Category Archives: astronomy poetry

Astronomy and Poetry

WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN’D ASTRONOMER

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired, and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman wrote that poem in 1865. Whenever I read it, I think of him sitting inside the stuffy lecture hall, waiting for some crumb of beauty to fall out from between the equations and Greek letters and the charts… but none did. And so he wandered outside to appreciate the beauty of the stars.

I admit I would be the first to tell you that to truly understand the whys and wherefores of astronomy and astrophysics, you have to do a little math. And learn a few Greek letters. And maybe work your way through some stuff that takes some skull sweat. But, there’s a time and a place for all that. Just as there’s a time and a place to leave it all behind as you wander on a darkened hillside late at night, with nothing more overhead than the infinity of space.

No numbers. No letters. No differential equations. No gas laws. No radiative transfer formulae. No Lorenz contractions blithering around in your head. Just the beauty of the stars and planets, all rolled up into some huge conceptual gestalt — some metaphysical awareness of the oneness of the universe and the realization of one’s own place some 1500 light-years from Orion, or 2.5 million light-years from the Andromeda Galaxy, or more than 12 billion years after everything got started in the Big Bang.

That’s Walt Whitman’s job, to take us out there in spirit. The learn’d astronomer inside us can wait a little while the poet that rules our hearts takes over and opens our eyes to the beauty of the cosmos. Besides, a little stargazing brings all the math and science to life in a way you never imagined!

Many a Night I Saw The Pleiades…

They’re coming. In another month or so you’ll be able to step outside an hour or so after dinner and look up and there they’ll be … a glittering little swarm of stars memorialized in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Locksley Hall:
Many a night I saw the Pleiades,
risin’ thro’ the mellow shade
glitter like a swarm of fireflies
tangled in a silver braid.

The Pleiades
The Pleiades

This star cluster has many hot, young stars that all formed together some one hundred million years ago. They’re passing through a cloud of gas and dust, lighting it up as they go. This is one of the brightest star clusters visible in the northern hemisphere sky, and relatively easy to observe even with the naked eye. Back when I taught at the planetarium, I used to get the same question every fall: “Is that little set of stars the Little Dipper?” I guess they look like a Dipper to the unaided eye — but if you look at them through binoculars or a small telescope, you’ll spot dozens of stars swarming around the 9 brightest ones. Their names, by the way, are quite poetic sounding: Alcyone, Asterope, Atlas, Celaeno, Electra, Maia, Merope, Pleione, and Taygeta. Cultures around the world throughout history have given names to these stars: the Hen and Chicks, the Herd of Camels, the Matari’i, the Little Eyes of the Heavens, and many, many more.

The Pleiades are the first harbinger of the winter constellations (for the northern hemisphere, summer for the folks in the south). Every year when I see them, I know that the glories of Orion won’t be far behind! Right now (in early October) you have to stay up into the wee hours of the morning to see them well after they rise up out of the horizon muck and light pollution.

Here’s a link to help you find the Pleiades and learn a little more about how another culture sees this lovely little band of stars.

Happy hunting!