Category Archives: amateur astronomy

A Tribute to Carl Sagan

Celebrating the Life of a Phenomenal Man

Image of Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan, from the Planetary Society web site.

It has been 11 years since astronomer Carl Sagan died following a battle with myelodysplasia. To commemorate his loss, and more important, to celebrate his life, many of us are blogging about Dr. Sagan or putting comments about him on the Celebrating Sagan blog.

To say that Dr. Sagan was a hero to a great many of us would be an understatement. For all of us who came to science popularization as a result of the phenomenal Cosmos series (created with Ann Druyan), who read his science popularization books, and who followed in his footsteps as writers and researchers, Carl Sagan was the foremost practitioner of science outreach and popularization. Simply put, he embraced and shared a passion for science and truth.

Cosmos may have brought him to public attention in a very broad way, but it was hardly the first thing he did. Do a search on Amazon and you’ll find an amazing number of products—books, music, DVDs, CDs, and so on—that he had a hand in creating (or that he inspired). All are still popular more than a decade after his passing.

One of his greatest hits isn’t something that you can pick up at Amazon or download from iTunes. It’s called the Voyager Record—a sort of audio-visual time capsule that recorded a brief moment of humanity’s time in the universe. There are copies of this album on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, each of which is speeding out from the Sun, never to return. Whenever I think of Carl Sagan, I think of those albums. He headed up the committee that created them; he fought for them to be put on the spacecraft, and in some sense, they carry his vision of humanity (with all our brilliance and foibles) along with them.

The Voyager Record

I often wonder what Carl Sagan would say today, if we were still alive and watching the current rush by some short-sighted politicians in the world to dehumanize science and scientists. These “leaders” seem to care for little more than the next election, the next corporate donation, the next fundamentalist endorsement. Would he have to rewrite the book Demon-Haunted World, where he describes the fallacies of too much reliance on short-sighted religious prophets and the uneducated embrace of pseudo-sciences by people who fear science? Would he need to add on new chapters with examples of people who disregard their critical thinking skills just so they won’t be bothered by uncomfortable truths about their leaders, their country, their planet?

I’ve had many “godly” people tell me that Carl Sagan hated religion, which of course is nonsense. Most times they haven’t taken the time to read his works and understand his points. A careful reading of his works has showed me that Sagan wasn’t about hate. He disliked, intensely, the way that many people willingly let others do their thinking for them. He disapproved of the silliness of pseudo-sciences and those who use science to promote nonscientific theories as a cover for religious indoctrination in the schools. But, hate people or religion? There’s no proof of it. And science is all about the honest search for truth and the proof of it.

Carl Sagan’s greatest legacy is and will continue to be the embrace of science and what it can tell us about the universe. How the cosmos works, where it’s come from, where it’s going, our place in it; those are things that science can tell us about. We have to be willing to do our part, too, by stepping up to the challenge and using science as the exploration tool that it is. And that, along with a record of images and sounds from our planet, is all a large part of what Carl Sagan left for us as a gift and a encouragement to explore our cosmos and all the ideas (whether uncomfortable or not) that exploration brings.

There’s a Sucker Hole Born Every Minute

In stargazing circles, the phenomenon known as the “sucker hole” is a very real one. It usually manifests itself during eclipses and comet apparitions, and leads great numbers of people to search anywhere for a good hole in the clouds. I’ve been taken with sucker hole fever a few times, most notably during the 1991 total solar eclipse. We went to Hawai’i to see it as part of an expedition sponsored by the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Our chosen viewing site was a big field in Waikoloa, and was much-touted as being on the “dry” side of the Big Island. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate, which we discovered after being awakened at 4 a.m. in our Kona hotel room, pushed onto a bus, and trucked out to the viewing site. As the light of day grew, so did our horror at finding out that the sky on the supposedly “dry” side of the island was, in fact, completely clouded over. We searched in vain for a sucker hole as totality approached, and were rewarded with a few glimpses of the eclipsed Sun through some pretty gauzy-looking sucker holes. Mostly though, we just watched the clouds get dark and then light again. Ironically, if we’d stayed in Kona (which had a less-wonderful forecast) we would have seen the eclipse because that area had clear skies!

Undaunted, we pushed our luck again in 1998, when we saw a great eclipse through clear skies in the Caribbean. (You can see our pix here.)

Second contact, 1999 solar eclipse, © 1999, Carolyn Collins Petersen
Second contact, 1999 solar eclipse, © 1999, Carolyn Collins Petersen

In 1999, we decided to to try for the hat trick, so we went to Garching bei Muenchen in Germany. This time we didn’t have to worry about racing a cruise ship around in case of clouds, and we swore we weren’t going to drive all over the countryside looking for a sucker hole. So, we sat in a lovely “platz” outside our hotel and hoped for the best. For a couple of hours, we watched it rain. And, we searched in vain for sucker holes.

By golly, we got sucker holes. And just as totality began, we got to see the eclipse. The break in the rain clouds lasted for several minutes, and then within a half hour of the end of the eclipse, the rain resumed and we all sat around in the biergarten under umbrellas, toasting our good fortune. Others in our group were not so lucky—they chased sucker holes all over Bavaria and came up with nuthin’.

Diamond ring, 1999 solar eclipse, © 1999, Carolyn Collins Petersen
Diamond ring, 1999 solar eclipse, © 1999, Carolyn Collins Petersen

So, once in a while, sucker holes DO materialize during celestial events. We’re now 3 for 5 in eclipse attempts. Our first one was in 1979, which we saw from Wolf Point International airport in Wolf Point, Montana. Our second was in Helsinki harbor, which was a sort of partial success due to low-lying clouds battling a rising eclipsed Sun. Our third was the ill-fated Hawai’i expedition; our fourth was in the Caribbean, and our fifth was Germany.

No such luck for this year’s fabulous comet McNaught. We got spoiled by the Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp apparitions, and hoped to recreate the wonder of comet-gazing this year. I fear we’ve lost our chance to see.

Speaking of Germany and sucker holes, I got a funny story from my Google News Alerts today, datelined a few months back. It seems this German attorney is taking advantage of a law that allows kidnap victims to claim compensation from the state. He’s offering to go to bat for anybody who claims to have been kidnapped by aliens. No word on whether he’s got any takers, yet, but he thinks this is a growth area for his legal business. Wow.