Extraterrestrial Life? Not So Fast !!!

I have written several times already on this subject, but there always seems to be something new to say. I am speaking, of course, about the possibility (probability?) of life on other worlds than ours.

Reading speculative fiction from the early 20th Century, it appears that there was at least some expectation of we would eventually discover extraterrestrial life right here in our own solar system. Mars was the perennial  favorite for such speculation. From H.G. Wells to Edgar Rice Burroughs to Stanley G. Weinbaum to C.S. Lewis to Robert Heinlein to Arthur C. Clarke, it was practically taken for granted that the Red Planet would be absolutely crawling with life. But it wasn't just Mars. Stories were written about life on the Moon (First Men in the Moon) Venus (Parasite Planet), Jupiter (Call Me Joe), the moons of Jupiter (The Mad Moon), and even the asteroids (Garden in the Void).

I have to confess to a desperate optimism that the next robotic space probe would find some sort of life on one or another celestial body, only to have my inflated expectations dashed time and again by the grim reality of what was actually out there. I vividly recall making up a list (sometime around 1980) of the places that might conceivably harbor life of some sort. It's rather amusing today to look back and see what worlds I included: Mars (of course), Enceladus, Iapetus, Titan, Triton, Ceres, and Vesta, and one or two less likely places. I finally gave up all hope after the Dawn spacecraft arrived at Ceres in 2015, only to find it a battered, lifeless pile of rocks. I was actually seriously depressed for some weeks afterwards.

So now, all speculation must center on the so-called exoplanets - those circling other suns. The problem is that the chances for life "out there" aren't much better than for elsewhere in our own solar system. First off, we have to face reality about how many suitable stars are in the Milky Way. Not that many, it turns out. Oh, I know, people say "There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. There's just gotta be life on millions of them!" But not so fast. Remember that the first stars in the universe (which includes our galaxy) were what astronomers call "metal poor" - that is, deficient in elements heavier than Hydrogen and Helium. But you can't build planets without heavy elements - iron, nickel, carbon, and all the others. It takes at least three generations of stars before you get any that are sufficiently rich in heavy elements to suit our purposes. At least a third of the stars in our galaxy are "first generation" stars, so we have to eliminate them right off the bat as potential places to find life. That's 30 billion already. Next, the Milky Way is a far more inhospitable place than imagined even a few decades ago. A nearby supernova could conceivably sterilize a solar system, snuffing out whatever struggling organisms might have been there. And in the galactic core (comprising roughly a third of our galaxy's stars) the stars are perilously close to each other, absolutely inviting such periodic sterilizations. And we haven't even gotten to the issue of stellar mass. A full 80% of stars, not only in the Milky Way but in the entire universe, are red dwarfs, which are so "cool" that any planet hoping to harbor life would have to orbit so close to its star that it would be tidally locked, keeping the same hemisphere forever in daylight and the other in perpetual night. Any atmosphere such a world might have would over time eventually freeze out on the nightside, leaving the rest of the world to resemble Mercury more than the Earth.

At the other end of the size spectrum, stars with a mass several times greater than our sun have significantly shorter lifespans, only a few hundred million years. And when you think that it took our sun more than three billion years to bring forth just one planet (us) with complex, multicellular organisms, well... even "a few hundred million years" is simply not going to cut it.

We're now down to no more than 10 billion stars. Still a lot, you might think. But again, not so fast. Three quarters of those that remain belong to multiple star systems, making the probability of any planets being in stable orbits less than certain. Plus, we have to weed out red giants, variable stars, blue white super giants, carbon stars, stars inside globular clusters, and stars at the centers of so-called planetary nebulae. We're left with maybe a few hundreds of millions of candidate homes for extraterrestrial life. Yes, that's still a big number, but less than 1% of the more than 100 billion we started out with.

Now lets examine the many exo-solar systems we have so far discovered. One surprising discovery made since we began racking up the numbers of known solar systems is how many of them contain what are known as "Hot Jupiters", that is, a Jupiter sized planet sitting right where the inner planets (including the Earth) do in ours. Subsequent computer simulations have suggested that this may be the norm for solar systems, and that ours is a notable, and possibly rare, exception. It seems that the normal course of events is for a Jupiter sized planet to form in the outer solar system, and then for it to migrate over time into a much tighter orbit... right in the middle of a star's "goldilocks" zone (where conditions are "just right" for life to flourish).

So why have we been so lucky? Why has our own solar system's Jupiter remained where it is, safely out there in the outer solar system? The answer? Saturn! The orbits of the two largest planets are in a roughly 1:2 synchronicity, which means that they tug on each other with regular frequency. The end result is that Jupiter's tendency to migrate inwards is balanced by Saturn's pulling it back out (and thus saving the Earth from annihilation). Now what are the chances of a solar system possessing both a Jupiter and a Saturn? I honestly do not know, but I would imagine their not being very high.

So... we dodged that bullet. But how many other cartridges are there in nature's gun? Another is our Kuiper Belt (made up of objects composed largely of water ice). Many planetologists believe that our oceans originated not on the Earth, but rather out in the far reaches of the solar system, out beyond Neptune and Pluto. These KB Objects are occasionally disturbed by near misses with other stars, which cause them to plunge into the inner solar system as comets, and the occasional super comet. (There's one of those lurking near Jupiter, Comet 29P, right now. The last super comet was Hale Bopp, nearly 30 years ago.) So no Kuiper Belt, no oceans. No oceans, and you likely get a dead Earth. And even the presence of an extra-solar Kuiper Belt is no guarantee than any inner, rocky planets will have oceans. The water bearing object first has to impact the planet. Ours got hit (multiple times, it would seem), but Venus has likely missed out on such watery enrichment. The Earth is rightly called the "Blue Planet" (insert political joke here), but Venus is about the driest thing imaginable.

Now let's move on to the Moon? What? The lifeless Moon? How does that effect life here on Earth? Well, as it turns out, a great deal. First of all, its enormous size in relation to its parent planet makes it (almost) unique in our solar system. I say "almost" because Charon is larger, relative to Pluto. But many astronomers don't consider Charon to be a moon of Pluto at all, the two of them being rather a double planet - the only one we know of.

And why is the Moon's size significant? Because it has an outsized influence on the Earth. We all know about the oceanic tides, of course. But the Moon not only pulls on the Earth's water, it is also pulling on the very rocks under our feet. The effect is naturally infinitesimal, but nevertheless there. (And remember that the Moon was long ago far closer to the Earth than today.) Over the millennia, this twice daily tugging could well have fractured the Earth's crust into its tectonic plates, allowing for a continual replenishment of our planet's surface. No other body in our solar system experiences plate tectonics as ours does. Sure, many moons in the outer solar system appear to have seen such activity in the distant past, but it seems to have extinguished aeons ago. Plate tectonics are what prevented the Earth from winding up today like Mars or Venus, with their dead, dead, dead surfaces. So, thank you, Moon! 

The Moon has also played a role in stabilizing the Earth's axial tilt, preventing wild gyrations in our rotation and smoothing out the seasons. An unstable axis could very well have resulted in geologic eras in which one hemisphere might be experiencing an ice age, while the oceans were boiling away in the opposite. Yikes!

Next, we have to consider our highly magnetic core. No other rocky planet has such a core. This is important to life, because it is our core which governs our world girdling Van Allen belts, which are basically our only defense against naked exposure to solar and cosmic radiation. It is believed that lack of such protection is what caused both Venus and Mars to lose whatever water they may have one had. Unfiltered solar radiation breaks water molecules down into their component atoms, which then fly off into interplanetary space. (This fact has caused me to speculate that maybe, just maybe, a significant portion of our planet's oceans originated on Mars! Who knows?}

I could go on, but by now you must realize that we live on a very unique planet indeed, one almost designed to support life. Or at least life as we know it (and we know of no other kind).

Bottom line (and personal opinion): We may very well be alone in the Milky Way. I can't speak for other galaxies.

Perspective

 

Last night I saw Venus. I was walking out to my car at about 9 PM, and low in the Western sky was the loveliest sight ever - a brilliant, piercingly white gem set in a field of pure cerulean blue. It stopped me dead in my tracks, and for several minutes I totally forgot why I had come outside. Because one so seldom encounters such absolute, unalloyed beauty.  

It was, of course, the planet Venus. And, also of course, we all know that "in reality" Venus is not at all beautiful. Its surface is hot enough to melt lead, and enveloped in a mantle of poisonous gas under a pressure that here on Earth one must descend to the ocean floor to experience. So on those terms, what I was gazing could be called an illusion, and a cruel one at that.

But here I must beg to differ. By what reasoning do we declare that one perspective is the "true" one, and all others somehow less so? Please don't get me wrong here. I am not speaking of relativism, where everything is a matter of opinion and no one's opinion is more correct than another's. Not at all. What I AM saying is that all perspectives contain a grain of truth, and you can't see the whole picture unless you take all points of view into account.

From a human perspective, the table on which my laptop is at this moment sitting is a solid object which is not doing much of anything. But from an atomic viewpoint, it is mostly empty space punctuated by vibrating, rotating, and incessantly hopping here and there particles of matter (whatever that is). From a galactic viewpoint, the table, the house in which it is located, and in fact the planet on whose surface the house rests, are all too infinitesimal to worry about.

I can stand on the shore of the Pacific and be overcome by the incomprehensible vastness of its area and the astounding depths to which it reaches. But then again, from the viewpoint of the Milky Way, even the Pacific shrinks to insignificance.

So which is true? Is the Pacific vast beyond comprehension, or tiny beyond caring about? Unsurprisingly, the answer is both. The human perspective is just as valid as that of an atom or of a galaxy, but it is also just as incomplete as both of those.

So yes, from the perspective of the Milky Way as a whole, the planet Venus is simply too small to even think about. From its surface, Venus is hell itself - no place I'd want to be. But looking up at it on a summer's evening, there is simply nothing more beautiful.

Starry Night

 “There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”

 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

This has been for decades now one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite books, The Lord of the Rings. I myself have at times taken hope from stargazing. Our earthly troubles cannot touch the Heavens. And there are times when you positively want to be insignificant, when you want your own misery to not extend beyond your own skin. This is the lesson that Job learned in the course of his sufferings. At the start of the book that bears his name, Job curses the universe. He wishes that the day of his birth would disappear from the calendar. He calls for darkness over light, and nonexistence over.. well, over everything. Yet by the end of the drama, Job is rejoicing over wild asses in the mountains who do not know man, the self-sufficient animals who haunt the wilderness, and even over Behemoth and Leviathan who cannot in any way be tamed or mastered. His many sorrows do not touch them.

That appears to be the lesson good Samwise learns in an instant, gazing in wonder at the unsullied beauty of a single star from the unrelieved horror of Mordor. He realized that all the evils of the world - past, present, and future - were incapable of tipping the scales in the presence of the perfect light of this star. Perhaps even in our day, surrounded by omnipresent death and suffering due to the pandemic, by economic misery, and millions of lives seemingly buried in despair, perhaps even now we can take solace from looking at the stars. I know that I do.

But on an entirely different level, I have always been fascinated by what exactly an author was thinking of when he references the sky and its inhabitants. For the most part, they're sadly not thinking of anything in particular, but it is fun to attempt to match art to reality. For instance, there have been numerous attempts to match Van Gogh's Starry Night to recognizable constellations in the hope of pinning down the exact portion of the sky the painting is depicting. (It has been definitively determined that the bright "star" to the right of the cyprus tree is actually Venus.) In the same vein, I've often wondered whether the "Netted Stars" seen by Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring are the Pleiades.

With the magic of modern software, we are able to duplicate the sky for any particular time or date one wishes. According to Appendix B of The Return of the King, Sam saw his star on the 17th of March. The Mountains of Mordor were to the west of Frodo and Sam on that date, and since they were close to their base, anything low on the western horizon would have been behind the mountains. Assuming the star was one of the brighter stars in the skies and that Sam was looking up before midnight, that narrows our candidates down to (from north to south) Capella, Aldebaran, and Rigel. We can rule out Aldebaran, because Tolkien tells us the star in question is white, whilst Aldebaran is most definitely orange. My own vote goes to Rigel, because Capella would have been too close to the zenith to qualify as being "above" the mountains.

Of course, all bets are off, if Tolkien (like Van Gogh) was referring to a planet, rather than a true "star". And since we don't know how the years in the Third Age match up with our own calendar, it would be anyone's guess whether the star in question could be Venus, Jupiter, or even (but not likely) Saturn.

So now, while COVID-19 is ravaging the land, and our "leaders" (irony intentional) are divided like never before, we can look up at Orion, and admire the matchless beauty of its component stars... and hope.

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

A Check in the Box

The 2016 Transit of Mercury

Yesterday was the last Transit of Mercury until 2032, and the first one observed by me.

Although the event started shortly after sunrise, Maryland time, I didn't arrive at Alpha Ridge Park until about 8:30. But it only took 5 minutes to set up, and another minute to find that unbelievably tiny spot, already almost one quarter of the Sun's angular diameter from the edge. What a difference from the Transit of Venus seven years ago. Venus' disk was large enough that you needed no magnification to see it against the Sun. A pair of properly shielded "eclipse" glasses would suffice. Not so yesterday! I tried spotting it through another member's 8X56 binoculars and couldn't see a thing, even though I knew exactly where Mercury ought to be.

But with my Stellarvue 60mm refractor, I had no trouble seeing Mercury, despite its miniscule size. Using my 9mm Nagler eyepiece, it remained a dimensionless point of un-light, but switching to my 5mm Nagler, it was a definite disk. It almost looked 3 dimensional.

In addition to the Baader solar filter safety attached to the business end of my scope, I inserted a Televue Mars filter between the diagonal and the eyepiece, which gave the Sun's disk a pleasing yellow/orange hue, a definite improvement over the otherwise unfiltered pure white.

Image by James Willinghan

Notice how small Mercury appears against the Sun (slightly above the center of disk)
(To see at full resolution, click on the image.)

Now you might say that sitting for 5 hours tracking a nearly dimensionless black dot as it crawls across the face of a featureless Sun (I was hoping for a few sunspots, damn it!) would be about as exciting as watching paint dry... and in a way, you would be right. But only in a way, for as with most things in amateur astronomy, it all depends on how you look at it.

First of all, there is the obvious but strangely overlooked fact that all this is going on in broad daylight. That, and the fact that the Sun was fairly low in the sky (it being late autumn), had a curious effect of rotating one's vertical axis of perception. The Sun and Mercury were not "up there" but rather "over there". I was acutely conscious of being in the plane of the ecliptic, along with all the other planets. And that perception somehow made what was going on more comprehensible to my Earthbound brain. Mercury was not merely crossing in front of the Sun, it was crossing "left to right" - not above me, but in front of me. I was part of the action! This is an awareness hard to arrive at when admiring a view of the Hercules Globular or the Rosette Nebula, or even Jupiter or Saturn. (It's easier with the Moon, but that's another story. See here: Explorers and here: Explorers 2.) I could clearly visualize the geometry of all the moving parts, and where I fit into it.

Secondly.. well, has it ever occurred to you how often we refer to this rather eclectic group of planets, moons, asteroids, as the Solar System, but fail to take in the meaning of that term? The planets are not just, as was thought in Percival Lowell's time, "other worlds" - they are OUR world. All the planets and everything else that makes up the Solar "System" are intricately and inextricably connected to each other. The Earth does not exist in isolation. In fact, our planet would be uninhabitable were it not for, not only Jupiter, but also Saturn being where they are. And some theories say we would have no oceans without there being a Kuiper belt. Etc, etc. Watching Mercury pass between the Earth and the Sun reminds me of this interconnectivity.

(And it reminds me of my own interconnectivity with the rest of humanity. See here: Foxholes)

And thirdly, it makes me acutely aware of the role of chance in our lives. As I look out the window at this moment, only 24 hours after the event, I see a 100% overcast sky with high winds and mixed snow and rain. Yet yesterday, despite depressing forecasts, was mostly clear with low winds and shirtsleeve temperatures. Had today been yesterday, we wouldn't have seen a thing.

So it's one more "check in the box", along with the 1985 return of Halley's Comet, the 2012 Transit of Venus, the 2017 total solar eclipse, and the 2018 opposition of Mars. The next will be the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius on December 21, 2020. If I've done my math right, the two planets will be separated by an angular distance of only one fifth of the full moon!

Spacewalk

Way, wa-a-a-a-y back when I was in college, a very strange book hit the bestseller lists and stayed there for seemingly forever - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. Like pretty much everyone else on planet Earth at the Time, I read it. But now, 45 years later, I can really only recall one passage from the work. Fairly close to the start of the book, the author goes into some detail describing the differences between driving through a beautiful landscape in a car, and riding through it on a motorcycle. In a car, Pirsig tells us, we are curiously divorced from the outside world. Perhaps it has something to do with the windshield, or from the fact that the interior of an automobile is very much like a room. The world passing by seems "out there", while the driver remains ensconced in his mobile cabin. Meanwhile, the motorcyclist is fully enmeshed in his surroundings. There is no "out there"; he is amongst them.

I had the same experience the one and only time I had a seat up in the super elegant skyboxes at a baseball game. There were plush, living room type seats inside, and we were separated from the stadium by a window which made up one whole wall. (This was at the then brand new Washington Nationals stadium.) Well, when the national anthem started up, no one in the skybox payed the slightest attention to it. Not a soul stood up or doffed his cap, and no conversation ceased or even slowed down. Yet there was no hint of discourtesy. After all, when you watch a game at home on TV, do you stand for the anthem? Of course not. And here we were at the stadium, yet that glass wall somehow made it seem like we weren't.

So what does any of this have to do with amateur astronomy? Attend, grasshopper, and gain wisdom.

I can't count the times where I've been showing Saturn in my telescope to someone who's never had the experience before, and their reaction is "Wow. Is that real? It looks just like the pictures!" This resistance to believing the evidence of one's own eyes has always puzzled me. So when the same thing happened a few days ago for the millionth time right in my driveway, sharing with a neighbor my view of the ringed planet, I got to wondering. Does anyone upon seeing, say, the Eiffel Tower for the first time, doubt that it's real because it looks just like the pictures he's seen of it?

And I must confess to falling into the same feelings when somewhat lazily going from warhorse to old warhorse on a less than inspiring night out. My reaction to swinging over to M13 in Hercules is not that different from seeing an image of it on my computer screen. What's going on?

I'm convinced it's the eyepiece. Its presence means there's something between me and the object I am observing. My equipment has distanced me from it by more than the actual lightyears of interstellar space separating us. I have to consciously overcome this barrier to feel its reality, to get the sense that M13 and I occupy the same universe. But it's an effort worth making. I know I've succeeded when the sky no longer feels like it's above me, but rather in front of me.

There's a sort of ritual I perform on most evenings that I've been out. After I'm done for the evening, I'll tear down and stow everything away... and just look up, drinking in all the constellations and the Milky Way itself if it's in view. This can easily go on for half an hour or more, after I'm supposedly done for the night. We often fail to realize that many of the constellations we see by naked eye are as or even more beautiful than the open clusters and globulars that we peer at through our eyepieces. Yes, the Double Cluster is stunning, but so are the Pleiades and the Hyades. Yes, Kemble's Cascade is a wondrous sight, but it doesn't hold a candle to Orion in all his wintry majesty. Yes, splitting a difficult double with my highest power (and therefore narrowest field) is pure joy, but kicking back, slapping in a widefield (such as my 30mm Pentax), and looking at nothing in particular is, I believe, as close to Nirvana we can come in this sorry world.

It's not easy being green

Yesterday out at Carrs Mill, I decided to make it a Green Star night. Yes, I am well aware that there are no such things as green stars - let's get that one out of the way right up front. But there are many stars that appear to be green when viewed through the eyepiece. The most famous is Almach, a.k.a. Gamma Andromedae, a spectacularly beautiful multiple star system not far from M31. At 2nd magnitude, it is an easy naked eye object, but it takes a telescope to see that it is not a solitary star. My 102mm refractor splits it into its A and B components, A being brilliant yellow, and B looking like nothing so much as a tiny Granny Smith apple nestled up against its brighter companion. Turns out that B is not a single star at all, but three, none of them being even remotely green. (see illustration below)

No possible amateur telescope can split B into its components. The easiest and surest way to determine its true makeup is with spectroscopy. Perhaps it's all those colors being mixed up that give us the impression of a single green star?

Now that we got the low hanging (green apple) fruit out of the way, we can turn to other greens that were not so easy to observe.

Struve 2725 in Delphinus is an absolute joy to behold. First of all, it, along with neighboring Gamma Dalphini, make up a delightful cousin to Lyra's Double Double. If you stop right there it's already a "must see" item on any stargazer's list. But amp up the power and zero in on Struve 2725, and drink in the subtle colors involved - a primrose primary with a dimmer, yes, green companion star.

Moving over to Cassiopeia, we check out Sigma Cassiopeiae, a star I never would have suspected of being double had I not been informed of this fact. I found it to be a difficult split, but my effort was rewarded by seeing a 5th magnitude primary of pure white, accompanied by a 7th magnitude bluish green secondary.

I had intended to wrap up the night by observing a 4th green star, over in Pegasus - Struve 2841. But alas, a cloud had moved over to obscure that part of the sky, and it showed no signs of going anywhere. So I saved that one for another time!

I was using my 102mm Stellarvue refractor with 9, 5, and 3.5mm Nagler eyepieces.

The Demon's Eyes

"What you look hard at seems to look hard at you."

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

The other night at Carrs Mill, Richard Orr asked me whether I had ever looked at the "Demon Eyes". I had to admit that I had never heard of them. The Demon Star (Algol), yes. But Demon Eyes? Nope. 

Well, we had just been talking about the Water Jar over in Aquarius, which is to me to only recognizable asterism in that entire constellation. The rest of it is just a giant 4th magnitude mess - the worst place in the sky to locate anything by star hopping.

The Water Jar consists of 4 relatively bright stars, 3 of which (Eta, Pi, and Gamma Aquarii) form a tight little triangle with a fourth (Zeta Aquarii) right in the center. All 4 stars are approximately 4th magnitude, making the asterism naked eye visible, but not particularly prominent. (Some people, myself included, consider Alpha Aquarii, a 3rd magnitude star somewhat to the east of the other four, to be part of the asterism. But that's not important here.)

To the naked eye or through binoculars, Zeta Aquarii appears to be a run of the mill solitary star of a nondescript white color. Even when I turned my 90mm refractor over to it the other night (using a 13mm Nagler eyepiece), there was nothing worth mentioning about it. But when I swapped eyepieces for a 3.5mm Nagler... Wow! There was a stunning, easily splittable double star, the two components of apparently equal brightness. They looked eerily like a pair of (rather sinister) eyes staring back at me. Just who was observing whom?

The A and B components are a true double star, with an orbital period of approximately 540 years, and the system itself is about 92 light years away. Impossible to see telescopically, the A component is itself a double star, composed of an F-type main sequence star with a companion about one 3th its mass. They orbit each other every 26 years, so they must be extremely close to each other. As for the system's main components (A and B), their separation is thought to be about 140 AU.

It's that last figure which intrigues me the most, since Neptune's orbital diameter is 60 AU. So if you can imagine one half of the distance between A and B Zeta Aquarii, that's pretty much what our own solar system would look like at a distance of 92 light years.

As an experiment, I observed the pair with my 5mm Nagler eyepiece. I could still split the double, but it wasn't as "clean" as with the 3.5mm. So if you're thinking of taking a look yourself (highly recommended),  use all the power you have. It's worth it!

Just an Observation

It's funny how when you see something often enough, you stop noticing it. Whatever it is becomes like air - it's just there. You don't think about it until it's not there, or until something goes wrong.

Well, I've just returned home from this year's Stellafane, and I do think it was (for me, at least) the best one I've so far attended. Three nights of absolutely perfect conditions, two giant planets and a million Perseid meteors (although I saw only four), a terrific keynote speaker (Dr. Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator), and at least half a dozen fascinating conversations with people at the food tent.

The food tent at Stellafane, with the observing fields behind it

And for once, I want to concentrate, not on the unbelievable list of Messier objects I took in, nor on the spectacular views of Jupiter I enjoyed, but on those conversations. In our everyday life, as we walk about grocery stores, sit at a coffee shop, or frankly wherever we go, we're surrounded by people staring at their smartphones or surfing the web on their laptops. The sight is ubiquitous, and therefore invisible. While I was living in Fells Point, there was a coffee shop about a hundred yards from my building's front door at which I was pretty much a regular. Being something of a people watcher, I did notice that practically no one ever spoke to anyone else while there. Even couples coming in together would, once they were seated, retreat to their devices and ignore their companion for the duration. Thumbs were busily twitching away whichever way I looked, people texting to invisible, distant interlocutors rather than speaking with their very visible tablemates.

Pitango Cafe in Fells Point

But not so at Stellafane. There is no cell phone reception at its location, except for at the very top of the hill in the first photo above, or atop Breezy Hill, where the clubhouse is. And there is no wi-fi anywhere. A major consequence of this absence is that, when people are between events, they actually talk to each other - even amongst strangers. You see very few individuals sitting silently, and if you do, it's likely because they're reading a (physical) book. But for the most part, conversational knots seem to spring up organically. People will turn around to take part in the conversation behind them if it interests them, or start one up based on asking about the artwork on another's t-shirt or the wording on their hat.

This year, I (silently) listened in on a lengthy debate about UFOs, talked for more than an hour with a couple my age about dogs, advised a pair of first timers on how to avoid the mistakes I made when buying one's first telescope, bemoaned the rapidly increasing extinction of dark skies with more than one person, shared with several others the results of our previous night's observing, and discussed telescopes and associated equipment, clubs, and other star parties. I listened to one guy describe mirror grinding to me, with me half the time unable to understand anything he was saying. (I kept that fact to myself.) On the last day there, I hit the jackpot, talking with someone named Steve about the history of New England stone walls for what must have been over two hours. Fascinating!

And I did not know any of these people!

So it's rather odd that, there in a gathering of folks engaged in the most technical of hobbies, all of them future oriented, they can soak in the benefits of "turning back the clock", can enjoy being "deprived" of gadgetry, and rediscovering the people around them. Refreshing.

The Stellafane Clubhouse on Breezy Hill

MIzar

I have just gotten back from a scheduled HAL Star Party at Alpha Ridge Park. The company alone was worth the drive out there, although the conditions were marginal at best. I kept waiting for Jupiter to make its appearance, until I realized that what I thought was just unusually bad light pollution to the east was actually an impenetrable cloud bank. No Jupiter. High, thin clouds over the rest of the sky drowned out all but the brightest stars no matter where you looked. Frustrated in looking in other directions, I finally settled in on the Big Dipper, which was in the darkest part of the sky this night.

I slowly scanned the sky from star to star making up this most famous of asterisms, until I came upon Mizar and Alcor. Ahh.. finally, the gods were smiling upon me. I must have observed this beautiful stellar pair for a good 20 minutes or so. With enough aperture Mizar is, of course, amongst the easiest of double stars to split, and although due to the conditions I had only bothered to set up my 60mm Stellarvue refractor (my smallest scope), I enjoyed to the utmost what was still possible to do. Using my 24mm Televue Panoptic eyepiece, Mizar could just barely be split, but it was easier than easy with my 9mm Nagler.

There was Mizar, clearly two separate stars. Alcor remained one. However, going to the googles, I learn that this system is far more complex than meets the eye. Mizar, although we amateurs can see only two stars, is actually four, whilst its (apparently) solitary companion Alcor is itself a double star. Six stars instead of one! What really fascinated me, however, were their colors. They seemed to change from moment to moment. Mizar's four components appeared in my eyepiece as two stars, one big and bright, and the other considerably dimmer and nestled right up against the brighter one. At first, the brighter looked white and the dimmer somewhat orange. But examining them again after a few minutes, I thought they looked blue and yellow respectively, not unlike Alberio. But after a bit, they appeared to swap colors - and then back again!

Now I know perfectly well that all these mutations are quite subjective - occuring in my eye, and not in the stars themselves. But to me, that just intensifies my interest in how we stargazers perceive color through our eyepieces, and reminds me that we should not be dogmatic about what colors are "out there".

FOOTNOTE: It's been almost 24 hours since I wrote the above, and now I'm wondering whether the shifting colors were a result of chromatic aberration. The seeing was frankly awful and I was using a particularly small aperture last night. Perhaps the "action" was going on, not in my eye, but in the eyepiece. I wonder. Would the colors have appeared steady had I been observing with my 102mm refractor, instead of my 60mm?

Stargazing and Peace

"Saguaro Twilight"

Watercolor by myself

Based on a photograph taken by Fr. Kurzynski

Fr. James Kurzynski, a blogger for the Vatican Observatory Foundation, recently posted a reflection on stargazing as a useful corrective for persons prone to being workaholics. The measured pace of our hobby, combined with the seeming eternity of the objects we observe, can make for a rare opportunity to slow the often all too frenetic pace by which we live.

You can read his posting here:
https://www.vofoundation.org/blog/and-on-the-seventh-day-astronomy-and-sabbath-rest/

What I found interesting about his reflections was his recognition that we can all too easily drag our workaholic tendencies into what ought to be a restful hobby. Now everyone knows that I am not an astrophotographer, so I'm not tempted by the Byzantine complexities of astrogear that might take hours to set up, and can be the occasion for spending most of what ought to be a relaxing evening under the stars in cursing some recalcitrant piece of equipment that refuses to operate properly.  But even we purely visual stargazers can get caught up in a race (of our own making) against the clock, trying to cram the maximum number of DSOs into the minimum amount of time. I now look back with mixed emotions at my pride at observing 19 DSOs, 4 planets, plus a number of Perseids and the ISS in a single night at last year's Stellafane. Just what was I trying to accomplish? And who was I competing against? True, I knew that it would likely be the one and only clear night I would spend in all of 2018 under a really dark sky, so maybe I had some excuse for wanting to see as much as I could.

But I must confess that I can fall into the same trap right here at home in suburban Maryland, under our battleship gray light polluted skies. I find myself at times needing to take a deep breath, and just look...

One "spiritual exercise" I've found most effective is to randomly point my telescope at some spot in the sky, slap in a widefield eyepiece, and DON'T MOVE ANYTHING for a half hour or so. Don't look for things to observe - let them come to you. With my 90mm Stellarvue  refractor and my 30mm Pentax eyepiece, it takes about 2 minutes for a star to traverse the entire field of view at its widest point. This is of course, assuming I've pointed my scope due south. The further north one looks, the slower objects will move across the FOV (and if you're pointed at Polaris, it will never move at all). So every 2 minutes, the view is completely different.

And really LOOK at what's in your eyepiece. Once again, don't sweat it; that's not the point here. The object is to synchronize your mind and body to the motions of the universe, to move at its pace. And it can be amazing what you chance across in this exercise. I've "discovered" globular clusters that aren't in the Messier catalog, but go by lowly NGC designations. I've seen brilliant double or multiple star systems that I would never have otherwise looked for. On rare occasions, the faintest of all imaginable smudges will traverse my FOV, and I'm left wondering whether I've caught sight of a distant galaxy or a gas cloud within our own. But mostly, I see stars, stars, stars. Swirls and knots, streams and spatters of them, intriguing asterisms and possible open clusters.

It takes a good 10 minutes or so to "get in the groove", for your mind to settle down and abandon the urge to look at something else. After another 10 minutes, you find you don't want to stop. When you finally do come back down to Earth after 30, 40, 50 minutes, or even an entire hour, it feels like you've been there, leaping from star to star, cruising the Milky Way, tossed about by the stellar winds of distant suns.

Now I certainly do not recommend a steady diet of such stargazing, but once in a while it's good to just let go and allow the turning Earth do all the work for you.

Learning to See

I've been sketching what I see through the eyepiece practically since the day I got my first telescope, back in 2010. I still have the very first astrosketches I ever made. Here is my first planetary sketch, of Mars, from the night of 14 April of that year.

Pretty crude, I'd say. But I wasn't that experienced yet as to planetary observing, and I was only using a 120mm refractor. So perhaps I ought not be that critical. There's Syrtis Major, plain to see, and a (doubtlessly oversized) polar icecap. (To see the sketches/paintings at full resolution, just click on the image)

2 months earlier, I had finished this drawing of my first sighting of the Asteroid Vesta.

I'm fairly sure that this is my first ever astrosketch, since I have nothing older than it (and I don't throw anything out). I began it on 14 April, but didn't finish it until 2 nights later. On the 14th, I wasn't sure which of the 2 "dots" at the lower left was the asteroid. It wasn't until my second look on the 16th that I could see which one had moved.

Well, time rolls on, and my observing skills gradually improved, as did my practice at recording what I saw. For evidence of such, just look at this 2014 sketch I made of pretty much the same face of Mars that I had drawn 4 years earlier.

The scope used here was actually smaller than I one I was looking through 4 years earlier (only 90mm), but my eye was far better trained... and it showed!

The high point (so far) in my sketching career was when, on a whim, I sent in one of my lunar sketches to Sky and Telescope magazine, and by golly if they didn't publish it! (June 2016 issue, page 73) Here it is:

Hundreds of sketches later, I am still a passionate advocate of the practice. Sketching an object compels you to PAY ATTENTION to what you're looking at, to notice little nuances. Is that crater wall brighter than the one right next to it? Is it more jagged, more broken up? Which mare is darker - the Sea of Tranquility or the Sea of Serenity? And why do you think they're different?

When sketching Saturn, I find myself noticing detail that I might miss when just looking at it, such as the planet's shadow on the rings, or subtle variations in color on the surface (much harder to detect than with Jupiter).

Now most HAL members know I have a fondness for tracking down anonymous uber-faint stars. Sketching the field of view after successfully spotting them makes going back to them all the easier, because you've fixed the environment in your mind. Many years ago, I used to teach Russian at Howard Community College. I discovered that the more parts of the body a student used in learning the language, the faster (and more permanently) he expanded his vocabulary. Just reading a new word was practically useless, as far as memorization was concerned. Saying it aloud was much better. But best of all was writing it down. (Actually, better than "best" was to do all 3 at once.)

The same goes for stargazing. It's a full body sport. Just looking at NGC whatever is good, as far as that goes. There's no way to "say it aloud", so let's just skip over that step. But sketching the danged thing? Aaaah, now that's the ticket! I guarantee that you'll remember the difference between M13 and M92 after you've sketched them both, and you'll appreciate their differences.

Now lately I've expanded my repertoire a bit, and have taken up watercolor painting. (A lot harder than I anticipated before getting into it!) What with the execrable weather of late, plus another round of health scares, I haven't had much opportunity of late to "paint the sky", but I have been practicing on some more mundane objects - like trees. Here are a few examples of recent work:

Trees behind the Pool Club

Medieval Tower in Bavaria

Storm Clouds over the Austrian Alps

"This Painting Belongs on a Motel Room Wall"

Now once again, painting trees has forced me to really look at them for the first time. I never before noticed just how radically sunlight alters the perceived color of leaves, how much variation there is in light and shadow, how many varieties of shape can be seen in even 2 examples of the same species.

I hope to be able to turn my attention skyward in the next few weeks, and make use of this new (to me) medium. I'd like to get similar benefits from painting the Messier catalog. Stay tuned!