The Naming of Parts

I love it when we get conversations going in comments here. I wish I had time to administer a bulletin board system, but right now work is keeping me from having that time. The work is great, by the way. The exhibits are coming along, the writing is great fun!

So, the current conversation about “fear of science” reminds me that we, as humans, do what we can to “humanize” science. This brings us to things like planetarium shows and places like science museums. And that’s great, although I do sometimes think that having a special museum for science, or even art for that matter, gives people the idea that science (or art) is something you have to go experience. Rather we should remember that science is all around us — or rather, the processes that science describes, occur all around us. We ARE science, just like we ARE starstuff.

One of the “humanizing” efforts in astronomy is this whole deal about paying some company to take a star and attach your (or someone else’s) name to it. That’s kind of strange, I think, since you can go out and do this for free. You don’t have to pay some company for a cheap certificate and a (sometimes) illegally copied star map with a circle around a star that somehow implies that you just bought the naming rights, like some beer company naming a stadium. Somehow these companies make it look like you’re getting something more for your money though: the chance to have everybody else (usually implying “official astronomers”) call that star by your name.

It just isn’t so, and all the advertising and hearts and flowers in the world isn’t going to make it so. Offering to put the name in a book locked in a Swiss bank vault isn’t going to make it any more official, either.

But, the stars ARE yours. The official names (or non-official ones written in books squirrelled away in some vault), don’t change that. You can go out, anytime, and look up. Fortunately, nobody’s figured out a way to charge you for access to your own backyard and a view of the stars.

I bring this up because companies who stick names on stellar objects do advertise using Google, and occasionally their ads do show up here (even though I filter such stuff out). So, I DO NOT condone such sales, but if an ad slips through, there’s not much I can do about it, even if I have filtered them out. Same with some other whack ads which have shown up here recently. Maybe I should just figure that people are intelligent enough to figure out what’s honest and what isn’t, but the star-monicker business pushes a few buttons for me. I’ve had experiences with people coming up to me after talks and proudly showing me the star they had called after their dearly departed loved one, telling me how proud they were that the whole astronomy community was going to be calling it “Bob’s Star” in perpetuity. And instead of the companies having to deal with the hurt feelings when we tell them people that they’ve kinda wasted their money on something that isn’t quite what they were led to believe, the backsplash comes back to us who love the stars too dearly to imagine them being used in activities that promise things that are usually just too good to be true.

Connections to the Cosmos

Total eclipse of the Sun
Total eclipse of the Sun

Sky events fascinate me. Every night (and every day!) I can go outside, and unless it’s totally cloudy, I can find something interesting to see. Eclipses are an example of something that I find quite fascinating. The mechanics are simple enough – one object moves between another object and the Sun. In the case of a total solar eclipse, the Moon moves between Earth and the Sun, and casts a shadow on our planet. If I’m in the shadow, this is what I see.

That may sound pretty simple, almost mechanical. And it is. But the part about standing on the planet and watching as the shadow sweeps toward you, and then being engulfed in that shadow for a few minutes (at most), brings on a feeling of awe at the majesty of the whole thing. It’s pretty darned cool!

And it’s no small wonder that we (humans) name things in our every day lives after sky phenomena that amaze us. Think about quasars for example. They’re bright, distant points of light that turn out to be distant galaxies with active (very active) nuclei. Astronomers think they have black holes at their centers which are powering huge releases of energy that cause them to be very bright at x-ray and sometimes optical wavelengths of light. But, in the 1960s, when the term “quasar” was coined from the longer description of “quasi-stellar objects,” it was a cool-sounding word that sounded “spacey” and “modern” and so a TV was named after this distant, bright, mysterious class of objects.

Or, think about cars. The first space-related car name I can remember is the Ford Galaxy. And, of course, the Subaru, which is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, that great little grouping of stars in the constellation Taurus. Or, the Ford Taurus!

Getting back to eclipses, there’s a sporty little car named the Eclipse. I suppose the name was space-related, as well as motivated by the carmaker’s desire to get across the idea that this car eclipses all others, leaves every other car in the dust. Or maybe they just liked the name.

I bought one ten years ago, not simply because of the name. But it was black, like a total solar eclipse. It was a great car in every way, and I was sorry to see it go when I finally drove it onto a dealer’s lot last week and traded it in for a new one, in the penumbral shade of titanium pearl. I guess it seems to fit my space-oriented interests!

Look around you and see how many space-themed objects exist in modern life. Kinda tells you something about our interest in the sky, even if we (as a human race) don’t always think about it in those terms.