from a particular height or angle, so that you can almost pull up a facsimile of the photo above.

The program also names every small feature, and the "bottom" of the heart, where it seems the curving edges of the island might be meeting, is called Bowknot Bend; at that spot the Green River almost meets itself, but not quite. I don't know much about the earth's terrain, but this seems to me like something unique. Have a look at this photo of Bowknot Bend that I pulled up at this web page (through Google Images):

And finally, a long shot of the little island, from the same web page:


Google Earth has amazed me so much that I feel at a loss for good words. Neither poetry not precision seems likely to convey the thrill that I've felt over this. After finding the identity of the canyon in the photo, I started looking at cities, and discovered that I could find satellite images of my own neighborhood, here in Greenpoint. I saw corners and bus stops and churches; buildings that I've lived in, including my current home; structures on the roof of my building where I've set my binoculars or rested my back; even some fuzzy blobs on the back of our apartment building, in the spots where I expected to find our kitchen windows. It was enough to make me imagine the face of the tenant, a friend of ours, who lived in our apartment before we moved in. I say that because some spots in our neighborhood where large condos are rising appear in the satellite images as they were a few years ago -- just empty lots or warehouses. Yet the World Trade Center appears as it does today, an essentially empty lot. The satellite images are composites manipulated by computers, obviously. And they do not have quite enough resolution to reveal human figures, though I did see some very light specks on the Riverside tennis courts in upper Manhattan. I saw what might have been cows in the fields of Massachusetts, near my mother-in-law's house.

It's been like a trek into the past, finding my high school, college, seminary, summer camp. Ecuador, I noticed, does not have the resolution of anything in the United States. Here, streets can be resolved on the maps, probably because so many weather satellites are busy looking at us; and even little schools or restaurants can be named, due to the great wealth and collection of information. In the maps of Ecuador I could plainly see the cities, but individual streets were not resolved, much less named, so it will be a while before I find the houses of my extended family. Dess has said that it's somewhat scary to think the government can spy on us this way. I agree; the government for a long time has been able to peer at us from the skies. But I think it's beyond good that such a map of the Earth is being made available to people -- for free. Google Earth is the visual equivalent of a directory or phone book, but it also has census info and other things; and it's much more than all these things. It's the map of a planet and a home.

9-11-05

I took this photo earlier this evening: You can see Venus here, the white dot to the left of the Tribute in Light.

The View from Down Under

I was in touch with Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer, about my photos of the Venus-Moon-Jupiter conjunction. His sky in California has been clouded over but he did say that there were some other nice photos of the conjunction at a blog in Australia called Two Cents, by Beche-La-Mer. Her photos include one bright body that did not appear in mine (the star Spica), and they show the Moon almost touching Venus: Australia turned toward the conjunction half a day after New York was facing it, so Beche saw a Moon that had had about 12 to 14 extra hours to move across the sky. Beche left a comment on my first post and noted how interesting it was to see the perspective from the other side of the planet. I agree, it's actually quite engrossing when you think about it.

Beche's photos have Venus, Jupiter and the Moon in a nearly vertical line while my photos have them close to horizontal. I've been using the sky charts provided by SkyView Cafe and AstroViewer to learn a little more. In Australia (a country I have never visited), the planets and moons of our solar system are rising at a slant in the morning, and setting almost in a vertical line, while in New York the situation is reversed. Consequently Beche was able to catch these bodies while they were still very high in the sky, with Jupiter, for instance, about twice as high at sunset than was the case in New York. (Here, Jupiter was 16 degrees above the horizon at sunset). You can see an astronomical object more clearly the higher it lies above the horizon, not just because the object is far from the city lights typically on the horizon, but because you're looking through less air, clouds, smog, etc. If you saw something directly overhead, you'd be looking essentially through the depth of the earth's atmosphere -- about 100 miles, no more. The light from an overhead object cuts through the air as efficiently as possible before it gets to our eyes. The light from an object sitting just above our horizon has to cut diagonally through our atmosphere before it gets to our eyes. The Moon that I saw the night of the conjunction was clear and white at first but grew more turbulent and yellow as it approached the horizon, which can be seen in the photos I published.

Now the reason that New York and Australia should see objects setting at different angles, or at any angle, is a complex little problem that has taken up more pages in my personal astronomy journals than any other "problem" or subject. More than once I've tried to work out in my head, or with a globe, the best way to think about it or to describe it. What follows is a new description. Comments are welcome.

Imagine you're on the sun and watching the earth spin, with a dark line running along the equator. And where is that line exactly? Well the sun's view of it changes. At the summer solstice in late June, the northern hemisphere was turned directly toward the sun, so from the sun you would have imagined the equator's line to look like a smile; at the December solstice, with the southern hemisphere turned to the sun, you'd see a frown. At most other times you would see something like a sideways smile or frown, one in which only the left or the right corner of the mouth was curling much. I say "most other times" because there are two brief exceptions. At the September and March equinoxes, you'd imagine a straight line representing the equator, running diagonally across the face of the earth. If you think of the round face of the earth as a clock, you would draw your imaginary line from about 8:13 to 2:13 in September, and from about 9:47 to 3:47 in March. The basis for these reference points is simple: the clock represents 360 degrees, with each hour representing 30 degrees, and 47 minutes representing 23.5 degrees, which is only 1/20 of a degree more than the actual tilt of the earth's axis.

On the dates of the equinoxes, the equator runs in a straight line from the sun's perspective. So if you're on the sun on September 22 of this year, and you're watching the earth spinning from left to right, watch for the city of Quito, Ecuador (a country I have visited, since my parents are from there). Quito is almost directly on the equator. You'd watch the city emerge into view at 8:13 on the clock, and it would appear to be making its way directly towards you. You'd watch it move across the earth's face until it arrived at 2:13 and disappeared from view, in a seemingly direct line away from you. Now, from Quito's point of view you'd see the sun and all the planets rise in a vertical line from a point lying exactly East, travel directly overhead, and sink back into the horizon in a vertical line at a point exactly West.

But this would never happen for Australia or New York. Imagine for a moment that the earth's axis is not tilted: the equator appears from the sun to run from 9 o'clock to 3 o'clock. Objects on the equator rotate from 9 toward 3. Someone on the equator sees the sun passing directly over him, any day of the year. But imagine what someone at the north pole sees. The earth is a ball; someone at the top of the ball is almost on the other side of the ball; if he were very tall, lets say many miles tall, someone at the sun might see this person standing on top of the earth. This person is nearly in night-time. Bring this person back to normal size: he sees the sun peeking just over the horizon. As the earth turns him around, he sees the sun going around in a circle that hugs the horizon. It's an extremely narrow angle, in other words, compared to the 90-degree line that the sun forms with the horizon for an observer at the equator.

So it's the curve of the ball we live on that ensures angles for rising and setting objects. There is another way I think about it which is perhaps more direct and simple. At 9 o'clock you see the line of the equator coming to an intersection, an apparently 90-degree angle, with the edge of the clock. A line running parallel to the equator, either above or below, such as the line of latitude that New York sits on, meets the edge of the clock at something other than 90 degrees. A city at 45 degrees of latitude will meet the edge at an apparently 45-degree angle. (New York sits very close to that line). A line running left to right just below the north pole intersects the top edge of the clock at a very small angle; such a line is almost running parallel with the section of the clock's edge that it cuts off.

All this by itself would produce angles for rising and setting objects. But if we go back and imagine the earth with its actual 23-degree tilt, things become more complicated. Now the equator appears as a straight line from the sun's perspective only on the dates of the equinoxes; at all other times it appears to be either a smile or a frown, as either the northern or southern hemisphere tilts toward the sun. Now the line on which New York sits will meet the edge of the clock at an angle further removed from what we could expect if the earth had no tilt. Whatever the exact angle, however, we know that what happens with New York would be the opposite of what happens with Australia, since only the northern or the southern hemisphere can be turned toward the sun at any one time.

This past week the north was tilted toward the sun, as it always is between March 21 and September 21. Between September and March the south will be turned toward the sun. On December 21 the south will be turned to its maximum sunward direction, and the north pole will be pointed at a maximum 23 degrees away from the sun. At that time the equator will look from the sun's perspective like a deep and perfectly symmetrical "frown" in which both corners of the mouth look the same: the frown will meet the left side of the clock at the same angle that it intersects the right side. This will be true for all imaginary lines of latitude: their frowns will meet the sides of the clock at angles that are produced according to how close they are to the bottom edge of the clock, as noted, but they will all intersect the sides of the clock in symmetrical frowns. Objects rising in Australian skies will do so at exactly the same angle that they do when they set. Right now objects are setting close to vertically and rising close to horizontally, as we see in Beche's photos; starting on December 21 and going all the way till June 21, it will be more accurate to say that they're setting horizontally and rising vertically. The contrast between sunrise and sunset will be smallest when the two angles "switch" places on December 21, and it will be greatest on March 21, when the contrast will begin to reduce, on its way to finally reversing itself again on June 21.

Confused? Good. There are good and bad ways to explain these things in words, and I hope mine were not too bad, but in the end words are not going to get these things across. A globe is handier, as is personal experience watching the skies.

A final note: Beche's photos captured a descent of Venus, Jupiter and the Moon that was nearly vertical, but to the extent that there was a sideways descent of these bodies, she saw them moving from right to left. This sideways motion, as noted, would currently be more noticeable in Australian sunrises, but it's there at sunset: if you look at the Moon in Beche's photo, the illuminated part of it is the lower-left section, suggesting the presence of the sun off to the moon's left. By contrast, I saw a lunar crescent curved in reverse, on the lower right of the moon's face: I saw the three bodies and the sun descend from left to right. This can also be seen here at sunrise, though currently the sideways motion at dawn is less noticeable than the vertical.

These perceptions of sideways motion do not reverse themselves throughout the year, since this phenomenon has nothing to do with the changing direction of the earth's tilt. It comes about only because someone in Australia must look north to see solar system objects, while someone in New York must look south. To say it this way can be a bit confusing since we see sunrise in the east and sunset in the west, but I've imagined it sometimes by picturing a very large human figure on the ball of the earth. Someone in New York is looking more or less "down" at the equator when looking out at the solar system and everything in its plane (objects well above or below the solar system are a different story), while someone in Australia is looking more or less "up" at the equator. In short, they are facing each other, so each person's "left" and "right" is a matter of perspective. They would use these subjective terms, but they would still speak of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

Three in a row

From left to right are the Moon, Venus, and Jupiter, at 8:06 pm tonight, forming as straight a line as one could hope for. However they were not so close as last night, when all three bodies fit into a circle only 5 degrees apart; tonight about 8 degrees separated the Moon and Venus, and about 6 degrees lay between Venus and Jupiter. Last night all three could be seen at once, though barely, in the 9x63 binoculars; tonight I could not see any two of them in the aperture.


This shot at 8:27 is the only one I got which shows off the Tribute in Light, which began tonight -- look just to the right of Venus. Jupiter is nearly invisible and about to sink, as it did last night, behind the brilliantly lit spiral top of the Woolworth Building. It did so at 8:28, re-emerged at the other side of the spire two minutes later, and sank for good at 8:32. It hit the Woolworth three minutes earlier than last night, and in a slightly lower spot on the spire.

At 8:33 Venus disappeared behind the Chase Manhattan Bank, the wide box of a building in the middle of the above photo -- the one showing off more office lights than any other. Again Venus flashed blue when less than half of it remained uncovered by the building. When it re-emerged briefly to the right of the Chase Manhattan at 8:38, I did not notice a flash, though perhaps it was because my eyes did not know where the planet would re-appear. Within a minute Venus disappeared again, behind the next building over -- and another blue flash!

I did not notice any flashing with either Jupiter or the Moon.


The moon at 8:45, seconds before it disappeared for the night behind 55 Water Street.

The moon's face was 16% illuminated tonight. It's been four days since new moon, and in another four days the lunar face will be 50% illuminated -- a phase called first quarter, although I usually just call it "half-moon."

I saw a few airplanes fly directly across the moon. One cut through the center, and when it emerged I saw an effect which astronomers sometimes look for in eclipses: when two bodies begin touching or separating, their light interacts like two blobs of water; it's called the "eyedrop" effect, akin to when the setting sun begins touching the ocean. To me it looked as if the airplane's engines were sucking some of the moon's white light, for just an instant, as they pulled away.

Evening Moon Conjunction

Photos do not capture the sky, or the wonder that it can induce. This is a new blog, and that's the first thing I wanted to say. It may bear repeating later on. I took the photo above a few hours ago, from the roof of the three-story apartment building where I live with my wife Dess. Three bodies are setting over the Manhattan skyline as seen from Greenpoint, Brooklyn: Venus on the left, Jupiter on the right, and the moon in between. Venus is currently 102 million miles from the earth, and it's about the size of our own planet. The sun, which always sits around 93 million miles from earth, is to the lower right, having set below the horizon 48 minutes before I snapped the photo. Jupiter, a planet with a diameter a dozen times greater than that of Venus, is neverthless more faint due to its great distance from earth, currently 580 million miles. At this time it is sitting on the other side of the sun from us. Our moon, the smallest of all these objects but by far the brightest, is just 245, 000 miles distant. A little over three days ago it stood almost exactly between us and the sun (new moon phase), and tonight only 10% of its face had become illuminated.


Above, a shot just two minutes later, at 8:10 pm. That's the Williamsburg bridge in front of Manhattan. The spiral-topped building near the right edge of the photo is the Woolworth Building, at 792 feet once the tallest building in the world (from 1913 to 1928). Not quite discernible in front of it is the spiral tower of the Municipal Building at 1 Centre Street. Set off to the right of both is a smaller building, the U.S. Court House at 40 Centre Street, which later swallowed up Jupiter; click the photo for more detail and you should be able to see its pyramid top.


Above, a shot at 8:15. The very bright spot above the left-most tower of the bridge is an airplane, probably heading north to LaGuardia.


Finally, a shot of the moon at 8:21. It disappeared within a minute.

Jupiter disappeared at 8:31 behind the spiral top of the Woolworth Building, and re-emerged to the right of that spiral top before disappearing for good at 8:35 -- as mentioned, behind the pyramid top of the U.S. Court House.

Venus disappeared at 8:37 behind the short flat-topped building sitting just to the left of the moon; we can see virtually no office lights within, and only a dull silhouette of the outline is visible. Looking at Venus through 9x63 binoculars, the planet took a few seconds to wink out, flashing wildly as it did so. In fact it flashed blue in the last instant, when only its topmost portion was visible. I wonder if this is at all similar to the "green flash," a rarely seen effect that happens when the topmost portion of the setting sun flashes green for just an instant. See Fred Schaaf's article "Catch the Green Flash" in the September/October 2005 issue of Night Sky magazine.

And see the November/December issue of Night Sky for one of my photos, which will appear under the title, "Morning Moon Conjunction."

I can remember only a few times when the sky has startled me quite like it did tonight. The feeling is not captured here. But I tell you what, even poor photos can witness to one essential fact: the sights in them do happen, and are not to be missed. For all those who did not know that New York skies produced such sights, or for anyone who enjoys the sky: go out and look west tomorrow (Wednesday). The moon will have moved across a large portion of the sky, and from left to right you will see the moon, Venus, and Jupiter in a virtually straight line, about equally distant from one another.

Have a look, and take a picture.