How to Enjoy Solar Systems
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How to Enjoy Solar Systems
by Hobb Thu 30 Apr 2015 - 15:57
Get some x70 binoculars, a tripod and a mount to attach the two. Wait for night. Set up your gear.
Shimmering Venus is escorting Orion, the Winter Titan, as he trudges west and off the stage. She is radiant, almost blinding in her diamond flashes of light; he seems to show his age, his back turned to us as he goes off to other lands - but come next fall when his steely eyes again peer over the eastern horizon, they will be frosty bright as befits the emperor of the long nights.
The moon is nearly full now, light covering it like a thick white paint poured over its head, creeping downward each day. Under the binoculars it resolves into an exquisitely detailed cratered ball of chalk. Perhaps someday we will be able to look at Luna and see structures or an atmosphere.
The moon's reflected sunlight dims the night sky with its power - but Jupiter can still between the moon and Venus. This is were the binoculars becomes a mind-blowing device to me, as you can clearing see the Jovian moons as a line of dots bi-secting the planet. They are just white dots but they manage to give me a notable physiological reaction as some mild euphoric chemical releases in my brain.
The night-sky reveals the two basic planes of our planet1: the solar ecliptic (or zodiac) formed as the sun swirls planets around it and the galactic ecliptic (or equator), a similar swirling that gives the blur of stars called the Milky Way. The planetary dance around the sun and the galactic whirlpool our sun flows in. The Milky Way is obvious to anyone who lets their eyes adjust to the night, the local ecliptic is found by connecting-the-dots between any planets (80% the brightest 'stars' in the sky) and the Moon giving you an arc through the sky.
The observable fact that the Moon travels around the Earth in the same plane as the planets are orbiting around the Sun used to confuse me. I assumed things would be more chaotic.2 When you look at the Jovian moons you will see that they too are aligned with the solar ecliptic. So just as planets align in a plane around the Sun (with some eccentricities, of course), moons align in the same plane around the planets. This sense of a basic order is why I like clock-work orreries so much, it is this order that allowed matter and then mind to emerge in the universe, if it was just chaos we wouldn't be conversing right now. (I get the feeling that all chaos or all order are almost the same thing...)
I gotta get back to work and thinking about crime (which has its own strange order to it), so I'm going to cheat and let old Bert Einstein wrap this up for me:
"You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way ... Even if a man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected. That is the 'miracle' which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands."
[New York, Philosophical Library, 1987 p 131.]
Or more simply:
"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible"
["Physics and Reality" (1936)]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 The two planes intersect each other and currently is visible right above Venus. There is nothing to actually see but I find the axis between the Milky Way and Zodiac too fascinating not to note it.
2 I also had a pretty hard time believing that the same side of the Moon is always facing the Earth - I still think it's suspicious... but it's a not uncommon phenomena called spin-orbit coupling and it occurs on the atomic scale too, a fact that leads to old but chilling Sci-Fi cliche that our universe might just be an atom when viewed by creatures living on a far larger scale. [I have also heard this phenomena called 'tidal lock' and 'orbital resonance' but the first explanation I read called it 'spin-orbit coupling' so that's what I call it.]
Shimmering Venus is escorting Orion, the Winter Titan, as he trudges west and off the stage. She is radiant, almost blinding in her diamond flashes of light; he seems to show his age, his back turned to us as he goes off to other lands - but come next fall when his steely eyes again peer over the eastern horizon, they will be frosty bright as befits the emperor of the long nights.
The moon is nearly full now, light covering it like a thick white paint poured over its head, creeping downward each day. Under the binoculars it resolves into an exquisitely detailed cratered ball of chalk. Perhaps someday we will be able to look at Luna and see structures or an atmosphere.
The moon's reflected sunlight dims the night sky with its power - but Jupiter can still between the moon and Venus. This is were the binoculars becomes a mind-blowing device to me, as you can clearing see the Jovian moons as a line of dots bi-secting the planet. They are just white dots but they manage to give me a notable physiological reaction as some mild euphoric chemical releases in my brain.
The night-sky reveals the two basic planes of our planet1: the solar ecliptic (or zodiac) formed as the sun swirls planets around it and the galactic ecliptic (or equator), a similar swirling that gives the blur of stars called the Milky Way. The planetary dance around the sun and the galactic whirlpool our sun flows in. The Milky Way is obvious to anyone who lets their eyes adjust to the night, the local ecliptic is found by connecting-the-dots between any planets (80% the brightest 'stars' in the sky) and the Moon giving you an arc through the sky.
The observable fact that the Moon travels around the Earth in the same plane as the planets are orbiting around the Sun used to confuse me. I assumed things would be more chaotic.2 When you look at the Jovian moons you will see that they too are aligned with the solar ecliptic. So just as planets align in a plane around the Sun (with some eccentricities, of course), moons align in the same plane around the planets. This sense of a basic order is why I like clock-work orreries so much, it is this order that allowed matter and then mind to emerge in the universe, if it was just chaos we wouldn't be conversing right now. (I get the feeling that all chaos or all order are almost the same thing...)
I gotta get back to work and thinking about crime (which has its own strange order to it), so I'm going to cheat and let old Bert Einstein wrap this up for me:
"You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way ... Even if a man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected. That is the 'miracle' which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands."
[New York, Philosophical Library, 1987 p 131.]
Or more simply:
"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible"
["Physics and Reality" (1936)]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 The two planes intersect each other and currently is visible right above Venus. There is nothing to actually see but I find the axis between the Milky Way and Zodiac too fascinating not to note it.
2 I also had a pretty hard time believing that the same side of the Moon is always facing the Earth - I still think it's suspicious... but it's a not uncommon phenomena called spin-orbit coupling and it occurs on the atomic scale too, a fact that leads to old but chilling Sci-Fi cliche that our universe might just be an atom when viewed by creatures living on a far larger scale. [I have also heard this phenomena called 'tidal lock' and 'orbital resonance' but the first explanation I read called it 'spin-orbit coupling' so that's what I call it.]
Hobb- Admin
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Age : 49
R2N :: Archives :: 2015 Archive
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