Daily Archives: August 28, 2013

astronomy

The Sky Connects Us

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Across Space, Time, and History

Chaco Culture National Historical Park poster from IDA. Image by Tyler Nordgren.
Chaco Culture National Historical Park poster from IDA. Image by Tyler Nordgren.

I found an interesting press release in my mailbox this morning. It was from the International Dark-Sky Association, reporting that the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico is the IDA’s newest Dark Sky Park.  If you’ve ever been to Chaco, you know how dark its skies are, so this is an extremely fitting designation for what is actually quite a wonderful (but rugged and demanding) place to visit.

TheSpacewriter at the supernova pictograph in Chaco Canyon. Copyright 2002, Carolyn Collins Petersen

We visited there in 2002 and spent time hiking to the major sites in the park. I had visited it once before, and it was Mark’s first visit. Some years earlier, he had done the soundtrack for a show about the Anasazi (music which comprises the Geodesium album Anasazi), and so for him it was a chance to reconnect with a place that he had described in music.

Throughout the visit I really did get a wonderful sense of the place’s history. For example, there is a pictograph that is about half a day’s hike from the center of the park that is thought to depict the supernova of 1054. There’s a hand pictured next to a star-like object and a crescent moon, almost as if the ancient stargazer who put it there was measuring the sky.

When you look at things like this, or such things as the depiction of a comet in the painting Adoration of the Magi by the Italian artist Giotto di Bondone, you are seeing the sky as those people did. In a sense, you’re entering their thoughts about the objects they saw. There are ancient observatories around the world, purpose-built by architects who saw the sky as someplace important enough to dedicate years of work and effort. From the Jantar Mantar in India to the Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming in the United States to other ancient and modern observatories scattered across the planet and through near-Earth space, these places allow us to see the sky in the way their builders intended.

In a very real sense, the sky is an amazing unifying principle that unites us all as we stargaze and explore the many celestial sights available to us “up there”.  Another unifying principle in astronomy lies in the names we give objects in the sky. For the brightest objects, at least, we use many names that come to us from antiquity, from a time when all astronomy was observational only, and it was naked-eye. So, for example, many constellation names come to us from the ancient Greeks and the legends they told of their gods and goddesses. Many star names are Arabic or Greek in origin, and they all have Latin names stemming back to ancient Rome when Latin was the language of civilization. So, for example, the brightest star in Canis Major is Sirius, which comes to us from the Greek. It’s also known as Alpha Canis Majoris. Betelgeuse, the bright star in the constellation Orion, is of Arabic derivation, from the phrase “Yad al-Jauza” which means “the hand of al Jawza”.  It’s also known as alpha Orionis.

Each name we use has a history, and it tells us something about the people who named it and the vision of the sky they had. Orion is seen as a figure of a hunter in many cultures, and so it was not a stretch to think of his brightest star as being part of his arm.  The Chinese had a very different view of this guy in the sky. They saw it as a lunar mansion.  Many cultures focused on the three belt stars in Orion, naming them after hunting animals or the hunting staff of a goddess, or the stick of a wise man or a judge. Each of these interpretation gives great insight into the minds and thinking of the people who used those terms.

Throughout history, through all the wars, the battles, the conquests, the occupations, the peaceful times, the expansions of humanity to new frontiers, modern times the stars have always been there.  They’re under threat from overuse of lights, which is something that IDA is working to fix (along with people around the world who recognize that dark skies are part of our heritage).  The starry skies are worth preserving and protecting. Stars and constellations have been a source of stability, something that all people could use, and share. And, when you visit places such as Chaco Culture National Historical Park, not only can you enjoy the beauty of the night sky, you can put yourself in the place of the people who lived there before, and shared the sky with you, through a link that exists only through time and the sky.

astronomy

Mars is NOT as Big as the Full Moon

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And Other Silliness

There’s this zombie rumor making its way through Facebook and in emails and in various other corners of the Web about how Mars is SOOOOO close to Earth it’s going to look as big as the Full Moon. This is one of those things that just won’t die (like a zombie) and like a zombie, it describes something that doesn’t exist. Let’s just talk about this for a second.  The Moon is 238,000 miles away (384,000 km).  As of tonight (August 27th, 2013), Mars is more than 346 million kilometers away (that’s more than 215 million miles). Even if it were at its closest to Earth, Mars would still be more than 55 million kilometers away (more than 34. million miles).  You can do the math here. Compare 384,000 kilometers to 345 million kilometers. Even if both worlds were the same size (they’re not), there’s no way Mars would appear anywhere NEAR the size of the Moon in our skies.  In fact, it would appear a very small fraction the size of the Moon.

So, to avoid getting duped with stories like this, it’s best to use some common sense and think about how the numbers don’t add up. Mars is not going to look as big as the Full Moon ever… unless it gets much, much, much closer in its orbit. Which isn’t likely to happen given how orbits and the laws of physics work.

This Mars/Full Moon idiocy happens every year or so when somebody starts passing around info that was debunked a few years ago. In fact, we end up debunking it every year. And it keeps coming back, like a bad zombie, wanting more and consuming everybody’s brains.  Here’s a good description of how this whole Mars mess got started.

The bigger issue here is that people swallow this stuff whole because it’s on the Internet or somebody they knew sent it to them in email and it just HAS to be true. I often wonder how many people go out and actually LOOK at a Full Moon, or look at Mars and figure out for themselves that this perennial nonsense is just that: nonsense.

It reminds me of other silly claims that get tossed around Facebook or pop up on the Web. Stories like how there’s a mysterious planet named Nibiru that is headed for Earth. The same people (led by one ditzy woman who claims to speak with aliens) have been screaming about how this planet has been inbound for years and that scientists are hiding that fact. Yet, NOT one amateur astronomer has spotted it. Nor have any professionals.  People who watch the sky regularly just haven’t seen any evidence of it.  And, more to the point, planets don’t suddenly shift their orbits and head in to the Sun. At least, not without a lot of input from something to give them a push. No evidence for that either. Nobody’s seen anything of Nibiru, and with millions of skywatchers out there training their telescopes to the sky, you’d think at least one of them would have taken an image or made a note of it. But, no. There’s nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero evidence for a mysterious planet that jumped its orbit and has been heading straight for Earth since the late 1980s (which is when I first heard of this scientifically unsupportable idea).

Most of you probably remember the Great Mayan “End of Time” hoax from last year. Not only did nothing happen that even remotely resembled the dire claims of all the “true believers” in mystical Mayan prophecies (there weren’t any, actually), but most of the celestial events that got linked to this non-event were scientifically improbable, too.

Extraordinary claims of amazing, mystical celestial events require extraordinary proof.  And, they also require that people do a bit more critical thinking before they swallow fantastical lies as “proof” (proof! mind you!) of such things as UFOs, rogue planets, aliens who talk only to one person (sort of like cosmic Cabots talking only to celestial Lowells), celestial angels, and all the other nonsense that gets floated around as somehow scientific. It’s not. Never will be.  But, it is good practice for building up your critical thinking skills and assembling a first-rate Bravo Sierra detector so that you won’t fall for nonsense again.