Galaxy

"Hurricane" by Chelsea Bredeson-Hayes was a gift from Barbara yesterday. When I first saw it, I thought of a galaxy.

Click on the image to enlarge.

The Tempest in the sky

Yesterday Barbara and I went to see a performance of the stage-play "The Tempest" by William Shakespeare. Barbara had encouraged her philosophy students to see this production of the NC Shakespeare Festival due to the connection with "Ship in a Bottle" from the Star Trek: Next Generation TV series. I just went along for the fun.

Then the names of some of the characters reminded me of astronomy:

Ariel, the air spirit and a major force in the story, is also the name of one of the smaller moons of Uranus. The solar system body is covered with impact craters and long rift valleys, Damaged not too unlike the character on stage.

Miranda is the name of Prospero's daughter in the play, a young woman easy to fall asleep and not very experienced when it comes to men. Miranda is also the name of another small moon of Uranus, the surface of which looks like a jumble of different features not carefully reconstructed.

Ceres and Juno are sprites in the Shakespeare comedy. They are also two of the four largest bodies in the main asteroid belt.

Isn't it wonderful that astronomy is almost everywhere?

Observing the Moon

Last night was International Observe the Moon night, and in celebration, I observed the Moon!

It was a grand evening with a guest list of about 50 folks, including movers and shakers of Greensboro (a former mayor was there!)

We looked at the waxing gibbous and talked about distance and American flags and a variety of other related and unrelated topics.

We took a peek at Albireo and spoke of color, temperature and mass.

Finally the giant of planets, Jupiter, rose above the trees and we spied the 4 Galilean moons.

Hope you got to look at the Moon last night. We saw 5.

If you missed it, tonight is not too late.

Three Planets plus at the Observatory

Last Friday the clouds played hide-and-seek, but the folks at Cline Observatory had some nice views of a globular cluster, the Bay of Rainbows on the Moon, and planets.

Venus was the first "star" to be found by a guest, a game we sometimes play. Venus is so bright and so high in the early evening sky, it is easily the evening star.

Mars was a rusty spot more difficult to discern. The clouds were not kind to us here.

Saturn's ring is slowly increasing it's tilt from our perspective. It was just last year that Saturn experienced "zero degrees inclination." We are now beginning to see more and more of the "northern" side of the rings as Saturn's north pole tilts toward us.

Senses

I grew up learning that we humans possessed five senses. Can you quickly name them?

touch

taste

smell

sound

sight

What is a sense? My handy dictionary says, among others,

"a specialized animal function or mechanism (as sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch) basically involving a stimulus and a sense organ."

I just finished What If the Earth Had Two Moons? by Neil Comins, and he posits an interesting wrinkle to our understanding of senses. Comins writes that two other senses are usually left off the list taught to children, and they are "heat and gravity."

We can put our hand near a fire and feel the heat, but are we using the same sense organs (nerves) we use for touch? Does that make "feeling heat" a part of the sense of touch?

And what sense organs do we use for gravity? To sense when we are falling, do we use another sense organ other than our eyes (seeing the environment pass by) and nerves (feeling the wind, friction and impact)?

What do you think? Seven senses? Or five?

Lost in Space

This past Friday evening, Dr. Steve Danford (UUC-G) addressed the Greensboro Astronomy Club regarding the future of America's space program. Steve's always a good presenter, and he can even make sense out of the chaos we call NASA.

He shared a graphic from Dr. Harry Shipman (University of Deleware) that puts the major issues before us and guides us to logical conclusion.

If I read this correctly, if we find that some things are best made in space ("space industrialization") AND we find celestial resources to live independently of Earth ("Extraterrestrial Resources to Support Humans") we will see, sooner or later, full human settlement of outer space, with a thriving space station or two and some colonies on the Moon, Mars, and other locales.

If, on the extreme other hand, we find neither things to make in outer space, nor resources on which to live, we will have a future with robotic explorers and telescopes.

What do you think? Does this approach make sense?

Turtle in the Road

Coming home from shopping today we encountered a big and dirty Eastern Painted Turtle in our street.

We use to be able to walk to Hester Park from our house, but the addition of Painter Boulevard has cut off not only our path to the park, but the route for animals as well.

I've noticed that the Japanese Beetles have not been eating our Purple Leaf Plum trees like they use to. We're also seeing fewer raccoons and possums.

So where this big turtle was going, and how it was planning to get there, I am at a loss.

We loaded him in the car and drove him to the lake at Hester Park. Boy did he seem happy, although the geese seem to be a little disappointed.