Few places capture our imagination like Saturn. With its myriad of rings and moons, it shines above us in the night sky as it travels along the ecliptic. It’s always been inspiration for sci-fi fans too. Anyone who’s ever glanced at pulp sci-fi fiction covers might have noticed ringed planets hovering in the background as a elongated oval-shaped finned spaceship rocketed past.
Take, for example, our friend Tommy Tomorrow. Created in 1947, he roamed the heavens in his futuristic 1988 space jet, zipping past a rather featureless Saturn-like planet, as illustrated above, while another Saturn-ish red planet with gold rings spins in the distance.
Early drawings of Saturn. From the Systema Saturnium (Fig. 67)
Early astronomers struggled to draw what they’d seen through primitive telescopes. While they seemed to understand that its appearance changed in relation to its orbit around the sun and the earth, they couldn’t always account for its rings. A quick glance tells the viewer that something’s going on with Saturn, but just exactly what, they couldn’t be sure.
As telescopes grew more sophisticated, astronomers were able to recreate more accurate images of Saturn.
19th century Illustration of Saturn
And photographers capabilities grew, so did their ability to capture Saturn.
A composite photo of Jupiter (1879) and Saturn (1885)
In 1973, NASA launched Pioneer 11. Its mission included photographing Saturn. While previous photos of this planet taken from the Earth resulted in blurry, yellowish images, Pioneer 11’s photos revealed tantalizing clues about its nature, as well as its moons.
NASA image, Saturn and Titan as seen by Pioneer 11
None, though, can compare to the 20-year mission of Cassini. Launched in 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative partnership between NASA and ESA to conduct an exhaustive exploration of the ringed jewel of the solar system. The images sent back are like none other.
NASA, Cassini-Huygens mission image of Saturn
On September 15, 2017, the Cassini mission will come to a fiery end, as it crashes into the atmosphere of Saturn, ending a glorious 13-year run. It’s been an amazing journey, and without a doubt, its legacy will continue to fascinate astronomers and ordinary folk like me. You’ve done well, Cassini!
By now, everyone’s heard the news – there’s seven new planets to consider in the universe. We’ve all read the headlines. Seven lovely orbs holding potential for life, only a mere 40 light years away! Why, that’s practically next door! And some of them hold the potential for life? Incredible.
While it’s nice to consider that we have an escape plan to another world, it’s kind of unreasonable to expect to get to any one of these places anytime soon. Sure, we’re all expecting to hop on a space ship in the next couple of dozen years and arrive at planet du jour within a Einstein’s calculated period. And Lord knows that the folks behind Prometheus practically guarantee travel to new Edens (although not without some pesky grey, hissing creatures with a penchant for sucking people’s innards and faces).
Are there wormholes to get us to these places quicker? Could be. Interstellar makes an excellent argument for that. If those wormholes do exist, the common folk won’t hear about them, at least not yet. Existing in theory and written about aplenty, I’ve no doubt these gateways to universal superhighways are around somewhere.
How then, is it possible to construct a vehicle to travel within the confines of a wormhole? Sure, we can throw a ship together – that’s the easy part. I’m wondering how a ship might be able to withstand whatever that wormhole throws at it – pressure gradients, temperature, forces binding the wormhole together. Or suppose the wormhole is a perpetual vortex that leads to nothingness? Once trapped inside, the travelers can’t break free and are subjected to extremes not even imagined?
Could there be different categories of wormholes? There must be. Just as there’s different types of highways, roads and streets, wormholes have characteristics. Some may be dead ends, short jaunts or long, winding roads. There could be ones that have celestial potholes, breaks, connect at junctions or turn back on themselves.
Suppose we do discover a wormhole in the neighborhood of Jupiter, as mentioned in Interstellar. Do we send our best and brightest through it just to see what happens? Do we travel to the unknown hoping to reap the benefits of what other places and methods of navigation can teach us? How do we steer our crafts, once caught in a wormhole if we don’t fully understand what they are in the first place? What is speculation and reality? Or will time trick us to believe there is a light at the end of the wormhole, only to find out we’re no longer able to function because of the forces of the universe bearing down on us? If we’re not able to return to Earth, what good is the journey to begin with?
Eventually, some intrepid group of astronauts will go forth to see what’s out there. We may never hear from them again. But they might find another system such as Trappist-1, and create a world that no citizen of Earth may ever be so fortunate to imagine.
This month proves to be a bonanza for Mars and Saturn fans! Take a look in the southeast and you’ll notice the giant fishhook that is Scorpio. You can’t miss it and if you glance at the top three stars, they form a crooked line. Here’s a better example of the constellation:
Credit: H.A. Rey, “The Stars”
Mars slips across the southern sky, so incredibly bright, you can’t miss it. If you’ve been keeping your eye on it, you’ll notice every night it’s in a different spot, competing with Scorpio’s Antares (magnitude: 1.22). Mars is a fair distance ahead of Antares, so you can’t get them confused.
Saturn isn’t in as much of a hurry as Mars, but still commands attention. During June, the ringed planet is its closest to the Earth, and, as an added bonus, has its rings nicely tipped at a 26 degree angle, showing them off nicely for you. It, too, is in Scorpio, just above it.
Scorpio also happens to be one of my favorite constellations, glimmering all summer long. When I see it rise, in earnest, in May, I know summer isn’t far behind. It glimmers and shimmers. It never rises that high, but you can’t miss it when it’s here.
In the early morning sky, you can also see Comet Pan-STARRS near the constellation Capricorn low in the souther sky. It comes into view around 4:00 am.
If you happen to have a telescope, all of these are worth seeking out. Even a strong pair of binoculars make a difference, especially with the comet.
Here’s a brief video from NASA JPL with more details regarding Mars, Saturn and Comet Pan-STARRS. Take a moment this weekend and look south – nature will reward you with its charming beauty!
Credit: Trustees of the British Museum/Mathieu Ossendrijver; NASA (both as shown in the New York Times)
Today I read in the New York Times an article about ancient Babylonians tracking the movement of Jupiter. It’s a remarkable discovery because the tablets dating from 350 BC to 50 BC (above is an example) revealed sophisticated mathematical equations comparing the motion of Jupiter across the sky. Cuneiform pressed into clay tablets detailed a graph which calculated the velocity of Jupiter’s travels in a given time. It was originally thought that this sort of calculus was first used in the Middle Ages.
Babylonians called Jupiter Marduk, the god of water, vegetation, judgement and magic. If you think about it, all four of those things might have been intensely important to a city-state. The fortunes of any population depend upon its ability to feed itself, and during dry times Marduk’s powers might have been called upon ensure the Tigris and the Euphrates kept flowing. Otherwise, without growing crops, it might have taken a bit of magic to keep the peace, and judgement must have come swiftly if Babylon’s citizens acted in a way not befitting of its patron god.
Marduk, I’ll have you know, didn’t come by his godship easily. It’s a bit obscure how he came into being as a mythological entity and it seems he went by 50 other names. During a civil war between the gods, Marduk, as a young god, offered his services to the Anunnaki gods, telling them he’d defeat the other warring gods and bring order. In return, they’d make Marduk the head god. Arming himself with all the elements and forces of nature, Marduk emerged victorious and took his rightful place as the one all others showed deference.
Somewhere in here’s a great story waiting to be written. No, not the trope where the ancient tablet is picked up by some unsuspecting archeologist or museum security guard and all hell (literally) breaks loose. Here’s my idea:
These hunks of clay talk to people via an ancient language known only to a few. An elderly professor, trying to prove he’s still relevant, goes into a collection and uncovers a cuneiform tablet no larger than a slice of stale bread. He’s seen it thousands of times, but realizes it’s been misinterpreted. A chip off of a corner, missing for years, turns up and changes the entire meaning of the message. It’s a message from Marduk himself, who foresees a wonderful vision that will only arise under exact circumstances. The elderly professor tries to show his revelation to the department dean, who dismisses him and accuses him of dementia-related hallucinations. Another professor, also getting along in years, is the only person who believes him. Trouble is, this person is on the other side of the globe and speaks another language. The two can only communicate, it turns out, in cuneiform symbol script. Both have age-related illnesses and it’s only a matter of time the two of them work together to solve the problem and bring the prophecy to life.
Hope you didn’t make any plans to take that much-needed restful vacation to Puerto Rico from September 15-28, 2015. And while that’s the heart of the hurricane season, this wrath-of-nature event’s going to create giant waves not as the result of intense low pressure, but the crashing of a honking huge space rock. Yes, folks, this sucker’s got our name on it and it’s that apocalyptic nightmare we’ve been long warned about. So if any of you were thinking about paying bills or going to college, your time’d be better spent making plans of an otherworldly sort – the kind that involves a sudden belief in religion and hoping that all of those priests, preachers and other sorts are right.
NOT!
Oh geez, here we go again. Once again, life on Earth is going to end. Or that’s what they’d like you to believe on the internet.
So much buzz and inquiry flew around in cyberspace that the American authority on such matters, NASA, had to release a statement that categorically denied our home planet’s days were numbered.
As things go, this latest rumor of our planet’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. There is no asteroid, the Earth is still planning to turn and as far as vacations to Puerto Rico are concerned, it’s still hurricane season and you still might want to check the forecast before you leave.
Back in 1982, a rare alignment of all nine planets (back then, Pluto was considered one) occurred. Our entire solar system lined up within a 95° arc, all on one side of the sun in March of that year. This amazing event prompted horrific rumors of devastating earthquakes, shifts in gravitational forces and life as we know it’d go the way of Betamax players (also popular at the time). And no Earth-ending force would be complete without California’s San Andreas fault sliding off the West Coast and offering the residents of Arizona the beachfront property they’d been longing for. Of course, no one would have even given this planetary lineup a second thought had it not been for the book written by John Gribbin, Ph.D., and Stephen Plagemann, called The Jupiter Effect, published in 1974. For some reason, nothing really happened except nighttime sky observers had a fantastic view. Not long after, Gribbin and Plagemann published, The Jupiter Effect Reconsidered, backtracking to say the actual event occurred in 1980 and was responsible for the monumental eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Finally, in 1999, Gribbin admitted he might have been mistaken about the whole thing.
There seems to be no end of apocalyptic predictions, it seems – humankind thrives on them. Most of them seem to revolve around Christ coming again and bible predictions, or some deity wreaking havoc, or even a random event magically pull the plug on our planet. To illustrate, Wikipedia has a fairly comprehensive (although by no means complete) list of popular end-of-it-all predictions. Suffice it to say, we’re all still here.
Why is it seemingly so popular to want life to end on our planet? Lots of reasons. Those in power used it as a means to control less sophisticated types, while others, through limited means of scientific understanding, considered such celestial events as comets to be a omen of death. The same goes for plagues, droughts and other extreme weather events, earthquakes, eclipses and more. I remember as a kid hearing Pat Robertson of the 700 Club predict the world would end in 1982. Why? He was a big fan of the Antichrist and figured that’d be a good time as any for the devil to show up. That, and this prediction bolstered viewers for his popular TV show. Hey, wouldn’t you want the latest details of your demise? Of course, if you were God’s Chosen, you’d be lifted up in The Rapture…and all of his viewers were special, natch.
Alas, as long as humans trod the earth, there will be naysayers for its future. The Assyrians are famously known for making this oft-quoted prediction, way back in 2800 BC:
“Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”
While all eyes were on the nonevent taking place in the Hudson Valley of New York (and elsewhere), there was quite the show taking place above that taunting canopy of clouds.
That’s right, I’m talking about the flyby of Asteroid 2004 BL86.
This little world blasted past our very own Earth and if you were lucky and had the right viewing opportunities, you could see it. I’d been hoping for a clear sky, as I’d been itching to take the new Celestron out behind the garage and see what I could see. Alas, it wasn’t to be – clouds with a tiny sprinkling of snow dropping from them – but that hasn’t stopped my fascination with BL86.
Take a look at the NASA/JPL film I’ve enclosed with this blog, as well as this excellent link from the same source. BL86 is a round asteroid with its own munchkin moon, which I find utterly charming. That moon isn’t much larger than our back yard, and here it is, making a name for itself while partnering with BL86 as it graces our solar system. True, it came within 745,000 miles/1.2 million kilometers of the Earth. That only means it stayed far away enough to mind its own business yet close enough to give us a good flirt and a wink.
Can you imagine if you were one of the inhabitants of that tiny world? How your view changes as the days whirr past while zipping through the solar system. It’s almost as if it’s shouting “wheee!” as it goes on its tilted orbit around the sun, waving hello every now and again.
If you have enough patience to wait until 2027, there might be a second opportunity to see yet another asteroid, 1999 AN10, grace our planet with its near presence. It, too, is expected to pass rather close…and raising the inevitable alarms that it has the potential to blast us out of existence.
Ah well.
Until then, keep your eyes to the skies, and always continue to be surprised!
Afternoon analemma photo taken in 1998-1999 by Jack Fishburn in Murray Hill, NJ. Bell Laboratories building in foreground
Have you ever noticed in the mornings, from about mid-December to around mid-January that the sun rises the same time every day? Even though the time of the setting sun changes, the dawn keeps breaking at 7:21 am (or whatever time your sun happens to rise, depending upon where in the world you live). It’s as if it’s stuck, needing an extra nudge to get it moving. Once again, from about mid-June to mid-July, the same thing happens with the sun once more.
As illustrated in the photo above, this phenomena is called an analemma. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as, “a plot or graph of the position of the sun in the sky at a certain time of day (as noon) at one locale measured throughout the year that has the shape of a figure 8; also: a scale (as on a globe or sundial) based on such a plot that shows the sun’s position for each day of the year or that allows local mean time to be determined.”
So, if one were to take a picture of the sun at the same time every day, from exactly the same position, you’d more or less wind up with a figure 8. It’s proof that the Earth’s axis is tilted at 23.439°. However, the angle at which it’s seen changes wherever one is located on Earth. The above was taken at roughly 40° north. Here is a picture taken at Veszprem, Hungary, which is latitude 47°:
Here’s an excellent link from the Washington Post that illustrates how the sun moves in the sky through the months.
And who can forget the moon? Since it rises and sets, it too creates its own analemma. However, the moon rises 51 minutes later every day, so in order to successfully photograph it, one has to take that into account. Understanding that means the moon returns to the same position 51 minutes later, in accordance to its rising. Still, with patience, one can create an excellent example of what the moon can do, although one has to also remember it has phases. That creates a wonderful variety of shapes. Here’s an example:
Earth isn’t the only place where the analemma occurs. Any planet where the sun shines also shares this perspective, although it’s teardrop shaped on Mars:
Digital Illustration Credit & Copyright: Dennis Mammana (Skyscapes)
Why the different shape? Here’s the explanation from NASA:
“On planet Earth, an analemma is the figure-8 loop you get when you mark the position of the Sun at the same time each day throughout the year. But similarly marking the position of the Sun in the Martian sky would produce the simpler, stretched pear shape in this digital illustration, based on the Mars Pathfinder project’s famous Presidential Panorama view from the surface. The simulation shows the late afternoon Sun that would have been seen from the Sagan Memorial Station once every 30 Martian days (sols) beginning on Pathfinder’s Sol 24 (July 29, 1997). Slightly less bright, the simulated Sun is only about two thirds the size as seen from Earth, while the Martian dust, responsible for the reddish sky of Mars, also scatters some blue light around the solar disk.”
Each planet, given its north-south axis tilt and shape of its orbit, has its own analemma shape:
Mercury – nearly straight line
Venus – ellipse
Mars – teardrop (as illustrated above)
Jupiter – ellipse
Saturn – figure 8, but with tight northern loop
Uranus – figure 8
Neptune – figure 8
Let me add that you don’t necessarily need a camera to record the sun’s analemma. Think back to the movie “Cast Away” wherein Tom Hanks marks on stone where the sun travels throughout the year. You can make note by just looking out the window and the same time each day, seeing where the sun happens to be at the same time each day. It’s pretty cool. Try it!
I have to trumpet the best present I’ve ever longed for and received – a brand spankin’ new telescope! And not just any telescope, my own Celestron NexStar 130SLT! I’ve always lusted after one of these, and now, I OWN ONE. Just in time to see Comet Lovejoy! I’d like to take it outside tonight, as it’s nearest to the earth, but we’ve had some snow and I don’t know if the sky’s going to clear in time. That, and it’s WELL below freezing tonight. Still, that’s the optimal time to gaze at the heavens, because there won’t be any of that nasty haze interfering with the brilliance of the winter nighttime sky.
For those of you who own or have access to telescopes, the best thing about them is how it changes your perspective on what’s up there in the nighttime sky. I had my first one at 12, but then it fell off the roof when I was trying to focus in on Comet Kohoutek. That ended that. Over the years I’ve belonged to astronomy clubs and peeked through fellow amateur astronomers. Now, for the first time in years, I have one that’s powerful enough for me to zoom in on not just the planets, but Messier objects, novas, galaxies, double stars – the works!
My husband used to look up at the evening stars with his father back in his native England. Their back garden in Launceston, Cornwall offered a terrific view, since it was near the top of a hill, without much to obscure the stars. After life at 40.7127° N, 74.0059° W for years, I had a chance to see things at 50.6350° N, 4.3540° W. My eyes, formerly trained to look at my favorite celestial objects at a lower latitude now had to focus somewhere else. That only took a moment, but it also meant that I couldn’t see a few constellations I’d grown used to seeing skirting the horizon at my latitude.
It’s fair to say Andrew’s into this scope just as much as I am. He’s a photographer and this Celestron has the capability for nighttime picture taking. I personally can’t wait to get the thing outside and pointed upwards. Truth be told, I don’t care where I look. There’s sure to be something wonderful when I peer into the eyepiece, and I can’t imagine being disappointed at what I’ll see.
Yes, I’ll admit I’m a geek. I married one, too. So of course we felt it necessary to see “Interstellar.” We read up on it, exchanged speculations on the theories behind it, compared different viewpoints, opinions, reviews, all of that. After all of this effort, a sensible decision was cast to go and see it, already.
So last night, after first ducking into Target to purchase some chocolates to stick into our pockets so we wouldn’t have to pay the ridiculous price of $4.oo for a $1.oo candy bar, we went. It was great to go into a theatre filled with our kinds of people, equally geeky and completely silent during the showing, with only the rare murmur of approval over a spectacular scene.
Naturally, we weren’t disappointed. Both of us loved it and spent the ride home discussing it. And I could go on about this, that or the other thing regarding the vagaries of space-time travel and the physics behind it.
Why would I? You know all that anyway.
What got me were the small touches, the little hints of things to come and viewpoints either behind the characters or the writers who invented them. First on my list were the books on the shelves in Murph’s bedroom. How many of you took a good look at them? Here’s two that caught my immediate attention: “The Stand” and “Outlander.”
“Outlander” caught my eye because Diana Gabaldon wrote this book regarding a portal that transports a woman through time, and Stephen King’s “The Stand” because the human race is nearly killed off in that one. Both of those elements were the story in “Interstellar.”
Actually, books do figure prominently in the movie. Take, for example, the school district’s reliance on “corrected versions” of history. The moonwalk was all propaganda to economically bankrupt the Soviet Union. After all, the Soviets never made it to the moon, so that propaganda campaign must have worked. Yet Murph refuses to believe it all and listens to her father, who reinforces the truth.
All that talk about chemical compositions and how it affects environments and circumstances also gave me the goosies. The way how too much nitrogen in an atmosphere isn’t ideal or any atmosphere’s makeup is so sensitive to various forms of life made me smile.
But really, when you get right down to it, the use of time as a resource and element defined the film. Everything from the father Cooper as a younger man visiting his daughter Cooper as she lay dying, much older than he (all right, how many of you also knew that was Ellen Burstyn?), to the astronaut left behind for 23 years when Brand and Cooper seemed to be gone only minutes? Or the gradual shift of Earth from viable to slowly dying, which seemed to take both an interminable and finite amount of time?
I could go on about many, many more things about why we enjoyed “Interstellar” so much, but that would take time, so if you haven’t seen it, take the time and go!
The New York Times had an excellent article on the possibilities of life Out There. You know, all that space that the universe occupies. According to Carl Sagan, there was no reason not to expect life that was comparable to humans. But if you asked the competition, evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, we were it. Sure, it was reasonable to expect primordial soup in other locales, with perhaps a few vegetables thrown in for variety, but Mayr was steadfast in his beliefs that the chances for humanlike life anywhere but here was slim to nil.
Naturally, there’s also that school of belief that attests to aliens living among us, including the abductees who’ve been tested and probed. Those unexplained sightings of strange ships hovering over dark highways in remote locations – that can’t be fake, eh? There has to be something real under Area 51, right? After all, why do they protect it so fiercely?
If you ask me, I’d bet the rent on life existing outside our little blue dot. Compare it to the lottery. The higher the stakes, the more players become involved. Eventually, a number’s picked and a winner is paraded before cameras as the newest bazillionaire. On occasion, though, there’s more than one winner, and regularly three or four. I’m no mathematician, but what are the chances that several people will bounce into the local gas station, drop $20.00 on gas and another $3.00 bucks for a few Powerball tickets and all come out winners? It happens. So why not expect life on other planets?
Carl Sagan maintained that sound waves generated from TV and radio drifted out among the stars would signal to intrepid space voyagers our existence. That was detailed in Contact. Those sound waves possess properties that cause them to stretch and grow as they wander further from their source. By the time those waves are detected, what discernible information remains attached to these signals would be challenging to interpret. But then again, the right exoplanetary scientist might find them an intriguing prospect: thin signals meaning what? A project to research, to turn heads into another direction to discover their source? Our planet, uncovered at last?
What’s to say there isn’t a planet with inhabitants who share the dreams of finding others, only to be told the possibilities are so incredibly remote it isn’t worth a bother?
Here’s how I see it: out there, far from Earth, a soul ponders what bioforms rose and prospered elsewhere in the abyss of space. Technologically advanced to send out space probes, this soul launches a machine capable of seeking clues, if not evidence. Time passes, the soul dies, but other scientists take this soul’s place and keep on with the vigil. Eventually, the machine wanders so far away from its home planet that even its trail of crumbs grows cold. After a great deal of time, the machine is lost to memory and passes into legend, but the language on the foreign planet evolves to the point where even the legend transforms into a mystery and eventually forgotten. Meanwhile, life on that planet succumbs to its own evolution as its inhabitants face other issues that seem more pressing or trivial, but interest in further explorations has shriveled as it’s become necessary to focus on the lack of rain, food, or a dwindling resource that is elemental to the stability of life on said planet. Or, life for the other planet’s inhabitants is fulfilling, and therefore interest plummets because all needs are met and exceeded. Curiosity fades as the inhabitants indulge in The Good Life and place high importance cultivating perpetual happiness.
On a peaceful September morning, blue skies except for drifting patches of cumulus clouds, a flash streaks across the sky. Whatever caused it crashes into a suburb of a medium-sized city, resulting in a fair amount of damage to both the landscape and the object. Upon cautious examination, its solid core leads Earth scientists to believe it’s not merely silicon. Placed in the hands of a particularly observant scientist, a barely imperceptible vibration reveals a secret only a sensitive hand would notice. “Hey,” says the Earth scientist, “I think we got something here…”
No alien spaceships, no apocalyptical force, only a simple device, badly damaged and time-worn, offers a clue to a glorious civilization similar to our own, whose own culture is seemingly lost to the wastelands of space and disbelieving souls.
Trappist-1 System – NASA
Moon, Stars and Beyond 