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STAR THING |
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...to The Star Thing, information and musings about the night sky, astronomy and science events. Feel free to browse past Star Things posted here and come back often. If you would like to be notified by email each time I post a new Star Thing let me know by sending your address to merryafoot@comcast.net. I'm happy to add you to the list.
- Keep Those Star In Your Eyes!  |
DUCK! HERE COMES ANOTHER STAR THING!
I’d like to address the flap over the term “Blue Moon”. The full moon on December 31, 2009 is not a blue moon by proper definition. A blue moon is NOT properly defined as the second of two full moons in the same month. It’s much more complicated – and more beautiful - than that. A blue moon is the third full moon in a season that happens to contain four full moons. Huh? Slow down, Leroy!!
You see, naming moons comes from very ancient traditions. The pilgrims adopted and adapted moon names from the northeastern American Indians. Astronomically, the seasons are defined by the solstices and equinoxes, which divide the year into four parts we lovingly call seasons. Usually, each season contains three full moons.
The traditional Yankee adapted names are:
WINTER
Wolf Moon
Snow Moon
Worm Moon
SPRING
Pink Moon
Flower Moon
Strawberry Moon
SUMMER
Buck Moon
Sturgeon
Corn Moon
AUTUMN
Harvest Moon
Beaver Moon
Cold Moon or Long Nights Moon
As you can see, each full moon was christened with a name that connects to something real and significant about that time of year. These were more than just cute, romantic appellations. They had real meaning in people’s lives. If a season contained four full moons, which occasionally happened, something had to be done to account for it. The names of the first and last full moons in a season could not be altered, since they signified the changes in seasons. So, tradition says that the third full moon is the extra moon and it is called a “blue moon”. This kept the lunar connection to daily life intact.
This is the way it was until the middle of the 20th century.
Then, amidst a world far different from the 17th century farmer’s, a misinterpretation of the Maine Farmer’s Almanac in 1943 caused people to think of the second full moon in a single month as the blue moon. By then, the urban person's connection to the lunar cycle was tenuous at best. Sky & Telescope magazine passed along the mistake and it has lived for sixty years.
This makes me think about the “Pluto: Planet or No Planet?” debate. Recently, the International Astronomical Union broke people’s hearts when it decided not to call Pluto a planet. I can see why. The classification of Pluto has to do with the structure of the solar system and clearly Pluto belongs to the Kuiper Belt - a clump of asteroids. This is how we must view Pluto if we are to understand our place in the universe, sad though it may make us.
I think these debates are about more than just semantics. They are about the way we see the world and ourselves in it. The old definition of blue moon has to do with a time when people lived off the land, close to nature; a time foreign to most of us now. The new classification of Pluto as a planet took from us romance about worlds far away from our own homes.
But what are rules? We are humans, not machines. We mustn’t confine our views within steely fences erected by someone we can’t even nudge in the ribs. We must live our lives by the policies that make sense to our lives now.
Since we tend to live by months, not seasons, nowadays, most people will always consider the second of two full moons in a given month a blue moon. It makes sense that way. Why shouldn’t we define Blue Moon in a way that touches us?
And most people will always think of Pluto as a planet. Why shouldn’t we honor Pluto as something special? It has meaning to us that way. It means, “something far away that we looked for and found and exudes genuine mystery, and I need that”.
I don’t till or plant or harvest. My connection to that part of the Earth lies in an automatically misting bin in Safeway. Perhaps that is sad, but I have other connections to the Earth and they have real meaning for me. I give them their own names.
Keep those stars in your eyes
Leroy Leonard
LET’S KEEP THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE FOR THE LATEST STAR THING
Well, it happened again. I heard another set of statistics from the Barbie-whiners. You’ve probably heard them. The Barbie-whiners are a gaggle of malcontents who carry a vendetta against the world’s most popular doll. Attempting to convince us that Barbie is ridiculous, they publish statistics about her. Here’s the latest set I heard:
“If Barbie were a real person her measurements would be 44-17-40. Absurd,” they assert.
Then they try to trick us:
“And she would be 7 feet tall!”
But we’re not fooled. We know that we are not REQUIRED to make Barbie a 7’ tall person. If we wanted to we could make Barbie a more reasonable height, like say, 5’ 9”. Using a little sixth grade arithmetic we can scale Barbie to 5’ 9”, and then her measurements become 36-14-33. She’s a little thin in the waist but otherwise quite normal. (And in Victorian times women routinely corsetted themselves nearly that thin. Barbie is no more absurd than our great-grandmothers.)
Changing the scale of things helps us to see really big stuff or really small stuff more clearly, so we can understand them a little better. Take our own solar system for example. Our solar system is so big that most of us would not recognize it if we saw it from outer space. That is because we tend to carry around in our minds those pictures we see in space books. But the pictures of the sun and planets we see in those books are not to scale, so they don’t really show us what our happy neighborhood looks like.
Want to know what our little pile of spinning marbles really looks like?
I looked up the numbers and applied that sixth grade arithmetic to them, and came up with a scale model of our corner of the Universe. I calculated the diameter of each planet and the distance they would be from the sun. I checked my numbers three times, just like I was taught by Mr. Randall. I chose a six inch sun. So, if the sun were 6” in diameter (a little bigger than a salad plate) the rest of the solar system would be this big and this far from the sun:
DISTANCE
PLANET DIAMETER FROM SUN
Mercury 1/64 inch 21 feet
Venus 1/16 inch 39 feet
Earth 1/16 inch 54 feet
Mars 1/32 inch 82 feet
Jupiter 5/8 inch 280 feet
Saturn 1/2 inch 512 feet
Uranus 1/4 inch 1,033 feet
Neptune 1/4 inch 1619 feet
Pluto 1/128 inch 2138 feet
Long lists of numbers baffle me, so let’s take a look at just a few.
How about the closest planet to the sun, Mercury? If the sun were six inches in diameter, the closest planet to the sun is 21 feet away. Try this, put a salad plate on the floor, take eight steps away, then make the tiniest pen mark you can on the floor. Stand back and take a look. That’s what it looks like from outer space — the sun and it’s first child. If your house is big enough, walk twenty steps away from the salad plate and make another tiny dot. That’s Earth!
And what about Pluto? If the sun were only six inches in diameter, Pluto would be nearly a HALF MILE away. Think of the gravity our little six inch sun must exert to keep Pluto in orbit. And there is a whole array of comets and asteroids well beyond Pluto that the sun keeps trapped as well.
Get a ruler and look at the relative sizes of the planets. The sun is 6 inches, but Jupiter, our biggest brother, is just a little over a half inch. Most rulers have sixteenth markings to represent Earth and Venus. But Mercury, Mars and Pluto are too small to measure.
No wonder the drawings in books are not to scale. I have read of a few astronomy clubs which have set up scale models of the solar system along bike paths in their cities. The models extend for two or three miles, so that walkers and cyclers can take a sentimental journey through the solar system and get a little fresh air at the same time.
There you have it. The next time you are playing with your Barbie, you can tell her about the wild and amazing solar system.
Keep Those Stars In Your Eyes!
Leroy Leonard
BETSY PUT DOWN THAT SEWING, IT’S ANOTHER STAR THING
When I set up a telescope at public star parties a very curious thing nearly always happens. A fascinated person will pull his eyeball away from the eyepiece and say, “Hmm, how far away is that?” Usually I don’t know the answer because I can only remember the distance to two objects: Saturn and M31. So if we happen to be pointed at Saturn I will say, “It takes light about an hour to get to us from Saturn.” Then I wince because I know what the next question will be. My guest will raise one eyebrow and say, “How many miles is that?” It is always a man who asks this question. Women and kids don’t care how far away these things are, nor do I, which is why I have to tell my companion that I really don’t know.
One time I made up an answer just to see what the guy would do. “In miles?” I said, “That comes out to about 85 billion miles.” He scratched his head and I could feel him silently calculating, comparing it to distances he knows; 90 miles to Cheyenne; 240 to Aunt Bertha’s; two nights to Charlotte with the kids if we share the driving... Finally he said, “That’s a lot.” I agreed.
The actual distance to Saturn, in miles, is about 791 million miles. I looked it up. But, WHO CARES? How many of us actually have a good concept of how much 791,000,000 or 85,000,000,000 really is? I understand what 12 means because every year I buy a 12 pack of Rolling Rock. Kindergarten teachers like to have their classes count the days of school until they reach 100, then they have a “100 Days Of School” party. A person who drives a forklift in a warehouse probably has a good idea of how much space 10,000 Bic pens takes up.
With a little work we can stretch our concepts of large numbers to give us some meaning. I can stuff eight doughnut holes in my mouth at once; it takes me about seven minutes to chew and swallow those doughnut holes; there are about one hundred forty 7-11 stores in town each of which sell doughnut holes... You get the point. With a little work I can get an idea of the amount of time it takes me to eat all the doughnut holes in Denver. Then I can relate that to something else and I have a context with which to work.
But after a certain point large amounts cease to mean anything because we just can’t comprehend them, no matter how hard we work. I read somewhere that many primitive societies have number systems that end at seven. They rarely have a need to count higher, so anything larger than seven is simply a lot. The Tao Te Ching uses a phrase that refers to everything in Heaven and Earth: “the ten thousand things”. This isn’t to say that the ancient Chinese thought there were exactly 10,000 things in Heaven and Earth. It simply means that there are too many things to count and if we did, well it would mean nothing, just like ten thousand doughnut holes is vague and meaningless in most contexts.
Professional astronomers deal with numbers that are so huge they have to be compressed just to be able to talk about them. My goodness, a Light Year is the distance light travels in a whole year! These distances are so huge that they are only good for comparing to each other. In human terms they are too big to relate to.
So what’s my point? Life only has meaning when you can touch it with your fingers. The rest is mystery. It does no good to calculate doughnut holes or black holes unless they are sitting in your pantry. Most of what people seek in life is meaningless, yet they seek it anyway because those far away things have an illusion of grandeur and importance. But that is only an illusion. The secret to finding meaning in life is to glean from what you can reach, and then to marvel at the mystery in the rest of the ten thousand things.
Now, for those of you who really need to know how many miles it is to M31, here is the formula:
60 x 60 x 24 x 365 x 186,000 x 1,500,000 = Miles to M31
If you’ll excuse me, I have a hankering for a doughnut hole.
Keep those stars in your eyes.
Leroy Leonard
NASA - NASA's official site
Denver Astronomical Society - Great site with great links. Get the schedule for their Public Nights!
International Astronomical Union - IAU's official site
Orion Telescopes - Commercial site with telescopes for all tastes
Astronomy Daily - Daily updates on the night sky
ATM
Page - This one makes me laugh.
It has info for Amateur Telescope Makers & Automated Teller Machines
Mel Bartels' - Great info
for ATM's (amateur telescope makers)
Gates Planetarium - At the Denver Museum of Nature and Science
Fiske Planetarium - At CU in Boulder
Merry-Andrew Afoot - My business page
Solar System Song - A song for teachers about the new 8 planet Solar System
MY HOMEMADE TELESCOPES
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I wasn't as confident after the race