Sharing the Moon

Greensboro has a nice new park downtown, and the site has become a magnet for folks and events. I took my 6 inch Celestron telescope to the park today for a couple of hours.

I was in the shadow of tall buildings for most of the hours I spent there. The Moon peeked above a building around 4 o'clock and other park patrons took turns looking thru the telescope. The Moon is currently just past 1st Quarter, and we could see the rugged southern area as well as the large mare on the western limb.

I got the usual questions about the size of the Moon and its distance from Earth, the relative distances to the Sun and the Stars, and so on. One guest was very knowledgeable and professed that he had done a good amount of research to support his belief that the world "as we know it" will end December 21, 2012.

I mentioned the 100% track record of such predictions being wrong, and he talked about the Federal Reserve Board and fascism. The Haitian earthquake, the increasing number of sunspots, and the Book of Revelations were all too much for him to dismiss, so he seemed firmly grounded in the "true believer" community.

Where do we learn?

Last week a tragedy happened. A young college student was recorded without his consent and the activity was broadcast on the Internet, to his embarrassment.

The young college student then committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.

Where do our young people learn such outrageous behavior and why do they think it's OK to blindside and embarrass others?

Above is a still image from a current TV ad in which one person records a video of another doing something potentially embarrassing. The video gets posted to the Internet.

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?