Celestial Drama

 "Dramatic" is not a word often used to describe any Deep Sky Object. Beautiful, yes. Spectacular, awesome, breathtaking, even mind boggling. But dramatic? Very seldom, and most often when the term is used, it's not really appropriate. For drama requires action - action that can be seen. And for the most part, the stars (and everything else outside our Solar System) are, from our human perspective at least, eternal. To witness movement, change, and events... well, you have to stick closer to Home. Fortunately however, the Solar System provides drama enough. No one need bemoan any lack of activity there!

I thought about this Tuesday night, as I observed the Grand Conjunction (one day late, due to some unfortunate clouds on the night of closest approach). Here was drama indeed! Yes, I am aware that the characters in this celestial play were separated by a half billion miles, but they appeared to have survived a near miss. My eyepiece was positively crowded with planets and moons. Once again, as with the 2019 Transit of Mercury, I could feel in my bones that we lived in a Solar System, and not just in a collection of planetary odds and ends circling a sun.

I'm no scientist, but I have faith that someday there will be a science of planetary ecology, and we will study the interdependence of the various components of the solar system in the same way that we today study biological habitats here on Earth, in which every lifeform is dependent upon all the others to survive. Perhaps the concept of a "Goldilocks Zone" is way too simplistic. The habitability of the Earth may depend on our distance from Jupiter, and even on Jupiter's distance from Saturn, as much as our own distance from the Sun. And this is not to mention the likely role of Kuiper Belt Objects (or else comets) in explaining our watery surface, and the Moon's possible role in plate tectonics.

So enjoy the drama the solar system offers! On the way home from observing the Grand Conjunction, I considered where did this experience rank with other similar occurrences I've observed? And list maker that I am, I couldn't resist coming up with a "Top Ten" dramatic events I've seen in my time.

And here they are:

1. The 2017 Total Solar Eclipse - no contest there.

2. The Grand Conjunction - hard to beat that crammed field of view.

3. The Transit of Venus - made even more significant by the rich history of past transits.

4. The Perseid Meteor Shower during my first Stellafane (about 6 years ago) - never before or since did I ever see so many meteors (more than 60) in so short a time (a little over 3 hours).

5. The Transit of Mercury - not as photogenic as Venus's, but I did get to see the whole thing.

6. Comet Garradd - not my first comet (that was Halley in 1985), nor even the most spectacular (that honor would go to Hale-Bopp), but I followed Garradd for months, as it traversed the sky from Pegasus to Ursa Major while passing by a number of Messier objects. Whenever it was right up against a globular cluster (which was several times), I could understand why Messier called them "false comets".

7. Any Mars Opposition - I've been paying attention to them ever since 2010, and I positively get "Mars Fever" whenever one is approaching. I love just looking at Mars naked eye, appearing like a baleful red eye staring back at me. I have no difficulty in understanding why the ancients believed the planet was a portent of doom!

8. Any Jupiter shadow transit - a test of my observing skills. I also love watching one of the Galilean moons emerging from behind Jupiter.

9. Lunar sunrise - never gets old. If there was nothing else to observe up there, I'd still want a telescope. The ever shifting shadows remain endlessly fascinating.

10. The Lunar Eclipse of August 6th, 1971. Why this one, you ask? Because I remember it so well. I was not "into" amateur astronomy at the time. I was a student at Arizona State University, and walking home from class with a good friend, talking about God knows what. There was a full moon that evening, so even back in those days when streetlights were a rarity in Arizona, the night was pretty bright. But then I happened (for no particular reason) to look up, and was shocked to see that half the moon had disappeared! I had no idea that an eclipse was going on, and I remember being actually frightened. What had happened to the moon?  I was positively relieved to learn that it was "only" an eclipse.

Sure on this Shining Night

SURE ON THIS SHINING NIGHT, by James Agee

Sure on this shining night
Of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand'ring far
alone
Of shadows on the stars.

Click on the link (SURE ON THIS SHINING NIGHT) to hear the music, and think of this, the next time you're out at Carrs Mill (or Alpha Ridge).

The Stargazer's Bookshelf

 Quarantined as I've been these past several months, staring at my library, I've been thinking a lot about what's on all those shelves. To make a long story short, what do I consider the most important books to have on a stargazer's bookshelf? Here is my very idiosyncratic list.  You are welcome (and in fact encouraged) to counter with your own list. The more, the merrier!

1. Sky and Telescope's Pocket Sky Atlas - Jumbo Edition (An oxymoron if I've ever heard one. I don't know anyone with an 8 1/2 by 11 inch pocket.). I particularly love this version because of its large size, and because it matches pretty much precisely what I see through my 8X56 Celestron binoculars.

2. The Night Sky Observer's Guide, Volumes 1 and 2, by George Robert Kepple and Glen W. Sanner. Whenever I get the (stupid) notion that there's nothing new to see "up there", I pull out these guides to the constellations and realize how little I've actually seen. There's enough in these books to keep anyone busy for several lifetimes of stargazing.

3. URANOMETRIA 2000.0 Deep Sky Atlas, All Sky Edition, for when the S&T pocket atlas doesn't have enough detail. My one wish is that they would publish a mirror imaged version.

4. Atlas of the Moon by Antonín Rükl. Whereas the above volumes supply all the detail you'll realistically ever need on the universe outside of our Solar System, Rükl's masterpiece will do the same for the Moon. The hand drawn maps in this atlas are not only superlatively detailed, but are true works of art. They are beautiful! Sadly, the Atlas of the Moon is currently out of print, but used copies are available (at ridiculous prices) from numerous booksellers on the web. My own copy once graced the shelves of a high school in Huntley, Illinois.

5. The Brightest Stars by Fred Schaaf has several pages of history, lore, and cold hard facts about each of the 21 brightest stars in the sky. Trust me, you'll appreciate much more just looking naked eye at Vega, Antares, Sirius, Arcturus, or whatever after reading this very entertaining book.

6. Voyager by Stephen J. Pyne. Now here we move from the purely "reference book" portion of this list to the more philosophical. Voyager is the finest book I have ever read on the robotic exploration of our Solar System. A deep dive into the origins, rationale, development, and execution of the Voyager missions, with wonderful digressions into history, politics, and the meaning of life.

7. Epic Moon by William P. sheehan and Thomas A. Dobbins. I cannot praise this book highly enough. As the subtitle says, "A History of Lunar Exploration in the Age of the Telescope", it ranges from Galileo to NASA's mapping of the lunar surface in preparation for the Apollo landings.

8. Imagining Mars, a Literary History, by Robert Crossley. Mars is more than dark smudges on an orange disk in your eyepiece. It is a world that has punched far above its weight in the human imagination over the past 2 centuries. Extremely entertaining, and you'll never look at the Red Planet in the same way again, ever.

9. Let There Be Night, ed. by Paul Bogard. A collection of essays on why preserving our dark skies is so important, and not just for stargazing. This is not a dry polemic or an ecologist's Jeremiad, but a deeply human look into why we need for night to be dark.

10. A Portfolio of Lunar Drawings, by Harold Hill. A glorious reminder that star (and Moon) gazing is more than just a hobby, but can be a window into a world of beauty and wonder far beyond what we encounter in most of our daily lives, and is accessible to most everyone.

So there's my list. What have I missed? What's on your shelf?

 

Eclipse

"Last Light"

The above image was taken on August 21st, 2017, from Jefferson City, Missouri, using a smartphone camera pressed against the eyepiece of my (properly filtered) 60mm Stellarvue refractor with a 9mm Televue Nagler eyepiece, just moments before totality. As stunning as this image is, it was NOTHING compared to the awe and wonder of totality. I had never seen anything like it, and the truly unbelievable sight of that jet black disk, looking like nothing so much as a hole in the universe, surrounded by the solar corona like a halo, was burned into my mind forever.

In the days and weeks following the eclipse, the internet was inundated by truly countless people expressing how they experienced an overwhelming sense of Oneness with the Universe, how they could feel the Earth, the Moon, planets, and the Sun spinning and moving through space in a Great Dance. More than one likened it to actually, physically hearing the Music of the Spheres.

And perhaps they were. For myself, my own feelings were mainly that I had not anticipated the beauty of the event. I had (mostly) anticipated the awe and wonder, but that it would be a Work of Art took me by surprise.

The "Belt of Venus"

Photo taken by my brother, Andrew Prokop, at sunset from the shore of Lake Superior.

The dark band just above the horizon is the Earth's shadow, just coming into view.

We think of eclipses (especially total solar eclipses) as super rare events, lasting at most a few brief minutes, and that one had to travel great distances to see. But have you ever realized that we (each and every one of us) experience a total solar eclipse every day? For just what is an eclipse? It is one celestial body passing in front of the Sun. A solar eclipse is the Moon passing in front of the Sun as seen from the Earth. A lunar eclipse is the Earth passing in front of the Sun from the vantage point of the Moon. But what is night? Is it not the Earth getting between us and the Sun? The fact that we are standing on the Earth's surface does not change that fact.

The Apollo astronauts marveled at finding "space" to be not cold and dark, as we are apt to think of it, but rather basking in an eternal noon. Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot, perhaps expressed this feeling the best (in his memoirs, Carrying the Fire):

"As the radio commercial describes sunset: "When the sun just goes away from the sky..." Baloney. The sun doesn't rise or fall: it doesn't move, it just sits there, and we rotate in front of it. Dawn means we are rotating around into sight of it, while dusk means that we have turned another 180 degrees and are being carried into the shadow zone. The sun never "goes away from the sky." It's still there sharing the same sky with us; it's simply that there's a chunk of opaque earth between us and the sun which prevents our seeing it. Everyone knows that, but I really see it now. No longer do I drive down a highway and wish the blinding sun would set; instead I wish we could speed up our rotation a bit and swing around into the shadows more quickly."

A similar sentiment was expressed as far back as 1938, in C.S. Lewis' science fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet. The novel's hero, Dr. Ransom, has been kidnapped by the evil scientist Dr. Weston, and carried off against his will in a spacecraft to an unknown celestial destination. Shortly after waking up aboard the ship, Ransom wonders aloud about how bright it is outside the window:

"I had always thought space was dark and cold," [Ransom] remarked vaguely.

"Forgotten the sun?" said Weston contemptuously. 

Ransom went on eating for some time. The he began, "If it's like this in the early morning," and stopped, warned by the expression on Weston's face. Awe fell on him: there were no mornings here, no evenings, and no night - nothing but the changeless noon which had filled for centuries beyond history so many millions of cubic miles.

And so we have the opportunity, without having to fly to the Moon, to viscerally experience our motion through space every single day. For me, the Earth's motion is most evident in the last minutes just prior to sunset, sitting on my back patio in shadow, while the tops of the trees in my neighbor's yard are still in bright sunshine. I realize that I am poised on the knife's edge of daylight. From space, from an observer on the Moon, I would be smack on the terminator, moving at approximately 700 mph into the Earth's night side.

I believe it is important to not just intellectually understand our place in the universe, but to feel it in our bones. I don't often manage to do this. I know I've succeeded when at a star party, the stars no longer seem to be above me, but rather in front of me. Try it sometime. Word of warning however - it can make you dizzy.

Fragility

Earthrise from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

For the second time in two years, I was hospitalized with a life threatening leg infection. I'm home now, but an enforced idleness of several days gives one time (and motivation) for Deep Thought. Upon discharge, I was told to expect to be back within a year or so unless I take active steps to prevent such a thing. It seems my body's immune system is irreparably compromised from my 20 plus year long losing struggle against diabetes. My sole defense against bacterial infection is my skin, and I am vulnerable to the smallest crack in that very thin layer of protection. The culprit this time around was an insignificant cut on one of my toes, so minor that I (incorrectly) assumed a simple band-aid would suffice.

(Be patient, this will get around to astronomy before I'm done.)

So now I walk around with an acute awareness of how fragile my safety is. It is quite literally "skin deep"! I must carry with me a tube of prescription strength antibiotic cream to apply ASAP to any cut, scrape, or puncture anywhere on my body, or else it's back to the hospital.

So I gave a lot of thought to just how fragile my health is, and how easily the apple cart could be upset, so to speak. Such thoughts were doubly a propos in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. For the health of our planet is equally vulnerable.

Earthrise from Japanese Kayuga space probe

We're learning from the armada of orbiters, landers, and rovers on and about Mars that that planet was "once upon a time" warm, wet, and quite possibly green, with an atmosphere approaching Terrestrial density blanketing its surface. Mars's northern hemisphere was almost entirely covered with an ocean containing enough water to fill our Atlantic. Rivers ran freely. We see even today their channels, flood plains, dendritic networks, and ancient deltas. Yes... "once upon a time", but long, long gone.

What happened? The atmosphere is what happened. It seems that the lack of a sufficiently powerful magnetic field laid the Martian surface naked to the full fury of billions of years of solar radiation, which little by little stripped the defenseless planet of its protective layer of air, causing most of its water to break down into its component atoms, which then flew merrily off into interplanetary space. (Hmm.. I just had a thought. I wonder how much of that water ended up here on Earth? Does my bottle of Fiji Water contain a bit o' the Red Planet?)

Did a rich and flourishing Martian ecosystem perish billions of years ago because it was stripped of that all too vulnerable protective screen? Just how knife-edged is the narrow path along which life progresses?

And what about us?

The original "Earthrise" photo, taken from Apollo 8

We are dumping carbon dioxide into our atmosphere at a rate that natural corrective processes are incapable of keeping up with. Equilibrium has not only been shattered, it has been stomped on, kicked into a corner, and beaten senseless. That, along with the other filth we pour into the air, threatens the very continued existence of Humanity, unless we come to our senses TODAY.

Take a good look at the Earthrise photos I've attached to this posting. Every time I see such an image, I can't help but marvel, not only at the heartbreaking beauty of our home world, but at its fragility. It's like a soap bubble suspended in space, perilously easy to pop.

Perhaps this coronavirus pandemic is a blessing in disguise. (A very good disguise, I must say.) In addition to our air becoming (temporarily, I fear) much cleaner, and our species' carbon footprint much reduced, it has exposed how fragile and unsustainable our economy is, and how radical income inequality is eating away at the foundations of our society. Even in "good" times, the poor and marginalized suffer disproportionately from hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and climate change in general, but in times of severe continental (indeed global) stress such as now, the result is inconvenience for the wealthy and catastrophe for the not so well off. Also, those who thought themselves safely ensconced in the Middle Class are finding they were only a paycheck or two away from financial ruin.

Fragility, fragility, fragility. Not just for our planet, but also for each and every one of us. (Forgive my digressions. I warned you, I had a lot of time on my hands.)

We have before us two alternatives, We can either use this calamity as a chance to reexamine the fundamentals of our economic and societal structures and rebuild so as to eliminate our ecologically destructive industrial habits, income inequality, and the lack of adequate healthcare and social safety net, or... we can emerge with a thoughtless resumption of our planet-destroying economy, and millions of families reduced to poverty and/or crushing lifelong debt from which they will have no hope of ever getting out from under.

Now, while the economy is basically shut down and the entire country is essentially under house arrest is the time to make the perilous knife's edge that we stand on abundantly clear to all. But this opportunity is fleeting. Once the economy starts up again, people will (understandably) be grateful for whatever crumbs are tossed in their direction.

The Earth and Moon, hanging in the Void

Biosphere

Over the holidays, I flew out to Arizona to celebrate my mother's 93rd birthday (Happy Birthday, Mom!). While there, my brother and I took a day off for ourselves and drove "up north" to the pine country. Along the way, we stopped off at Montezuma's Well, one of only two natural lakes in the entire state of Arizona. All the others are man-made.

At first glance, it's not that much of a lake. Less than 400 feet in diameter, it's very close to a perfect circle. It lies at the bottom of a steep depression, completely surrounded by cliffs close to 100 feet high. The water is very dark - almost black, and much of the surface is choked with pond weed.

Talk to the park ranger and you'll find that the lake is fed from underground volcanic vents, and contains lethal levels of arsenic and other poisons. There is also no oxygen in the water, so fish cannot survive more than a few minutes in it. Fascinatingly, the lake has no known bottom. It simply gets denser and increasingly saturated with sand and mud until further exploration is impossible. (The deepest probes have made it to 124 feet before being stopped by the suspended sand, without finding any bottom. Some geologists estimate the lake may be 2000 feet deep!) I imagine that it's similar to what one would find on the gas giants in the outer solar system, which have no solid surface, but just keep getting denser and denser as you go down until you're stopped dead..

But that's just the first course. Now for the main event. Montezuma's Well boasts a unique ecosystem of species which exist nowhere else on the entire planet. There's a completely independent food chain of life beginning with diatoms (a species of algae), the Montezuma Well springsnail, a water scorpion, the Hyalella montezuma amphipod, and (at the top of the chain) the Motobdella montezuma leech, along with the lake's utterly unique pond weed with 80 foot long stems that grows nowhere else in the world. All of these species would perish if removed from Montezuma's Well - they're perfectly adapted to its poisonous environment. And likewise, no life from outside the well can live in its waters for longer than a few minutes. The life within Montezuma's Well is essentially independent of all other life on Earth!

This amazing site got me to thinking about possible life on other planets. Perhaps we're too accustomed to the ubiquity of life covering nearly every inch of our own world. But is it possible that we'll find the equivalent of a Montezuma's Well on Mars, or even the Moon? A micro-environment only a few hundred yards across sustaining a vigorous ecosphere of utterly bizarre lifeforms? 99.9999% of Mars could well be deader than a doornail, while one small crater might be absolutely bursting with life. After all, as far as the denizens of Montezuma's Well are concerned, the rest of Planet Earth might as well be dead.

Ice-filled Korolev Crater on Mars