Category Archives: astronomy

astronomy

Astronomy and the Lunatic Fringe

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What is it about stargazing that draws so many fruitloops out of the closet? I’ve often wondered this while scanning the sky looking for my favorite objects. There’s something so intrinsically beautiful about the stars and planets. They’re just there being stars and planets. Most stars shine by consuming hydrogen fuel in their cores and venting the energy generated as light. Planets reflect the light of the Sun, and they orbit the Sun in predictable paths.
So, why is it these predictable, physical motions and activities draw out what a friend of mine often refers to as the “psychoceramics” experts? (translation: crackpots) I’ll be darned if I know for sure, but my guess is that there’s an innate human need for the mysterious — and since the stars and planets can’t be touched (easily), they’re good candidates for fuzzy applications of the mysterious and arcane.
Take Mars, for example. It orbits the Sun every 687 days, almost but not quite twice as long as it takes Earth to go once around the Sun. Both planets go round and round, like two kids on a merry-go-round. One planetary kid is on the inner circle, the other is on an outer circle. Every 17 years or so, the two planets end up near each other in their orbits; Mars looks big and bright in our sky, and if somebody on Mars could see us (and Earth wasn’t lost in the glare of the Sun), we’d look pretty bright and big in their sky, too. This is an entirely predictable, natural consequence of planets in orbit around a star.
This summer a huge number of amateur astronomers (and a bunch of professionals, too!) are aiming their telescopes at Mars and taking this opportunity to study the Red Planet in detail. They’re all quite dedicated to the scientific study of the planet and they’re capable of turning out some amazing work. One of the best is Don Parker — a member of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (and one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met). His images regularly grace the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (ALPO) site.

Now, the amateur and professional astronomers aren’t the confused types I was referring to in my opening sentence. No, the folks I’m thinking of are whipping themselves into hysteria over this perihelic opposition of Mars (that’s what it’s officially called). And they aren’t likely to be outside actually observing the planet. Why let reality stand in the way of a good fantasy?

My charitable suggestion is that the folks who are invoking Mars as an astrological influence or even worse are ignorant of the physical processes that are at play here in the solar system. My not-so-charitable suggestion is that these people are using the Mars perihelic opposition to make some money, make a name for themselves, and/or go on a little power trip using fake scientific terminology and people’s gullibility to their advantage.
One “PhD” in astrology (no, I’m not mentioning any names (why give him/her free publicity?) is claiming that Mars’s energy signature in one’s horoscope could be causing people to be upset, overworked, suffering from ego-inflation, and engaging in fault-finding of one’s fellow workers or family members this summer. Gosh, do ya really think so???
Of course it HAS to be Mars, rather than, oh say, the recent spate of hot weather in many parts of the world. Nobody would blame personality glitches and short tempers on anything logical when a planet some 55 million kilometers away is a much more convenient source of bad karma. Right? Of course not. That wouldn’t be profitable.
A little word of advice here: astronomy’s a great science. It’s one you can do for yourself. And it’s one you can learn for yourself. You don’t need a mystic guru to read your tea leaves or use psychoceramic powers to interpret the Martian movements for you (all for a fee). Sure, you might need help from a friendly observer or a few finder charts from someplace helpful like SkyandTelescope.com — but they’re just there to help. Not do your thinking for you.
Step out there one of these summer nights around midnight and check out the stars and planets. Mars will be the one shining in the south east (if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere), and it’s reddish white! No special tools required to see it!

astronomy, astronomy art, sloan digital sky survey

Art and Space

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(Left) Space Mysteries by Vance Kirkland, courtesy of the Vance Kirkland Museum Denver, Colorado
Space Mysteries by Vance Kirkland, courtesy of the Vance Kirkland Museum Denver, Colorado

I have always been interested in the many ways of depicting space objects — whether through photography, or music, or on canvas. I’m no artist, meaning that I can’t draw or paint very well, but I do know what I like to look at. And often, I can see connections between art and the cosmos. In college one year I studied art history for a summer and grew to appreciate the different ways that artists cast their subjects — on canvas, in stone, whatever direction their muse takes them.

‘Way back in the early 1980s, my husband and I were running a recording studio and getting our planetarium show business off the ground, and we happened to meet an artist named Vance Kirkland. At the time (and for more than a decade earlier) he had been exploring scenes of outer space using a method of painting that derived from pointillism — where the artist creates whole scenes by daubing small dots of paint in primary colors to build up a larger image. Mr. Kirkland was using varying sizes of wooden dowels to daub circles of paint onto huge canvases. Some of his paintings, with names like “Energy of Mysteries in Space” and “Energy of Explosions 24 Billion Years B.C.” were wall-sized (and larger) explorations of space themes in wild colors and vibrant energy. We still have hanging in our living room a poster he created to celebrate a fund-raising effort for the Denver Symphony Orchestra. And, somewhere in my library I have a series of art books illustrating the breathtaking space views that Kirkland created throughout his career.

he Cats-Paw Nebula courtesy of the 2-Micron All-Sky Survey.
The Cat's-Paw Nebula courtesy of the 2-Micron All-Sky Survey.

Vance Kirkland died in 1981, not long after we met with him and his curator, Mr. Hugh Grant. We found out later how well-known Kirkland was — his work hangs in the Denver Art Museum and a search on his name in Google turns up thousands of citations from museums and collectors around the world. Today the Vance Kirkland Museum stands in Denver as a tribute to his work and imagination.

The top image in today’s entry is a very small thumbnail of a Kirkland painting called “Space Mysteries” and as I looked at it, I realized that although it was painted in 1973, I’d recently seen a space image that looked somewhat similar to it. But where? Then I remembered. The 2-Micron All-Sky Survey — an infrared survey of the sky undertaken by a consortium of universities and observatories recently announced that its mission of archiving 5 million images of the entire sky at high resolution was complete. I’ve mined around in the 2MASS gallery over the past few months to illustrate the upcoming book Visions of the Cosmos and had run across the second image up there — the Cat’s-Paw Nebula.

NGC 6334
NGC 6334

This area of space, also called NGC 6334, is a cloud of gas and dust that appears to be the birthplace of several massive stars. It lies more than 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The bright sources are very young and massive stars that are radiating light so energetic and intense that it is eating away at the clouds of gas and dust that make up the nursery in which they are born. In this 2MASS image, which shows an infrared view of the scene, the warm molecular clouds of gas and dust appear as purple-blue. The stars are almost like Vance Kirkland’s points of light, scattered to form a backdrop of light against which the diaphanous clouds of the nebula float like some ethereal ghost.

Take some time to browse the 2MASS gallery (link above). The scientists who created the images have given the objects some quite imaginative names, and the images are almost like works of art themselves. The link between the very human proclivity toward art and the majesty of the universe will set your mind spinning. To quote The Moody Blues, “It’s all around if you could but perceive.”