Links in Space

A while back I blogged about BlogShares, a “stock market of blogs” game that I (used to) play when I have time. One of the things that players do to maintain a high “value” is to get as many other blogs as they can to link to their own blogs. This is by way of encouraging all of us to read each others’ blogs.

Over the time I’ve been playing, I’ve amassed a fair number of links from various blogs. I’ve visited all of them and I must say that there are some pretty erudite folks out there! And while we all have differences in political and social outlooks, the one that unites us is a passion for space and/or astronomy. I doubt if I would have found some of these blogs if it hadn’t been for Blogshares. It’s another common denominator between us all because it really does force us to go out there and read the blogs as we buy shares in them. I wonder how many people who play the stock market do as much due diligence on their buys as some of us do in our blog-reading? Hopefully, most of them do.

I thought I’d share many of the the links in my Blogshares Blogroll. So, look over in the left column there for a category called (oddly enough) “Blogshares Blogroll.” (NOTE: I’ve since stopped playing Blogshares due to an inordinate amount of questionable behaviour by other players.  The blogroll has been deleted and the best ones merged into a list you can see here.) my Browse around and let me know which ones strike your fancy. I think you’ll find, as I did, that while most of them are chiefly about space and astronomy, there are a few that are about other interesting topics, including law and politics. That’s the thing about blog-surfing—it introduces you to a myriad of viewpoints; as many as there are people.
One of the topics I’ve seen popping up on various blogs (including a few in the blogroll) is last night’s eclipse of the Moon. Of course, we were clouded out here in New England for some of it. But, we did see a partially eclipsed Moon as we were driving to a concert later in the evening, and it was magical! If you ever wondered what such a thing might look like from the Moon, graphic artist Hana Gertstein came up with a pretty good composite illustration (above).

Did you get to see the eclipse last night? Did you blog about it? Take any friends out to see it? How was it?

Lunar Eclipse as it might be seen from the Moon. Image by Hana Gartstein courtesy Astronomy Picture of the Day.
Lunar Eclipse as it might be seen from the Moon. Image by Hana Gartstein courtesy Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Do We Remember the Stars?

The past couple of months, Mark and I have been working on a series of planetarium fulldome digital shows about stargazing. They’re the “next generation” of what we in the planetarium profession like to call the “green arrow” show (so named because in the “olden days” the planetarium lecturer would use a green-arrow pointer to point things out in the sky).

The process of creating the shows got me to thinking about what jumble the stars must seem like for someone who has never gone out stagazing. I’m so used to stepping out and knowing what I’m looking at that I sometimes forget what it’s like to NOT know the stars.

That cocky assurance was upended the first time I went to the Southern Hemisphere (back in 1986, for Halley’s Comet) and I was confronted with a totally strange new sky. Oh, I recognized SOME patterns, and I had studied the star charts and used the planetarium to learn the skies, but the REALITY of those star-studded skies as seen from Peru was quite a shock.

Every so often, I think about the first stargazers—those humans who first looked up at the sky and tried to make sense of what they saw. It had to be a strange experience to watch the sky each night have NO idea of what those bright, shiny things were. Just out of sheer desperation, I imagine they turned to storytelling to get across the awe and wonder they felt. That’s likely where we get the multiplicity of star tales streaming out by word of mouth through every culture. Not only did they help people remember the stars, but those star tales taught cultural values and told historical tales. You can go anywhere in the world and gain insight into a culture’s values and history by listening to their ancient star tales.

My friend Ed Krupp, who is director of Griffith Observatory, told me that the stars had a certain utility for early cultures. In a previous blog entry I talked about the moon calendars and their likely link to female cycles. That’s a practical use for sky knowledge. Here’s another: charting the rise and set time of certain stars in certain seasons to commence agricultural activities. Or, how about this: using the locations of stars on certain dates to to explain a dead Pharoah’s trip to the underworld? Or, using a public sundial to mark the passage of time in the marketplace?

We don’t have to worry about stuff like that today. We have clocks and calendars and watches and computer programs to help us know the day and time and season. But, being able to do it with the stars sort of gives you a link to the cosmos you didn’t know you could forge. Let’s not forget how to do that!