11/4/07 – 11/10/07
by C. Zaitz
When I was visiting my parents in Rochester, NY, I saw a headline in the local paper about Pamela Melroy, a retired US Air Force Colonel. She was a local girl, one of the very few female pilots who had made it successfully through the astronaut training program. She is only the second commander of the Space Shuttle, and most likely the last.
Melroy got degrees in physics and astronomy from Wellesley College, a female-only institution patterned after Mount Holyoke Seminary (College in 1893), the first of seven famous colleges for women. These so-called “seven sisters” were chartered in the late 1800s when women had little opportunity for the excellent education that men had from the so-called Ivy League schools. Currently only five of the seven are still private women’s colleges, but those five still strive to give women an excellent education and the self confidence of succeeding in often male-dominated fields. Apparently it worked for Pamela Melroy. As she herself said in a commencement address, “The environment gives women a place to dream without being restricted or blinded by culturally generated limits.”
One of a very select group of shuttle pilots, Melroy is definitely a minority at NASA. She is one of 18 female astronauts out of a group of 91. Strangely, and for the first time ever, she is one of the two women in charge on the current mission. While she commands the space shuttle Discovery, her colleague Peggy Whitson will serve as the Station Commander on board the International Space Station. The fact that for the first time in the 50 year history of spaceflight that two women will be commanding is a rare coincidence, NASA says. The fact is, Melroy is most likely the last shuttle commander, and the only female test pilot left at NASA.
The shuttle’s days are numbered. NASA is phasing out the shuttle in favor of an updated launch vehicle, Orion. From the first flight of the Columbia in 1981 to the recent launch of Discovery, the Space Transportation System, NASA’s official handle for the shuttle, has been an astoundingly reliable workhorse of our space program. Of the120 flights of the entire fleet, Discovery has flown 33 of them. However, the loss of even one vehicle means the loss of the astronauts within it. Out of the original five shuttles built, only three remain. Considering the danger of launching and landing such an unwieldy vehicle, the statistics of 2% death rate per astronaut-flight seem like a small risk. But each one of those twelve deaths in the two shuttle disasters was painful and very difficult to overcome.
It is the tragedy of loss that spurs us on to build a bigger and better space exploration vehicle. And it is the spirit of adventure and the willingness to risk her life that allows people like Pam Melroy to follow her dream against the odds to become an astronaut, and to command the Discovery.
The last trips planned for the remaining shuttles are in 2010. After that, Orion will take over for the return to the Moon and possibly one day to Mars. Astronaut tryouts are coming, and astronaut school begins in 2009, in case you want to clear your calendar!
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Core Issues
10/28 - 11/3
by C. Zaitz
I look up a lot, but right now my mind is on core issues, like what is at the core of our home planet. There has been conflict about this very question in the past. In the 17th century, the famous comet hunter Edmund Halley had a theory that the earth was actually hollow, and thought the core was luminous and filled with gas. Where did he get such a bright idea? From none other than his contemporary scientist, Isaac Newton. Newton had calculated the density of the earth, and had found that the center of the earth must be at least twice as dense as the surface. But he also calculated the density of the moon, and mistakenly found it much denser than the earth. Since there was no reason to suggest that the moon was made so much differently than the earth, Edmund Halley sought to explain the difference by suggesting that four-ninths of the earth was empty. He imagined the inner sphere inhabited by throngs of beings, as were all the planets of the solar system. He even had a portrait painted of himself as Astronomer Royal with a diagram of his hollow- shelled earth, forever immortalized. Luckily his comet became so famous that for the most part people have forgotten this aspect of his work. Some folks, however, took the idea of the hollow earth and elaborated, so vestiges of the theory still haunt society today.
Rather than being hollow at its core, Earth is actually quite dense. It is a rocky conglomeration, like the other inner planets, very close in nature to its sister, Venus. Earth and Venus are like twins, separated at birth. Venus has a different disposition than her sister. She’s very hot, with an atmosphere that would crush and melt any visiting earthlings. Earth is more subdued, and more gracious to the living beings that inhabit her outer skin.
Underneath the harsh exterior, Venus has a dense metallic core, similar to earth, with perhaps a liquid outer core surrounding it. On earth, this rotating liquid core generates our strong magnetic field, allowing us to navigate with compasses and protecting us from killing radiation from the sun. Venus seems to be lacking a magnetic field, though her makeup is similar to the earth. The difference may lie in the fact that Venus rotates slowly, and retrograde to the rest of the solar system. The slow rotation may not provide enough energy to generate a magnetic field.
So how do we know about the cores of the planets? On earth, no one has been more than 7.5 miles down. That’s not very far, considering that it would be a journey of 4,000 miles to reach the center. Most of what we know about the interior of the earth comes from seismic data. We can measure how fast earthquake shock waves travel through different materials, and estimate the depth and make-up of earth’s layers. That is how we found out about the liquid outer core of the earth. Seismic data doesn’t tell us everything, but it does rule out a society of folks living in a hollow earth.
As you ponder life at the center of a planet, you can spy Venus by looking toward the sunrise. She’ll be winking at you from the south eastern morning sky.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
by C. Zaitz
I look up a lot, but right now my mind is on core issues, like what is at the core of our home planet. There has been conflict about this very question in the past. In the 17th century, the famous comet hunter Edmund Halley had a theory that the earth was actually hollow, and thought the core was luminous and filled with gas. Where did he get such a bright idea? From none other than his contemporary scientist, Isaac Newton. Newton had calculated the density of the earth, and had found that the center of the earth must be at least twice as dense as the surface. But he also calculated the density of the moon, and mistakenly found it much denser than the earth. Since there was no reason to suggest that the moon was made so much differently than the earth, Edmund Halley sought to explain the difference by suggesting that four-ninths of the earth was empty. He imagined the inner sphere inhabited by throngs of beings, as were all the planets of the solar system. He even had a portrait painted of himself as Astronomer Royal with a diagram of his hollow- shelled earth, forever immortalized. Luckily his comet became so famous that for the most part people have forgotten this aspect of his work. Some folks, however, took the idea of the hollow earth and elaborated, so vestiges of the theory still haunt society today.
Rather than being hollow at its core, Earth is actually quite dense. It is a rocky conglomeration, like the other inner planets, very close in nature to its sister, Venus. Earth and Venus are like twins, separated at birth. Venus has a different disposition than her sister. She’s very hot, with an atmosphere that would crush and melt any visiting earthlings. Earth is more subdued, and more gracious to the living beings that inhabit her outer skin.
Underneath the harsh exterior, Venus has a dense metallic core, similar to earth, with perhaps a liquid outer core surrounding it. On earth, this rotating liquid core generates our strong magnetic field, allowing us to navigate with compasses and protecting us from killing radiation from the sun. Venus seems to be lacking a magnetic field, though her makeup is similar to the earth. The difference may lie in the fact that Venus rotates slowly, and retrograde to the rest of the solar system. The slow rotation may not provide enough energy to generate a magnetic field.
So how do we know about the cores of the planets? On earth, no one has been more than 7.5 miles down. That’s not very far, considering that it would be a journey of 4,000 miles to reach the center. Most of what we know about the interior of the earth comes from seismic data. We can measure how fast earthquake shock waves travel through different materials, and estimate the depth and make-up of earth’s layers. That is how we found out about the liquid outer core of the earth. Seismic data doesn’t tell us everything, but it does rule out a society of folks living in a hollow earth.
As you ponder life at the center of a planet, you can spy Venus by looking toward the sunrise. She’ll be winking at you from the south eastern morning sky.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Halloween
10/21/07 – 10/28/07
by C. Zaitz
Halloween is a great night, isn’t it? Modern culture has taken our holiday to new heights of materialism, but if we can get back to its former meaning, it can be a great night for communities. October often has cool, clear nights, great for viewing the sky. On Halloween, kids and parents are out, neighborhoods are active, and the sky darkens early. What better time to look up and notice the evocative sky? It can bring us together and remind us of our connection to the seasons and the sky above.
Halloween is the last of four special days of the year known as the cross-quarter days. These days are the midway points between the better known solstices and equinoxes. As the earth slips around the sun, it changes its tilt with respect to it. At this time of year, the earth is changing its orientation daily. The northern hemisphere leans toward the sun in the summer, but in winter it leans away from it. The leaning causes a big difference in weather. The sun doesn’t heat us as well now that we aren’t getting direct rays. The sun also makes a short path in the sky, which means it’s not in the sky as long. Shorter days and indirect rays cause winter here in the north. That, and that alone, causes our seasons.
We celebrated the first day of fall, the autumn equinox, on September 23rd this year, and winter begins officially on December 22nd, the winter solstice. But for many of us, fall doesn’t really get under way until October. Perhaps that’s why we have retained the celebration of the cross quarter day in this one season. Seasons on earth don’t really kick in until the earth itself is on board. It takes time for heating and cooling to take place, just like in the air conditioning and heating in your car. Our seasons are delayed so much that it seems like the cross-quarter days are really the "first days" of the season. It’s not a great leap to imagine October 31st as the end of the growing – harvest season. What better New Year’s Eve party than Halloween?
I like Halloween for one reason and one reason only: people are outside and looking at the sky. Ok, maybe that and the leftover candy! Halloween at the Zaitz house includes the traditional bowl of candy for trick-or-treaters, but also my trusty 4” Astroscan telescope, showing any and all comers a view of the sky. This year the moon will be past full by Halloween, so not very helpful in lighting our evening activities, but Jupiter will be shining powerfully in the southwest and showing its children- four of its tiny moons, visible through a telescope.
We have lost touch in our modern culture with most of the cross quarter days. The others are Groundhog’s Day in February, May Day, and Lammas day, in August. Halloween is by far the most famous of the cross quarter days, and the most fun. Halloween celebrations have lasted through the centuries. Pre-Christian Celts celebrated Samhain (“sau-wen”) as the end of the year/beginning of a new year. The association with death and dying has been preserved through the centuries in our modern celebration of Halloween. It’s the time of the year we can easily be in touch with the rhythms of the earth.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
by C. Zaitz
Halloween is a great night, isn’t it? Modern culture has taken our holiday to new heights of materialism, but if we can get back to its former meaning, it can be a great night for communities. October often has cool, clear nights, great for viewing the sky. On Halloween, kids and parents are out, neighborhoods are active, and the sky darkens early. What better time to look up and notice the evocative sky? It can bring us together and remind us of our connection to the seasons and the sky above.
Halloween is the last of four special days of the year known as the cross-quarter days. These days are the midway points between the better known solstices and equinoxes. As the earth slips around the sun, it changes its tilt with respect to it. At this time of year, the earth is changing its orientation daily. The northern hemisphere leans toward the sun in the summer, but in winter it leans away from it. The leaning causes a big difference in weather. The sun doesn’t heat us as well now that we aren’t getting direct rays. The sun also makes a short path in the sky, which means it’s not in the sky as long. Shorter days and indirect rays cause winter here in the north. That, and that alone, causes our seasons.
We celebrated the first day of fall, the autumn equinox, on September 23rd this year, and winter begins officially on December 22nd, the winter solstice. But for many of us, fall doesn’t really get under way until October. Perhaps that’s why we have retained the celebration of the cross quarter day in this one season. Seasons on earth don’t really kick in until the earth itself is on board. It takes time for heating and cooling to take place, just like in the air conditioning and heating in your car. Our seasons are delayed so much that it seems like the cross-quarter days are really the "first days" of the season. It’s not a great leap to imagine October 31st as the end of the growing – harvest season. What better New Year’s Eve party than Halloween?
I like Halloween for one reason and one reason only: people are outside and looking at the sky. Ok, maybe that and the leftover candy! Halloween at the Zaitz house includes the traditional bowl of candy for trick-or-treaters, but also my trusty 4” Astroscan telescope, showing any and all comers a view of the sky. This year the moon will be past full by Halloween, so not very helpful in lighting our evening activities, but Jupiter will be shining powerfully in the southwest and showing its children- four of its tiny moons, visible through a telescope.
We have lost touch in our modern culture with most of the cross quarter days. The others are Groundhog’s Day in February, May Day, and Lammas day, in August. Halloween is by far the most famous of the cross quarter days, and the most fun. Halloween celebrations have lasted through the centuries. Pre-Christian Celts celebrated Samhain (“sau-wen”) as the end of the year/beginning of a new year. The association with death and dying has been preserved through the centuries in our modern celebration of Halloween. It’s the time of the year we can easily be in touch with the rhythms of the earth.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Monday, October 08, 2007
Hot Hot Hot
From the nuclear furnace at the core to the extremely hot plasma of its corona, the sun is the definition of hot! Far from the “giant ball of fire” we learned about in first grade, it is more accurately described as a sphere of plasma. Plasma is not a common everyday household item. You know of plasma- lightning is an example. If you’ve seen the northern lights, you are seeing a colorful display of plasma. Plasma is hot, ionized gas.
The sun has plenty of plasma. Like other stars, it supports itself from the crushing weight of gravity by fusing hydrogen atoms at its core. Pressures and temperatures being what they are at the core of the sun, atoms that normally don’t like being all that close will overcome their repulsion and fuse together. In this process, they release prodigious amounts of energy.
It was actually the icon scientist Albert Einstein who quantified exactly how much energy in his uber-famous equation, E=mc (squared). In English, this equation says that you can get an enormous amount of energy out of a little bit of mass. The variable “c” stands for the speed of light, which is a pretty big quantity. And if you square it, it becomes super big. No matter how small your mass (m), if you multiply it by the speed of light squared, you have a very big number, which is E, the amount of energy you can get from it. This idea opened up a world of hurt.
Here on earth, we have harnessed the power of fission to unleash energy from an atom. We have figured out how to take a heavy element like uranium and “fission” it by tossing a neutron at it. By splitting a very heavy element like Uranium, we can release exorbitant amounts of energy. Unfortunately a by-product of the process is radioactive material, called “waste” due to its unpleasantness and difficulty of disposal without harm to humans. We use our knowledge for good, in our nuclear power plants, but also for bad, in our nuclear bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki both felt the power of unleashed of nuclear fission.
Stars don’t “fiss,” they fuse. Stars release energy through nuclear fusion. The sun isn’t filled with heavy elements like uranium. All they have at their disposal to keep alive is hydrogen. Luckily the universe decided that elements lighter than iron would be better off if they fused, rather than fissioned. The sun has lots of light elements to fuse, and it does so at will. This releases the life-giving energy that we receive some 93 million miles away. We seem to have a very advantageous spot in the solar system.
Think about toasting marshmallows on a stick. When you get too close to the fire, you end up with a crispy marshmallow that you have to snuff before popping into your mouth to hear the sizzle of your own saliva. If the marshmallow is too far from the fire, it remains cool and solid, not the most pleasing form of the food product. I find it both fascinating and reassuring that the earth maintains the place of the well-browned marshmallow. Not too close to the nuclear furnace, and not too far. It’s just right to keep us comfortable. So even with changing temperatures and seasons, we can be grateful for our place in space.
The sun has plenty of plasma. Like other stars, it supports itself from the crushing weight of gravity by fusing hydrogen atoms at its core. Pressures and temperatures being what they are at the core of the sun, atoms that normally don’t like being all that close will overcome their repulsion and fuse together. In this process, they release prodigious amounts of energy.
It was actually the icon scientist Albert Einstein who quantified exactly how much energy in his uber-famous equation, E=mc (squared). In English, this equation says that you can get an enormous amount of energy out of a little bit of mass. The variable “c” stands for the speed of light, which is a pretty big quantity. And if you square it, it becomes super big. No matter how small your mass (m), if you multiply it by the speed of light squared, you have a very big number, which is E, the amount of energy you can get from it. This idea opened up a world of hurt.
Here on earth, we have harnessed the power of fission to unleash energy from an atom. We have figured out how to take a heavy element like uranium and “fission” it by tossing a neutron at it. By splitting a very heavy element like Uranium, we can release exorbitant amounts of energy. Unfortunately a by-product of the process is radioactive material, called “waste” due to its unpleasantness and difficulty of disposal without harm to humans. We use our knowledge for good, in our nuclear power plants, but also for bad, in our nuclear bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki both felt the power of unleashed of nuclear fission.
Stars don’t “fiss,” they fuse. Stars release energy through nuclear fusion. The sun isn’t filled with heavy elements like uranium. All they have at their disposal to keep alive is hydrogen. Luckily the universe decided that elements lighter than iron would be better off if they fused, rather than fissioned. The sun has lots of light elements to fuse, and it does so at will. This releases the life-giving energy that we receive some 93 million miles away. We seem to have a very advantageous spot in the solar system.
Think about toasting marshmallows on a stick. When you get too close to the fire, you end up with a crispy marshmallow that you have to snuff before popping into your mouth to hear the sizzle of your own saliva. If the marshmallow is too far from the fire, it remains cool and solid, not the most pleasing form of the food product. I find it both fascinating and reassuring that the earth maintains the place of the well-browned marshmallow. Not too close to the nuclear furnace, and not too far. It’s just right to keep us comfortable. So even with changing temperatures and seasons, we can be grateful for our place in space.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Astarte and... Astarte
From Sunday morning, October 7th, 7am-ish.
The "too-poetical" poem of Edgar Allan Poe,
Ulalume
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere -
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir -
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
Here once, through and alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul -
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll -
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole -
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.
Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere -
Our memories were treacherous and sere, -
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!) -
We noted not the dim lake of Auber
(Though once we had journeyed down here) -
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
And now, as the night was senescent
And star-dials pointed to morn -
As the star-dials hinted of morn -
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn -
Astarte's bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.
And I said: "She is warmer than Dian;
She rolls through an ether of sighs -
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion
To point us the path to the skies -
To the Lethean peace of the skies -
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes -
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes."
But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said: "Sadly this star I mistrust -
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:
Ah, hasten! -ah, let us not linger!
Ah, fly! -let us fly! -for we must."
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings until they trailed in the dust -
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust -
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.
I replied: "This is nothing but dreaming:
Let us on by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its Sybilic splendour is beaming
With Hope and in Beauty tonight! -
See! -it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
And be sure it will lead us aright -
We safely may trust to a gleaming,
That cannot but guide us aright,
Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."
Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom -
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb -
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said: "What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?"
She replied: "Ulalume -Ulalume -
'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"
Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere -
As the leaves that were withering and sere;
And I cried: "It was surely October
On this very night of last year
That I journeyed -I journeyed down here! -
That I brought a dread burden down here -
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber -
This misty mid region of Weir -
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Candle In The Dark
9/30/07 – 10/6/07
by C. Zaitz
Do you remember Carl Sagan? Back in the early 1980’s, Carl Sagan was the voice of science. Scientists envied him for his fame and comedians imitated him due to his juicy enunciation of words like “nucleosynthesis” and “billions.” I was an impressionable 13 year old when Cosmos: A Personal Voyage first aired. Cosmos was Sagan’s illustrated ode to science and scientific thinking. Not only did he reveal the latest findings in astronomy, he discussed everything from the origins of life to the prospect of space travel, touching on biology, chemistry and physics. He framed phenomenon on earth within the larger context of the entire universe.
Who can forget the giant “Cosmic Calendar?” Sagan fit the whole history of the universe into one year, starting with the Big Bang on New Year’s Day. Humans started walking upright around 9:30 pm on December 31st, the very last day of that same year. Recorded human history begins at 11:59:45 pm. The voyage of Christopher Columbus happened on the very last second before midnight. Sagan reminded us that everything that has ever happened, everyone we’ve ever known about, any deeds ever done, occured in the last minutes, the last seconds of the history of the universe.
Later in life Sagan wrote a book called, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. He wrote extensively about the importance of skepticism and scientific thinking in our daily lives. He rallied against the influence of pseudosciences like astrology and ufology, while being a strong proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life. Sagan warned against sloppy thinking, and came up with the “Baloney Detector,” useful ideas to keep in mind when forming ideas. “Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours.” ”Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified. (Can it be tested?) Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?” And Occam's razor has been used in countless debates: “if there are two hypotheses that explain the data equally well, choose the simpler.” Why go supernatural when something can be explained by natural laws of science?
Carl Sagan died in 1996 of a rare bone cancer, but his legacy lives on. This fall the Henry Ford Community College Planetarium is showing each of the 13 episodes of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage on Fridays at 11:15 am. The doors are open to anyone interested, and there is no admission fee. The episodes are updated with new graphics and commentary by Sagan and his widow Ann Druyan. The ideas and words of Carl Sagan speak to us over the decades. Who can forget his famous quotes, “We are all star stuff” and, “We are a way for the universe to know itself.” It’s hard to leave the planetarium not feeling a little richer, a little wiser for having thought about our place in the great scheme of things. Even if you don’t agree with every thing he says, Carl Sagan was nothing if not an inspirational educator and popularizer of science. He made the process of scientific inquiry interesting, and he gave us perspective by describing the grandeur and curious nature of the universe and our local part of it.
by C. Zaitz
Do you remember Carl Sagan? Back in the early 1980’s, Carl Sagan was the voice of science. Scientists envied him for his fame and comedians imitated him due to his juicy enunciation of words like “nucleosynthesis” and “billions.” I was an impressionable 13 year old when Cosmos: A Personal Voyage first aired. Cosmos was Sagan’s illustrated ode to science and scientific thinking. Not only did he reveal the latest findings in astronomy, he discussed everything from the origins of life to the prospect of space travel, touching on biology, chemistry and physics. He framed phenomenon on earth within the larger context of the entire universe.
Who can forget the giant “Cosmic Calendar?” Sagan fit the whole history of the universe into one year, starting with the Big Bang on New Year’s Day. Humans started walking upright around 9:30 pm on December 31st, the very last day of that same year. Recorded human history begins at 11:59:45 pm. The voyage of Christopher Columbus happened on the very last second before midnight. Sagan reminded us that everything that has ever happened, everyone we’ve ever known about, any deeds ever done, occured in the last minutes, the last seconds of the history of the universe.
Later in life Sagan wrote a book called, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. He wrote extensively about the importance of skepticism and scientific thinking in our daily lives. He rallied against the influence of pseudosciences like astrology and ufology, while being a strong proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life. Sagan warned against sloppy thinking, and came up with the “Baloney Detector,” useful ideas to keep in mind when forming ideas. “Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours.” ”Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified. (Can it be tested?) Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?” And Occam's razor has been used in countless debates: “if there are two hypotheses that explain the data equally well, choose the simpler.” Why go supernatural when something can be explained by natural laws of science?
Carl Sagan died in 1996 of a rare bone cancer, but his legacy lives on. This fall the Henry Ford Community College Planetarium is showing each of the 13 episodes of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage on Fridays at 11:15 am. The doors are open to anyone interested, and there is no admission fee. The episodes are updated with new graphics and commentary by Sagan and his widow Ann Druyan. The ideas and words of Carl Sagan speak to us over the decades. Who can forget his famous quotes, “We are all star stuff” and, “We are a way for the universe to know itself.” It’s hard to leave the planetarium not feeling a little richer, a little wiser for having thought about our place in the great scheme of things. Even if you don’t agree with every thing he says, Carl Sagan was nothing if not an inspirational educator and popularizer of science. He made the process of scientific inquiry interesting, and he gave us perspective by describing the grandeur and curious nature of the universe and our local part of it.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Music to My Ears
9/23/07 - 9/29-07
by C. Zaitz
I love music. I’ve studied it, I listen to it, and I play it. I started piano lessons when I was five and after years of practice I can make music that sounds good to my ears. But the sweetest sound I’ve heard in a long time came from a human voice, and it made this music, “My daughter never liked science before, but now she likes it.” This was from a mom I met at Parent’s Night in the girl’s school where I’m teaching.
I’m still flying from hearing those words. There’s nothing that makes an educator feel better about the difficulty of teaching many classes every day, the long hours of correcting labs, grading tests, and crafting lessons, than to hear that they made a difference. It makes me very happy when young teen-aged girls, just entering puberty, are still excited about science. When I hear that the older girls in their later teens are still curious and interested, it makes me feel even better. We often lose girls in science at that age, and I think one reason is that they don’t know why it’s important. But I tell them why. It teaches them how to think. And that takes practice.
The first time you ice skate can be frustrating, as can your first karate lesson, or your first attempt at driving a stick shift. They all require repetitive practice. So does scientific thinking, but many of us don’t naturally tend toward it. We have to practice our thinking, our language, and our ability to reason. We all have habits, but to make science a habit requires the same kind of practice that cooking or playing football does.
So how can we practice scientific thinking? By reading a lot. Scientific questions come from observations and prior knowledge, gathered by humans since they first started painting bison hunts on cave walls. We have to know stuff to ask questions about it. Books and periodicals are important, but we get a lot of information from on-line sources. On-line science news can be convenient, but we run the same risk there that we run by getting our news from TV, and that is getting information from biased or non-reputable sources. Which leads me to the subject of critical thinking.
We should think critically about what we read and hear and see. Critical thinking doesn’t mean to “criticize,” it means to be discerning and evaluate the information we get. If we start with reputable sources, perhaps do a little research before we read, we can avoid wasting our time reading information that is not based in science, meaning based on facts or testable information.
Believing what someone tells us just because they speak the loudest isn’t using sound judgment, and certainly hasn’t done our nation much good in recent history. We can all think for ourselves, and yet sometime we choose not to. Sometimes we buy into other people’s ideas because they sound good to us or fit in with our belief system. I am as guilty of it as anyone, but I know what it takes to think critically and to avoid our personal biases and prejudices: practice, practice, practice. And that’s how you can get to Carnegie Hall, or to Mars!
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
by C. Zaitz
I love music. I’ve studied it, I listen to it, and I play it. I started piano lessons when I was five and after years of practice I can make music that sounds good to my ears. But the sweetest sound I’ve heard in a long time came from a human voice, and it made this music, “My daughter never liked science before, but now she likes it.” This was from a mom I met at Parent’s Night in the girl’s school where I’m teaching.
I’m still flying from hearing those words. There’s nothing that makes an educator feel better about the difficulty of teaching many classes every day, the long hours of correcting labs, grading tests, and crafting lessons, than to hear that they made a difference. It makes me very happy when young teen-aged girls, just entering puberty, are still excited about science. When I hear that the older girls in their later teens are still curious and interested, it makes me feel even better. We often lose girls in science at that age, and I think one reason is that they don’t know why it’s important. But I tell them why. It teaches them how to think. And that takes practice.
The first time you ice skate can be frustrating, as can your first karate lesson, or your first attempt at driving a stick shift. They all require repetitive practice. So does scientific thinking, but many of us don’t naturally tend toward it. We have to practice our thinking, our language, and our ability to reason. We all have habits, but to make science a habit requires the same kind of practice that cooking or playing football does.
So how can we practice scientific thinking? By reading a lot. Scientific questions come from observations and prior knowledge, gathered by humans since they first started painting bison hunts on cave walls. We have to know stuff to ask questions about it. Books and periodicals are important, but we get a lot of information from on-line sources. On-line science news can be convenient, but we run the same risk there that we run by getting our news from TV, and that is getting information from biased or non-reputable sources. Which leads me to the subject of critical thinking.
We should think critically about what we read and hear and see. Critical thinking doesn’t mean to “criticize,” it means to be discerning and evaluate the information we get. If we start with reputable sources, perhaps do a little research before we read, we can avoid wasting our time reading information that is not based in science, meaning based on facts or testable information.
Believing what someone tells us just because they speak the loudest isn’t using sound judgment, and certainly hasn’t done our nation much good in recent history. We can all think for ourselves, and yet sometime we choose not to. Sometimes we buy into other people’s ideas because they sound good to us or fit in with our belief system. I am as guilty of it as anyone, but I know what it takes to think critically and to avoid our personal biases and prejudices: practice, practice, practice. And that’s how you can get to Carnegie Hall, or to Mars!
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
All Things Being Equal
September is one of those transitional months. School–aged kids know instinctively what fall means, and now many Michigan adults find themselves school bound for work related retraining. Even at work the feeling can change; no more “sliding out” early on Friday afternoon to find a favorite beach or an empty picnic table. There’s a palpable crispness in the air, a curt bustle in our motions, as if we still had to gather in the crops before the first hard frost.
The equinox approaches. Day submits to the creeping onslaught of night. Practically speaking, we have to walk the dog before it gets dark. We don’t linger outside talking to neighbors as late. The balance of power between light and dark is coming to equilibrium. We could relax in the abatement of burning rays from the sun and enjoy the lessening humidity and moderate temperatures, but we know what comes next: the utter and complete domination of a Michigan Winter. Can you hear the distant bells tolling for our dying summer?
Equilibrium of night and day means that the stars appear earlier. You don’t have to stay up very late to see the mighty planet Jupiter hovering low in the western twilight sky, or to see Princess Andromeda and her hero Perseus playing out their ancient story in the deepening night. So let’s quell those morose tolling bells and enjoy the equinox, for it brings some of the most interesting constellations and the biggest of planets to the early evening sky. Plus, fall in temperate Michigan is nothing to sneeze at! (Unless you suffer from allergies as many of us do!)
I like to think of autumn “advancing” because that word reflects what’s happening in the sky. The Sun, positioned against a background of very distant stars, seems to be marching eastward little by little. We can’t see this happening because the blue day sky prevents us from seeing the stars and the sun at the same time. The only change we can detect is the advancing of sunset, minutes earlier each day. If we could watch the process from space, we would see our home planet plodding along its normal course around the sun.
One result of this plodding motion is that the constellations that have been with us all summer are now getting lost in the glow of the sun. It also means that the star patterns that you’ve seen in the sultry summer mornings are now visible much earlier in the evening. Instead of the Summer Triangle adorning the sky all night, it will be fading not long after sunset. And the glorious and familiar constellations of fall, our friends Perseus and Andromeda, Cassiopeia and Pegasus, have migrated from early morning apparitions to familiar players in our evening heavenly tableau.
All things being equal, we can enjoy the moderate temperatures, the early evening sunsets, and the convenient timing of the crisp and clear fall night sky. The equinox occurs on September 23rd, the day when the sun rises due east, sets due west, lingers in the sky for half of the earth’s rotation, and goes down in time for us to take a break from the bustle of fall and enjoy the twinkle of the celestial bodies in the autumn sky.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
The equinox approaches. Day submits to the creeping onslaught of night. Practically speaking, we have to walk the dog before it gets dark. We don’t linger outside talking to neighbors as late. The balance of power between light and dark is coming to equilibrium. We could relax in the abatement of burning rays from the sun and enjoy the lessening humidity and moderate temperatures, but we know what comes next: the utter and complete domination of a Michigan Winter. Can you hear the distant bells tolling for our dying summer?
Equilibrium of night and day means that the stars appear earlier. You don’t have to stay up very late to see the mighty planet Jupiter hovering low in the western twilight sky, or to see Princess Andromeda and her hero Perseus playing out their ancient story in the deepening night. So let’s quell those morose tolling bells and enjoy the equinox, for it brings some of the most interesting constellations and the biggest of planets to the early evening sky. Plus, fall in temperate Michigan is nothing to sneeze at! (Unless you suffer from allergies as many of us do!)
I like to think of autumn “advancing” because that word reflects what’s happening in the sky. The Sun, positioned against a background of very distant stars, seems to be marching eastward little by little. We can’t see this happening because the blue day sky prevents us from seeing the stars and the sun at the same time. The only change we can detect is the advancing of sunset, minutes earlier each day. If we could watch the process from space, we would see our home planet plodding along its normal course around the sun.
One result of this plodding motion is that the constellations that have been with us all summer are now getting lost in the glow of the sun. It also means that the star patterns that you’ve seen in the sultry summer mornings are now visible much earlier in the evening. Instead of the Summer Triangle adorning the sky all night, it will be fading not long after sunset. And the glorious and familiar constellations of fall, our friends Perseus and Andromeda, Cassiopeia and Pegasus, have migrated from early morning apparitions to familiar players in our evening heavenly tableau.
All things being equal, we can enjoy the moderate temperatures, the early evening sunsets, and the convenient timing of the crisp and clear fall night sky. The equinox occurs on September 23rd, the day when the sun rises due east, sets due west, lingers in the sky for half of the earth’s rotation, and goes down in time for us to take a break from the bustle of fall and enjoy the twinkle of the celestial bodies in the autumn sky.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
All Over the Map
9/9/07 - 9/15/07
by C. Zaitz
I write about astronomy. At least, that’s what I say I’m writing about. But I tend to be all over the map with my topics. I’ve talked about Jamestown, Dinosaurs, Snorkeling and even the weather. It’s not because I have Attention Deficit Disorder, it’s because Astronomy can be all over the map too.
Astronomy encompasses a lot of other sciences, leading down a road that passes through towns like physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and it even goes to territories like philosophy and religion. Forgive my extended metaphor, but astronomy is rather like a path or a trail that leads to many different places. Of course, the vehicle driving astronomy is curiosity, the same thing that drives all the sciences. Curiosity, and the desire to make our lives better and easier.
Take Google Earth, for example. You can download a program to your computer that allows you to zoom in on practically any place on earth, as if you were orbiting our planet and had an amazing zoom lens that allowed you to see, in some cases, who planted a new tree or where dirty water is pouring into our streams. That sounds like science fiction, but it’s not; it’s easy, fun and useful as well. Curious to see what Madagascar looks like? You can, and not just a colored blotch on a world map; you can see the actual landscape from a bird’s eye view. You can visit the Coliseum in Rome, and see the four presidents at Mount Rushmore. And thanks to scientific technology, it’s available to anyone who can use a computer.
Scientific knowledge allows us to keep satellites in space to take the pictures, and it allows us to understand optics and information storage. Scientific inquiry allows us to use quantum tunneling in our electronics, and allows the global sharing of information. It’s pretty incredible when you think about it. But some people may feel like it’s an invasion of privacy, or feel the Orwellian “Big Brother is watching us” uneasiness.
Perhaps it’s our ability, or maybe our need, to be curious and question things that is important, especially now when it’s difficult to accept what science is telling us about global warming and climate change. We have the data that tells us that our world is changing. Information is coming to us from all over the map. But we cannot forget that it is ultimately our interpretation of information that matters.
Interpretation comes from our background knowledge, such as from our education, our experiences, and what we’ve heard, read, or seen on TV. And that can truly be a mish mosh of ideas, of reality and faux reality. But the more we get information from reputable sources, from primary and authoritative sources, the better informed we can be in our interpretations. Science allows us to rely on experiments and observations to try to explain things. But many areas of science are open to interpretation, and misinterpretation, if we’re not discerning.
Information may seem to be all over the map, but we can use all of the tools at our disposal to interpret and synthesize it. And the best tools we have are the sciences. They may be disparate areas of study, but they all stem from our attempt to understand our universe, and ourselves.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
by C. Zaitz
I write about astronomy. At least, that’s what I say I’m writing about. But I tend to be all over the map with my topics. I’ve talked about Jamestown, Dinosaurs, Snorkeling and even the weather. It’s not because I have Attention Deficit Disorder, it’s because Astronomy can be all over the map too.
Astronomy encompasses a lot of other sciences, leading down a road that passes through towns like physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and it even goes to territories like philosophy and religion. Forgive my extended metaphor, but astronomy is rather like a path or a trail that leads to many different places. Of course, the vehicle driving astronomy is curiosity, the same thing that drives all the sciences. Curiosity, and the desire to make our lives better and easier.
Take Google Earth, for example. You can download a program to your computer that allows you to zoom in on practically any place on earth, as if you were orbiting our planet and had an amazing zoom lens that allowed you to see, in some cases, who planted a new tree or where dirty water is pouring into our streams. That sounds like science fiction, but it’s not; it’s easy, fun and useful as well. Curious to see what Madagascar looks like? You can, and not just a colored blotch on a world map; you can see the actual landscape from a bird’s eye view. You can visit the Coliseum in Rome, and see the four presidents at Mount Rushmore. And thanks to scientific technology, it’s available to anyone who can use a computer.
Scientific knowledge allows us to keep satellites in space to take the pictures, and it allows us to understand optics and information storage. Scientific inquiry allows us to use quantum tunneling in our electronics, and allows the global sharing of information. It’s pretty incredible when you think about it. But some people may feel like it’s an invasion of privacy, or feel the Orwellian “Big Brother is watching us” uneasiness.
Perhaps it’s our ability, or maybe our need, to be curious and question things that is important, especially now when it’s difficult to accept what science is telling us about global warming and climate change. We have the data that tells us that our world is changing. Information is coming to us from all over the map. But we cannot forget that it is ultimately our interpretation of information that matters.
Interpretation comes from our background knowledge, such as from our education, our experiences, and what we’ve heard, read, or seen on TV. And that can truly be a mish mosh of ideas, of reality and faux reality. But the more we get information from reputable sources, from primary and authoritative sources, the better informed we can be in our interpretations. Science allows us to rely on experiments and observations to try to explain things. But many areas of science are open to interpretation, and misinterpretation, if we’re not discerning.
Information may seem to be all over the map, but we can use all of the tools at our disposal to interpret and synthesize it. And the best tools we have are the sciences. They may be disparate areas of study, but they all stem from our attempt to understand our universe, and ourselves.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Entangled States
9/2/07 – 9/8/07
C. Zaitz
I’ve been thinking about quantum mechanics lately. QM is a branch of physics that deals with the universe on the scale of the very small. On a daily basis, we don’t enter the realm of quantum mechanics, but more and more, scientists are finding that the properties of the very small scale inform the universe on a very big scale. And it’s a quite different universe on the small scale.
On the scale of the tiny, basic laws of “classical” physics break down. We are used to measuring things and describing their positions with numbers. In the realm of atoms, measuring things becomes impossible. You may have heard of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the idea that you cannot know both the position and the momentum of an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom. You can know where an electron is likely to be, but you can’t pinpoint it. The act of doing so would destroy the information you were trying to get. Once you “stop” the electron to study it, you have changed its momentum. And you cannot get around this fact. The measuring and the measured thing are entangled, you cannot separate them. We can intuit that perhaps more easily than other aspects of QM. In art, we say that “negative space” is as important as the object in space. There is a direct and entangled relationship between the object and the space around it. Change the object, and you automatically change the space surrounding it.
It turns out that objects, rather than just being objects, are better described as a series of relationships. You might not be able to know exactly where one particle is, but if it is entangled with another particle having an opposite position, you can know that whatever you do to one particle will always affect its entangled particle. So if one egg is sunny side up and its entangled partner is sunny side down, you can flip one egg and automatically and always flip the other too. This is called “entangled states.”
In quantum mechanics, we have to give up absolutes and accept probabilities. Perhaps that’s why we never notice quantum mechanics in our daily lives. QM says there is a real possibility that all of the atoms in your body could pass right through the atoms of a wall, allowing you to walk right though it. Does that mean Kung-Fu masters can really walk through walls? No, because on the scale of a human being, the probability of that happening is incredibly small, almost non-existent. But on the scale of the atom, it can happen. In fact it does happen, and furthermore, we rely on it happening. It’s called “quantum tunneling” and it’s the basis for our modern electronics and microchips.
Science and philosophy come together in quantum mechanics. We often say that the age of determinism in science, where A causes B through a direct line of events, has been replaced with the age of probability. Einstein hated this idea. His aversion to it shows up in his famous quote, “God does not play dice with the Universe.” Even today many people reject the underlying philosophical ramifications of QM while using its principles and products in every day life. But I find the QM idea of probabilities, relationships and entangled states to be an active and connecting philosophy. And we’ve only begun to explore it.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view
C. Zaitz
I’ve been thinking about quantum mechanics lately. QM is a branch of physics that deals with the universe on the scale of the very small. On a daily basis, we don’t enter the realm of quantum mechanics, but more and more, scientists are finding that the properties of the very small scale inform the universe on a very big scale. And it’s a quite different universe on the small scale.
On the scale of the tiny, basic laws of “classical” physics break down. We are used to measuring things and describing their positions with numbers. In the realm of atoms, measuring things becomes impossible. You may have heard of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the idea that you cannot know both the position and the momentum of an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom. You can know where an electron is likely to be, but you can’t pinpoint it. The act of doing so would destroy the information you were trying to get. Once you “stop” the electron to study it, you have changed its momentum. And you cannot get around this fact. The measuring and the measured thing are entangled, you cannot separate them. We can intuit that perhaps more easily than other aspects of QM. In art, we say that “negative space” is as important as the object in space. There is a direct and entangled relationship between the object and the space around it. Change the object, and you automatically change the space surrounding it.
It turns out that objects, rather than just being objects, are better described as a series of relationships. You might not be able to know exactly where one particle is, but if it is entangled with another particle having an opposite position, you can know that whatever you do to one particle will always affect its entangled particle. So if one egg is sunny side up and its entangled partner is sunny side down, you can flip one egg and automatically and always flip the other too. This is called “entangled states.”
In quantum mechanics, we have to give up absolutes and accept probabilities. Perhaps that’s why we never notice quantum mechanics in our daily lives. QM says there is a real possibility that all of the atoms in your body could pass right through the atoms of a wall, allowing you to walk right though it. Does that mean Kung-Fu masters can really walk through walls? No, because on the scale of a human being, the probability of that happening is incredibly small, almost non-existent. But on the scale of the atom, it can happen. In fact it does happen, and furthermore, we rely on it happening. It’s called “quantum tunneling” and it’s the basis for our modern electronics and microchips.
Science and philosophy come together in quantum mechanics. We often say that the age of determinism in science, where A causes B through a direct line of events, has been replaced with the age of probability. Einstein hated this idea. His aversion to it shows up in his famous quote, “God does not play dice with the Universe.” Even today many people reject the underlying philosophical ramifications of QM while using its principles and products in every day life. But I find the QM idea of probabilities, relationships and entangled states to be an active and connecting philosophy. And we’ve only begun to explore it.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Dark Ages
8/26/07 – 9/1/07
by C. Zaitz
When we think of the “dark ages” in western history, especially in science, we often think of folks believing the earth was flat and that the stars were little lights attached to a crystal sphere which circled the earth. In reality, just like today, people probably didn’t spend too much time thinking about how the stars were attached to the heavens, since they were busy trying to survive on meager meals and trying to avoid diseases. But there are always a few folks with either the time, or the light headedness from lack of food, who think about the heavens. All was not dark in the dark ages.
If we can get beyond the strong terms of contrast used throughout history like black and white, light and dark, we can begin to see the time period in Europe we generally regard as the “dark ages” more realistically. Between the years 500-1000 AD, or the early Middle Ages, people didn’t stop working, they made things, they communicated, and they thought. The problem with the dark ages, historians say, is that there is very little recorded information. Without recorded events, the time period becomes “dark” to historians. Unfortunately, writers from later times have shaped the way we think about the so-called dark ages, comparing them with what came before, the glorious Roman Empire, and what came after, the High Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. However, it isn’t completely accurate to say that no advancements to civilization came during that period. By the middle ages, most people believed that the earth was a very small part of an immense universe. Folks knew the earth was round, and though the science of the sky was intricately tied to prognostication and astrology, there was a considerable bank of knowledge about the planets and stars.
But in these times, people had to deal with an ongoing scarcity of food, hardships of weather, and now it seems scientists have found evidence that crop failure and a series of very cold summers may have been caused by some catastrophic event, such as volcanic eruption or asteroid collision. The first appearance of the Bubonic Plague came around this time, and before it was done centuries later, it had killed perhaps one half or more of the entire population of Europe. No wonder they didn’t record their history.
I wonder if the folks in the sixth century would have done anything different had they known the plague would kill every other person. I wonder what they would have done to prevent it. Eerily, the same things that may have prevented folks from recording their history then are predicted to happen to humanity again. Are we prepared? There are folks who look to the skies and tell us that we should begin to colonize other planets, but most of us aren’t listening. We are just trying to get through the day with modern day plagues of disease and lack of food and shelter many people worldwide suffer from.
I hope that the visionaries who want to travel to other planets, and the rest of us who support them, will make it happen in our lifetimes. I hope we learn from our history, and that we can keep a light on in the darkness that we all sometimes face.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
by C. Zaitz
When we think of the “dark ages” in western history, especially in science, we often think of folks believing the earth was flat and that the stars were little lights attached to a crystal sphere which circled the earth. In reality, just like today, people probably didn’t spend too much time thinking about how the stars were attached to the heavens, since they were busy trying to survive on meager meals and trying to avoid diseases. But there are always a few folks with either the time, or the light headedness from lack of food, who think about the heavens. All was not dark in the dark ages.
If we can get beyond the strong terms of contrast used throughout history like black and white, light and dark, we can begin to see the time period in Europe we generally regard as the “dark ages” more realistically. Between the years 500-1000 AD, or the early Middle Ages, people didn’t stop working, they made things, they communicated, and they thought. The problem with the dark ages, historians say, is that there is very little recorded information. Without recorded events, the time period becomes “dark” to historians. Unfortunately, writers from later times have shaped the way we think about the so-called dark ages, comparing them with what came before, the glorious Roman Empire, and what came after, the High Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. However, it isn’t completely accurate to say that no advancements to civilization came during that period. By the middle ages, most people believed that the earth was a very small part of an immense universe. Folks knew the earth was round, and though the science of the sky was intricately tied to prognostication and astrology, there was a considerable bank of knowledge about the planets and stars.
But in these times, people had to deal with an ongoing scarcity of food, hardships of weather, and now it seems scientists have found evidence that crop failure and a series of very cold summers may have been caused by some catastrophic event, such as volcanic eruption or asteroid collision. The first appearance of the Bubonic Plague came around this time, and before it was done centuries later, it had killed perhaps one half or more of the entire population of Europe. No wonder they didn’t record their history.
I wonder if the folks in the sixth century would have done anything different had they known the plague would kill every other person. I wonder what they would have done to prevent it. Eerily, the same things that may have prevented folks from recording their history then are predicted to happen to humanity again. Are we prepared? There are folks who look to the skies and tell us that we should begin to colonize other planets, but most of us aren’t listening. We are just trying to get through the day with modern day plagues of disease and lack of food and shelter many people worldwide suffer from.
I hope that the visionaries who want to travel to other planets, and the rest of us who support them, will make it happen in our lifetimes. I hope we learn from our history, and that we can keep a light on in the darkness that we all sometimes face.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Disappointment
8/19/07 – 8/26/07
by C. Zaitz
Sometimes when a person takes their first look through a telescope, they get a feeling of, “is that all there is? Where are the colors? Why is it so small and faint?” Ah, you were expecting Hubble Space Telescope photographic quality. How disappointing! Hubble Space Telescope photos are works of art, created from information traveling by radio frequencies over hundreds, thousands, and in the case of the Hubble Deep Field image, billions of light years.
The images are breathtaking. Who can forget the famous “Pillars of Creation,” the image of the Eagle Nebula whose elongated fingers of gas and dust may harbor baby star systems. Or the Deep Field, an image made by opening the Hubble’s photographic eyeball and having it stare at a tiny area of space for a very, very long time. But how do these images get back to earth? Actually, they come to us in black and white, as a series of zeroes and ones, strung along in complicated patterns like strands of DNA. Once they get to earth, computers assemble the information into black and white images. So how did they get so colorful?
Astronomers, or should I say artists, add it later. They use a computer program like Photoshop to color in the gases and clouds with tints they assign. But color is a hard thing to define. We each perceive it differently. Some people have a very keen sense of color, and some are color blind, meaning that the colors they see are different from what most of us see. My dad often confuses red and green, because, he says, red is a very dull color. Most of us don’t see it that way. In the the Pillars of Creation, both hydrogen and sulfur were detected as a red color in the clouds of gas. Astronomers changed the hydrogen to green so it could be distinguished from the sulfur. What we got was a gorgeous, colorful, if not accurate image that filled our imaginations. But what does accurate mean when it comes to color? It’s difficult to define an exact color because it is mostly perception. So how far from red can we stray before it becomes green? Or does it really matter? Dad thought they were still the same color!
How often have I said, “here’s Betelgeuse, a red star,” or, “this is Rigel, a blue star.” No wonder people get disappointed when they are expecting the star to be the color of Bozo’s nose in the sky. I could say, “Betelgeuse radiates light mostly in the infrared and red end of the spectrum, so it’s considered a “red star,” but it is so far away that the very little bit of light we get from it is only slightly tinged orangey-red.” But that’s pretty long-winded! So we oversimplify.
The Hubble pictures are so inspiring that I don’t think the colors are an issue. The only problem comes when people expect to see those kinds of images through a telescope. If you are expecting your view through a friend’s telescope to look like the poster you saw in the mall, you’ll be disappointed. But if you have patience and look with eyes and mind ready to see detail and to absorb what you are looking at, you’re bound to avoid disappointment.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
by C. Zaitz
Sometimes when a person takes their first look through a telescope, they get a feeling of, “is that all there is? Where are the colors? Why is it so small and faint?” Ah, you were expecting Hubble Space Telescope photographic quality. How disappointing! Hubble Space Telescope photos are works of art, created from information traveling by radio frequencies over hundreds, thousands, and in the case of the Hubble Deep Field image, billions of light years.
The images are breathtaking. Who can forget the famous “Pillars of Creation,” the image of the Eagle Nebula whose elongated fingers of gas and dust may harbor baby star systems. Or the Deep Field, an image made by opening the Hubble’s photographic eyeball and having it stare at a tiny area of space for a very, very long time. But how do these images get back to earth? Actually, they come to us in black and white, as a series of zeroes and ones, strung along in complicated patterns like strands of DNA. Once they get to earth, computers assemble the information into black and white images. So how did they get so colorful?
Astronomers, or should I say artists, add it later. They use a computer program like Photoshop to color in the gases and clouds with tints they assign. But color is a hard thing to define. We each perceive it differently. Some people have a very keen sense of color, and some are color blind, meaning that the colors they see are different from what most of us see. My dad often confuses red and green, because, he says, red is a very dull color. Most of us don’t see it that way. In the the Pillars of Creation, both hydrogen and sulfur were detected as a red color in the clouds of gas. Astronomers changed the hydrogen to green so it could be distinguished from the sulfur. What we got was a gorgeous, colorful, if not accurate image that filled our imaginations. But what does accurate mean when it comes to color? It’s difficult to define an exact color because it is mostly perception. So how far from red can we stray before it becomes green? Or does it really matter? Dad thought they were still the same color!
How often have I said, “here’s Betelgeuse, a red star,” or, “this is Rigel, a blue star.” No wonder people get disappointed when they are expecting the star to be the color of Bozo’s nose in the sky. I could say, “Betelgeuse radiates light mostly in the infrared and red end of the spectrum, so it’s considered a “red star,” but it is so far away that the very little bit of light we get from it is only slightly tinged orangey-red.” But that’s pretty long-winded! So we oversimplify.
The Hubble pictures are so inspiring that I don’t think the colors are an issue. The only problem comes when people expect to see those kinds of images through a telescope. If you are expecting your view through a friend’s telescope to look like the poster you saw in the mall, you’ll be disappointed. But if you have patience and look with eyes and mind ready to see detail and to absorb what you are looking at, you’re bound to avoid disappointment.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
It's Just a Theory...
8/12/07 – 8/18/07
by C. Zaitz
If science is based on “theories,” how do we know they are true? After all, a theory isn’t necessarily truth or law, is it?
All scientific theories begin as a hypothesis, or a possible answer to a question we ask. For the question, “Why don’t we fall off the earth if it’s round?” we could invent some pretty cool explanations. For example, we have seen how magnets on earth attract each other, and we know that iron can be magnetic. If earth is a big magnet, maybe it pulls the iron in our blood toward it. But then we remember that feathers and leaves also fall to earth and they have no iron in them. Oops, back to the drawing board with our hypothesis.
We will have to gather observations and do experiments to come up with another hypothesis. We have to design experiments that will test exactly what we want to test without introducing too much error. And we have to accept the answers we get, even if they don’t agree with our hypothesis. The key to scientific theories is that they need to be falsifiable. That means that we must be able to test to see if a hypothesis fails. If it does, we have to refine it or chuck it completely. If we make all reasonable tests and it holds up, it may become a theory.
In the late 17th century when Sir Isaac Newton began to think about what made apples fall and held the moon in orbit, he didn’t have a word for the force he was trying to describe. He wasn’t trying to prove a theory; he was trying to find a reasonable hypothesis to explain his observations. He needed a mathematical way to describe how objects move, so he developed calculus. With that tool, he was able to find an equation that worked in every case he tried. Finally he came up with a name for what he was describing, from the Latin, “gravitas,” meaning weight or heaviness. Today we call them the Laws of Gravitation, but they are really theories that have held up over time and trials. But new technology brings new tests.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Albert Einstein was able to test the laws of gravity around a massive object, the Sun, and found that the “laws” needed to be modified. By the time he was done, he had changed the way we think about gravity. No longer do we imagine it as an invisible magnet, but more like a fabric in which we are all embedded. Our movements are shaped by this fabric, which itself is shaped by mass. We follow its curves like golf balls on a putt putt course. Einstein called it spacetime, and scientists are still unraveling the implications today.
The word theory deserves more “gravity” than it is usually given. In order for a hypothesis to be scientific and to become a theory, it has to be tested. That’s why religious or “new age” ideas are often not considered to be in the realm of science. I believe it’s important for us to understand how science works. Otherwise we might never have known how gravity works, and therefore never be able to fly a rocket to the moon. Scientific theories are the only things that let us do that.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
by C. Zaitz
If science is based on “theories,” how do we know they are true? After all, a theory isn’t necessarily truth or law, is it?
All scientific theories begin as a hypothesis, or a possible answer to a question we ask. For the question, “Why don’t we fall off the earth if it’s round?” we could invent some pretty cool explanations. For example, we have seen how magnets on earth attract each other, and we know that iron can be magnetic. If earth is a big magnet, maybe it pulls the iron in our blood toward it. But then we remember that feathers and leaves also fall to earth and they have no iron in them. Oops, back to the drawing board with our hypothesis.
We will have to gather observations and do experiments to come up with another hypothesis. We have to design experiments that will test exactly what we want to test without introducing too much error. And we have to accept the answers we get, even if they don’t agree with our hypothesis. The key to scientific theories is that they need to be falsifiable. That means that we must be able to test to see if a hypothesis fails. If it does, we have to refine it or chuck it completely. If we make all reasonable tests and it holds up, it may become a theory.
In the late 17th century when Sir Isaac Newton began to think about what made apples fall and held the moon in orbit, he didn’t have a word for the force he was trying to describe. He wasn’t trying to prove a theory; he was trying to find a reasonable hypothesis to explain his observations. He needed a mathematical way to describe how objects move, so he developed calculus. With that tool, he was able to find an equation that worked in every case he tried. Finally he came up with a name for what he was describing, from the Latin, “gravitas,” meaning weight or heaviness. Today we call them the Laws of Gravitation, but they are really theories that have held up over time and trials. But new technology brings new tests.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Albert Einstein was able to test the laws of gravity around a massive object, the Sun, and found that the “laws” needed to be modified. By the time he was done, he had changed the way we think about gravity. No longer do we imagine it as an invisible magnet, but more like a fabric in which we are all embedded. Our movements are shaped by this fabric, which itself is shaped by mass. We follow its curves like golf balls on a putt putt course. Einstein called it spacetime, and scientists are still unraveling the implications today.
The word theory deserves more “gravity” than it is usually given. In order for a hypothesis to be scientific and to become a theory, it has to be tested. That’s why religious or “new age” ideas are often not considered to be in the realm of science. I believe it’s important for us to understand how science works. Otherwise we might never have known how gravity works, and therefore never be able to fly a rocket to the moon. Scientific theories are the only things that let us do that.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Fiery Skies of August
8/5/07 – 8/11/07
by C. Zaitz
Every August, the earth passes through a part of its orbit where a vast cloud of debris awaits. The debris consists of tiny particles, many no larger than a mote of dust or grain of sand, left behind by a comet. As earth plows through the cloud, the tiny bits of rock are jammed into the thick atmosphere and create spectacular plasma trails as they incinerate. These are the Perseid meteors, and the nights of August 11th and 12th will be the peak this year.
I find it odd that particles so very tiny can make such a fiery fuss in the sky. So do other scientists, and it hasn’t been completely clear what is actually making the light. Scientist study the light from meteors to find out if it comes from ionized gas as the meteorite interacts with the air and melts and sublimates, or if it’s from the compressed and heated air that the meteorite creates as it slams in at over 40 miles per second. It may be both, but meteor spectra tell us that most of the light contains ionized bits of meteorite, making the first explanation more plausible as the main cause.
This year, the event of the Perseid meteor shower is predicted to be good. The moon will not be around to outshine the sometimes faint streaks of light, and if you can find a spot where the sky is not tainted by artificial lights, the chances are great for you to see several meteors a minute. Perseids can go off in any direction, but if you trace the streak back to the source, you will be somewhere near the constellation Perseus. Though the average sighting may be one per minute, often you will see a “clumping effect” where you may see 3-5 in a minute but then experience a lull.
The very best time to see them is always between midnight and sunrise, but that’s inconvenient for most of us. Luckily, anytime after twilight is fine, though if you can stay up, the view will get dramatically better towards morning. You don’t have to know where Perseus is, which is handy since he’s not the most spectacular of all constellations. Look toward the northeast in the early evening, and higher in the north more overhead as night turns to morning. All you really need is a fairly dark sky, perhaps a lawnchair, and some patience.
Meteor showers are one of the most fun things to watch in astronomy. You do not need the aid of binoculars or a telescope to enjoy a meteor shower, but you can try to photograph them if you’re a gambler or just very patient! You can stay out late with friends and count them or just try to be the first to see the biggest and brightest one of the night. It’s always fun to hear someone shout “There’s one” and have everyone sigh because by the time someone says those words, the meteor is usually gone. Meteor showers are social events, and a great way to watch the sky with your loved ones and friends. I encourage you to take your children or parents out for the evening and enjoy the natural show of the Perseid meteor shower.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
by C. Zaitz
Every August, the earth passes through a part of its orbit where a vast cloud of debris awaits. The debris consists of tiny particles, many no larger than a mote of dust or grain of sand, left behind by a comet. As earth plows through the cloud, the tiny bits of rock are jammed into the thick atmosphere and create spectacular plasma trails as they incinerate. These are the Perseid meteors, and the nights of August 11th and 12th will be the peak this year.
I find it odd that particles so very tiny can make such a fiery fuss in the sky. So do other scientists, and it hasn’t been completely clear what is actually making the light. Scientist study the light from meteors to find out if it comes from ionized gas as the meteorite interacts with the air and melts and sublimates, or if it’s from the compressed and heated air that the meteorite creates as it slams in at over 40 miles per second. It may be both, but meteor spectra tell us that most of the light contains ionized bits of meteorite, making the first explanation more plausible as the main cause.
This year, the event of the Perseid meteor shower is predicted to be good. The moon will not be around to outshine the sometimes faint streaks of light, and if you can find a spot where the sky is not tainted by artificial lights, the chances are great for you to see several meteors a minute. Perseids can go off in any direction, but if you trace the streak back to the source, you will be somewhere near the constellation Perseus. Though the average sighting may be one per minute, often you will see a “clumping effect” where you may see 3-5 in a minute but then experience a lull.
The very best time to see them is always between midnight and sunrise, but that’s inconvenient for most of us. Luckily, anytime after twilight is fine, though if you can stay up, the view will get dramatically better towards morning. You don’t have to know where Perseus is, which is handy since he’s not the most spectacular of all constellations. Look toward the northeast in the early evening, and higher in the north more overhead as night turns to morning. All you really need is a fairly dark sky, perhaps a lawnchair, and some patience.
Meteor showers are one of the most fun things to watch in astronomy. You do not need the aid of binoculars or a telescope to enjoy a meteor shower, but you can try to photograph them if you’re a gambler or just very patient! You can stay out late with friends and count them or just try to be the first to see the biggest and brightest one of the night. It’s always fun to hear someone shout “There’s one” and have everyone sigh because by the time someone says those words, the meteor is usually gone. Meteor showers are social events, and a great way to watch the sky with your loved ones and friends. I encourage you to take your children or parents out for the evening and enjoy the natural show of the Perseid meteor shower.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Colonists
7/22/07 - 7/29/07
by C. Zaitz
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. Jamestown, Virginia is known as the birthplace of the country, where the first boatload of eager colonists landed. They arrived in May, and I can imagine that the summer was filled with building, hunting, cooking and fending off human and animal enemies. By July I imagine that the colonists were wondering what they had been thinking, coming to a new world so far from home. They must have been hot, hungry, riddled with mosquito bites and maybe a few arrow wounds. But enough of them survived the terrible famines and attacks from the Spanish and Natives to build homes, churches and official buildings, to flourish and become farmers and businessmen.
400 years later, we can wonder what happened to that colonizing spirit. When you first heard that we’d gone to the moon, didn’t you think Mars was next? What happened? Yes, space travel is very dangerous, expensive and time consuming, but was not also crossing the Atlantic to the New World?
Old colonizing risks: Running out of food and water. Disease and pestilence. Getting speared by someone already living there. Death.
New colonizing risks: Running out of food, air and water. Disease and pestilence. Getting lasered by someone already living there. Death.
So why haven’t we planned a mission to Mars? Are the risks any greater? Are the costs heavier? If we really wanted to travel to Mars, we would. America has not been frugal when its will was strong. Why do we not establish a mission to Mars, to walk the rusty sands and build a human presence on that nearby planet? Perhaps we need an outside menace to motivate us. The mission to the moon was a response to immediate threat of Soviet superiority. Without that threat, it’s not obvious that we would have endured the expense and the risk. But being motivated by threat is not the best case scenario, since the threats that would motivate us to travel to other planets usually involves the destruction of our own planet.
But it’s not all gloom and doom. Economic incentive seems to be what drives us today, rather than fear of asteroid collision, irreversible global warming, or even nuclear holocaust. Some say our governments should pool resources and offer incentives to private companies to innovate. Private companies can often get the job done with less bureaucracy, more efficiency, and less waste than governments. That requires widespread cooperation, however, and economic motivation. Companies need to know what they will gain from the endeavor. On the other hand, did the Jamestown colonists really know what they were getting into before they left England? They surely weren’t making a profit during the first years of starvation.
I don’t think our will is weak. We are fascinated by space travel, by UFOs and aliens. Maybe we are just yearning for proof that it can be done. Whatever our ultimate motivation, I hope that it includes our will to survive and our curiosity to know the universe. And I hope we don’t wait too long to get started. Who knows where we’ll be in 400 more years. I hope it doesn’t take a threat of Jupiterian superiority to get us motivated, because by then, it may be too late.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
by C. Zaitz
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. Jamestown, Virginia is known as the birthplace of the country, where the first boatload of eager colonists landed. They arrived in May, and I can imagine that the summer was filled with building, hunting, cooking and fending off human and animal enemies. By July I imagine that the colonists were wondering what they had been thinking, coming to a new world so far from home. They must have been hot, hungry, riddled with mosquito bites and maybe a few arrow wounds. But enough of them survived the terrible famines and attacks from the Spanish and Natives to build homes, churches and official buildings, to flourish and become farmers and businessmen.
400 years later, we can wonder what happened to that colonizing spirit. When you first heard that we’d gone to the moon, didn’t you think Mars was next? What happened? Yes, space travel is very dangerous, expensive and time consuming, but was not also crossing the Atlantic to the New World?
Old colonizing risks: Running out of food and water. Disease and pestilence. Getting speared by someone already living there. Death.
New colonizing risks: Running out of food, air and water. Disease and pestilence. Getting lasered by someone already living there. Death.
So why haven’t we planned a mission to Mars? Are the risks any greater? Are the costs heavier? If we really wanted to travel to Mars, we would. America has not been frugal when its will was strong. Why do we not establish a mission to Mars, to walk the rusty sands and build a human presence on that nearby planet? Perhaps we need an outside menace to motivate us. The mission to the moon was a response to immediate threat of Soviet superiority. Without that threat, it’s not obvious that we would have endured the expense and the risk. But being motivated by threat is not the best case scenario, since the threats that would motivate us to travel to other planets usually involves the destruction of our own planet.
But it’s not all gloom and doom. Economic incentive seems to be what drives us today, rather than fear of asteroid collision, irreversible global warming, or even nuclear holocaust. Some say our governments should pool resources and offer incentives to private companies to innovate. Private companies can often get the job done with less bureaucracy, more efficiency, and less waste than governments. That requires widespread cooperation, however, and economic motivation. Companies need to know what they will gain from the endeavor. On the other hand, did the Jamestown colonists really know what they were getting into before they left England? They surely weren’t making a profit during the first years of starvation.
I don’t think our will is weak. We are fascinated by space travel, by UFOs and aliens. Maybe we are just yearning for proof that it can be done. Whatever our ultimate motivation, I hope that it includes our will to survive and our curiosity to know the universe. And I hope we don’t wait too long to get started. Who knows where we’ll be in 400 more years. I hope it doesn’t take a threat of Jupiterian superiority to get us motivated, because by then, it may be too late.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Night Watchmen
7/15/07 - 7/21/07
by C. Zaitz
There are a lot of things floating above us, circling the planet all day long, all night long. While we are all sleeping, there are flocks of satellites gliding silently overhead. If you’ve been out this summer even for ten minutes of star gazing, you’ve seen them. I love it when you can see more than one at a time. They look like a flotilla of space ships, and I imagine a future where they are just commuters coming to and from work.
Meanwhile I looked into what is really up there. Mostly, it’s derelict satellites, parts of old rockets, debris from collisions and even frozen space sewage. It seems the astronauts launch it out into space to get rid of it. Unfortunately, the bags of waste have the same orbit as they do, so it is not unheard of that someone might meet up with it in a future orbit.
There are many different types of orbits for satellites. The International Space Station and most of our weather satellites are in LEO’s, or low earth orbits. They are speeding along at nearly 20,000 mph because they are so “close” to earth, at only 200-500 miles. They circle the earth every 90 minutes. If they went any slower, earth’s gravity would overcome them and they would tumble to earth, burning streaks of incinerated satellite parts as they fell.
A common LEO, especially for satellites that need to see the whole earth over time, is a polar orbit. As the satellite travels from pole to pole, the earth rotates underneath. Over time, the satellite will have passed over the entire planet, just by maintaining its orbit. They can map the entire earth. Remote sensing and long term weather satellites are often in these polar orbits. These are very common to see. I saw three the other night, all at slightly different speeds, but traveling along the same trajectory like silent watchmen.
A GEO is a much higher orbit. GEOs are geosynchronous orbits, meaning they are up so high and going just the right speed so that they appear to be stationary over a certain spot on earth. You can imagine what use these orbits would be, especially if you were curious about a certain spot on earth. Unfortunately, at 22,000 miles up, the view is not as sharp as a lower orbiting satellite's. Their advantage is that they have a large coverage area. We use them for relaying a signal for communication or broadcasting. Our telecommunications satellites are in GEO orbits. The problem with this kind of orbit is that the satellite must be directly over the equator to maintain the orbit. That leaves out the polar regions, and those folks want their satellite TV, just like we do. So we have another orbit, a highly elliptical one, which can come close to earth at one point, even a polar region, and then wander father out.
If you’d like to know exactly when satellites are passing over your head, you can go to the Heavens Above website and enter your town. You’ll be surprised at what you can see. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg of the night watchmen. You’ll be surprised at who’s seeing you!
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
by C. Zaitz
There are a lot of things floating above us, circling the planet all day long, all night long. While we are all sleeping, there are flocks of satellites gliding silently overhead. If you’ve been out this summer even for ten minutes of star gazing, you’ve seen them. I love it when you can see more than one at a time. They look like a flotilla of space ships, and I imagine a future where they are just commuters coming to and from work.
Meanwhile I looked into what is really up there. Mostly, it’s derelict satellites, parts of old rockets, debris from collisions and even frozen space sewage. It seems the astronauts launch it out into space to get rid of it. Unfortunately, the bags of waste have the same orbit as they do, so it is not unheard of that someone might meet up with it in a future orbit.
There are many different types of orbits for satellites. The International Space Station and most of our weather satellites are in LEO’s, or low earth orbits. They are speeding along at nearly 20,000 mph because they are so “close” to earth, at only 200-500 miles. They circle the earth every 90 minutes. If they went any slower, earth’s gravity would overcome them and they would tumble to earth, burning streaks of incinerated satellite parts as they fell.
A common LEO, especially for satellites that need to see the whole earth over time, is a polar orbit. As the satellite travels from pole to pole, the earth rotates underneath. Over time, the satellite will have passed over the entire planet, just by maintaining its orbit. They can map the entire earth. Remote sensing and long term weather satellites are often in these polar orbits. These are very common to see. I saw three the other night, all at slightly different speeds, but traveling along the same trajectory like silent watchmen.
A GEO is a much higher orbit. GEOs are geosynchronous orbits, meaning they are up so high and going just the right speed so that they appear to be stationary over a certain spot on earth. You can imagine what use these orbits would be, especially if you were curious about a certain spot on earth. Unfortunately, at 22,000 miles up, the view is not as sharp as a lower orbiting satellite's. Their advantage is that they have a large coverage area. We use them for relaying a signal for communication or broadcasting. Our telecommunications satellites are in GEO orbits. The problem with this kind of orbit is that the satellite must be directly over the equator to maintain the orbit. That leaves out the polar regions, and those folks want their satellite TV, just like we do. So we have another orbit, a highly elliptical one, which can come close to earth at one point, even a polar region, and then wander father out.
If you’d like to know exactly when satellites are passing over your head, you can go to the Heavens Above website and enter your town. You’ll be surprised at what you can see. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg of the night watchmen. You’ll be surprised at who’s seeing you!
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
The Heavens
7/8/07 – 7/14/07
by C. Zaitz
I have a collection of old astronomy books. Sometimes the author will refer to the sky as “the Heavens.” What a lovely way to think of the regions above our heads. It gives the sense of the vastness and beauty of the sky, but the term does tend to lump everything together. “The Heavens” is a more encompassing term than saying the singular “heaven” but it doesn’t truly capture the layered and complex nature of what lies above.
For example, during the day, the sky is all around us, and we rarely ever look at it, just as we rarely look at the ceiling in our house. But the sky is much more interesting, even on a bland day, than the ceiling. The sky has magnificent layers of intrigue, layers of depth and color. Blue skies aren’t just blue, and grey skies are even more colorful. My favorite, of course, is the black sky of night, when all the subtle, distant and concentrated light from the stars can penetrate the atmosphere and be seen here on earth.
But sometimes when you look up, you see what looks like “heaven” from what we’ve seen in paintings and drawings. We can see rays of light coming down from the frothy, fluffy gold-edged clouds with a bright sun lighting them from behind. It’s a beautiful scene, which is probably why it was chosen to represent heaven. Those rays have a technical name. They are called crepuscular rays, which certainly isn’t as poetic a term as “heavenly rays,” but describes the rays of light that seem to spread out from behind back lit clouds, especially at twilight. Crepuscular means, “twilight,” though the effect can happen anytime there are enough particles of dust or vapor in the air to scatter light well. The cause of these rays is a combination of light and shadow. The light is always there when the sun is out, but the shadow created by an object like a cloud that gives the light a “ray” appearance.
From our perspective, the parallel rays from the sun actually look like they diverge from behind the cloud, giving them that spread out “ray from heaven” look, as if a heavenly body shone a great golden flashlight to illuminate our little patch of earth. It’s the same trick of perspective that the brain plays to make parallel railroad tracks look like they converge at a distance.
There certainly are other beautiful effects of light and shadow, scattering and perspective to be seen in the sky, but I think crepuscular rays are some of the most evocative. Perhaps it’s because they do seem to be flooding the earth with golden light, almost like a curtain opening up onto earth’s stage, as directed by something bigger than ourselves. Next time you see them, you’ll know that they are caused by natural circumstances, but you can always let those pretty rays take your gaze up into the sky. I assure you there will always be something interesting to see in “the heavens.”
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
by C. Zaitz
I have a collection of old astronomy books. Sometimes the author will refer to the sky as “the Heavens.” What a lovely way to think of the regions above our heads. It gives the sense of the vastness and beauty of the sky, but the term does tend to lump everything together. “The Heavens” is a more encompassing term than saying the singular “heaven” but it doesn’t truly capture the layered and complex nature of what lies above.
For example, during the day, the sky is all around us, and we rarely ever look at it, just as we rarely look at the ceiling in our house. But the sky is much more interesting, even on a bland day, than the ceiling. The sky has magnificent layers of intrigue, layers of depth and color. Blue skies aren’t just blue, and grey skies are even more colorful. My favorite, of course, is the black sky of night, when all the subtle, distant and concentrated light from the stars can penetrate the atmosphere and be seen here on earth.
But sometimes when you look up, you see what looks like “heaven” from what we’ve seen in paintings and drawings. We can see rays of light coming down from the frothy, fluffy gold-edged clouds with a bright sun lighting them from behind. It’s a beautiful scene, which is probably why it was chosen to represent heaven. Those rays have a technical name. They are called crepuscular rays, which certainly isn’t as poetic a term as “heavenly rays,” but describes the rays of light that seem to spread out from behind back lit clouds, especially at twilight. Crepuscular means, “twilight,” though the effect can happen anytime there are enough particles of dust or vapor in the air to scatter light well. The cause of these rays is a combination of light and shadow. The light is always there when the sun is out, but the shadow created by an object like a cloud that gives the light a “ray” appearance.
From our perspective, the parallel rays from the sun actually look like they diverge from behind the cloud, giving them that spread out “ray from heaven” look, as if a heavenly body shone a great golden flashlight to illuminate our little patch of earth. It’s the same trick of perspective that the brain plays to make parallel railroad tracks look like they converge at a distance.
There certainly are other beautiful effects of light and shadow, scattering and perspective to be seen in the sky, but I think crepuscular rays are some of the most evocative. Perhaps it’s because they do seem to be flooding the earth with golden light, almost like a curtain opening up onto earth’s stage, as directed by something bigger than ourselves. Next time you see them, you’ll know that they are caused by natural circumstances, but you can always let those pretty rays take your gaze up into the sky. I assure you there will always be something interesting to see in “the heavens.”
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Summer Vacations
7/1/07 – 7/7/07
By C. Zaitz
‘Tis the season to get away. Whether it is vacation travel time, visiting relatives time, or maybe just taking a vacation in your mind time, most folks like to change locations in the summer. I’m often asked about how the sky changes when you travel. The answer is: it depends on where you’re going! If you are traveling mostly due east or west, you don’t have to worry. You’ll see pretty much the same sky you will “here,” at pretty much the same time of the evening, give or take some minutes depending on how close you are to the edge of your time zone. For example, if you travel to Chicago from Detroit, you’ll notice a large difference in actual sunset time. Chicago is on the eastern edge of the Central zone, and we are on the western edge of the Eastern. We gain an hour by traveling to Chicago, so though physically the two cities aren’t that far apart, Detroit has sunset around 9pm EDT, and Chicago sees it at 8:15pm CDT.
If you’re traveling north or south of “here” (wherever you are), you’ll start to see some differences. From Michigan and pretty much anywhere in the US, the solar system objects make a path across the southern sky as they seem to travel east to west. The further south you go, the higher they will be in the sky. As you travel close to the equator, they will be above your head. As you go south of the equator, you’ll notice the parade of planets across the northern sky, but they’ll still be in the same order. Currently Venus is closest to the western horizon at sunset, followed by Saturn, with Jupiter bringing up the rear furthest toward the east. They will still seem to travel east to west, so the only difference is that you’ll be looking north, rather than south to see them.
The constellations do vary with latitude, but not that much within the US. If you travel north of here, you won’t add any new constellations to your repertoire; we see all the northern ones throughout the year already. If you go significantly south, perhaps beyond Miami, you will see sights never seen from our latitude. This is the realm of the hopelessly obscure constellations. If you thought Cancer (the crab) and Monoceros (the unicorn) were hard to find, try finding Antlia (the pump) or Norma (the carpenter’s square). I may be biased, but I think most of the groovy constellations are in the northern skies. That’s no excuse to stay home this summer, though!
I think the main difference you’ll find as you travel is the view of the sky in general. There aren’t too many places left that are unpolluted by street lights, but when you travel, chances are greater that you may find a few of them. I think that the mind actually sighs when it sees the vast number of stars of the Milky Way in a velvety black summer night sky. That’s when it begins to get rid of the hassles and worries of the long cold months and begins to finally get a change of perspective. And for me, that’s when the vacation really begins!
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
By C. Zaitz
‘Tis the season to get away. Whether it is vacation travel time, visiting relatives time, or maybe just taking a vacation in your mind time, most folks like to change locations in the summer. I’m often asked about how the sky changes when you travel. The answer is: it depends on where you’re going! If you are traveling mostly due east or west, you don’t have to worry. You’ll see pretty much the same sky you will “here,” at pretty much the same time of the evening, give or take some minutes depending on how close you are to the edge of your time zone. For example, if you travel to Chicago from Detroit, you’ll notice a large difference in actual sunset time. Chicago is on the eastern edge of the Central zone, and we are on the western edge of the Eastern. We gain an hour by traveling to Chicago, so though physically the two cities aren’t that far apart, Detroit has sunset around 9pm EDT, and Chicago sees it at 8:15pm CDT.
If you’re traveling north or south of “here” (wherever you are), you’ll start to see some differences. From Michigan and pretty much anywhere in the US, the solar system objects make a path across the southern sky as they seem to travel east to west. The further south you go, the higher they will be in the sky. As you travel close to the equator, they will be above your head. As you go south of the equator, you’ll notice the parade of planets across the northern sky, but they’ll still be in the same order. Currently Venus is closest to the western horizon at sunset, followed by Saturn, with Jupiter bringing up the rear furthest toward the east. They will still seem to travel east to west, so the only difference is that you’ll be looking north, rather than south to see them.
The constellations do vary with latitude, but not that much within the US. If you travel north of here, you won’t add any new constellations to your repertoire; we see all the northern ones throughout the year already. If you go significantly south, perhaps beyond Miami, you will see sights never seen from our latitude. This is the realm of the hopelessly obscure constellations. If you thought Cancer (the crab) and Monoceros (the unicorn) were hard to find, try finding Antlia (the pump) or Norma (the carpenter’s square). I may be biased, but I think most of the groovy constellations are in the northern skies. That’s no excuse to stay home this summer, though!
I think the main difference you’ll find as you travel is the view of the sky in general. There aren’t too many places left that are unpolluted by street lights, but when you travel, chances are greater that you may find a few of them. I think that the mind actually sighs when it sees the vast number of stars of the Milky Way in a velvety black summer night sky. That’s when it begins to get rid of the hassles and worries of the long cold months and begins to finally get a change of perspective. And for me, that’s when the vacation really begins!
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Not Just a Pretty Sky
6/24/07 – 6/30/07
C. Zaitz
I am in the habit of telling people to look in the sky to see various things like planets or the moon. Then I will invariably say “it’s so pretty, just look east, blah blah etc.” Recently I was called on to clarify my statement. “So just what do you mean by pretty? What colors? What should we expect to see?” “Um, well, uh, it’s just pretty,” was all I could say.
I know people want to know what to expect, but describing beauty in the sky is tough, since it’s in the eye of the beholder. I’m always tilting upward to check out the sky, even during the day. I find beauty in the cloud formations, in the gradation of blue to white in a daytime sky, in the windblown condensation trails left behind by high flying jets. But such visceral experiences are hard to put it into words. Words are for the explanation of what a contrail is, but when I’m just enjoying it, I fall silent. I think that’s a pretty common human experience.
Recently the crescent moon, Venus, Saturn and a bright star Regulus were in alignment in the western sky. My parents were visiting so I showed them the line of objects and extended it over to Jupiter, also along the ecliptic, or plane of the solar system as seen from earth. But rather than going into the whole explanation of what we were seeing, I just pointed to them and named them. I know that some people would rather just enjoy the view rather than knowing what they were looking at and why.
On the other hand, sometimes knowing is good. In the past, and even still today, there are folks who would rather make a leap of the imagination and say that the alignment meant something, such as an omen or a foreshadowing. It is unusual it is to have such an alignment of bright objects in the sky. Unusual because it doesn’t happen every night, or even every month, but it is to be expected from time to time, since the planets do all travel the same highway, the ecliptic. For me there’s no need to assign a special significance to it other than “it’s really pretty when it happens.”
The other night I went out on a hot, humid night to gaze at the setting moon and Venus, and they were both tinted orangey red. Immediately I thought “how beautiful, a blood red crescent moon.” It occurred to me that some people in the world might think that something was wrong, that maybe the moon had exploded or was on fire. The truth was not that exciting. It was reddish because there was a lot of water vapor in the air. That’s why it felt so humid. It is the same light extinction that happens when the sun is low along the horizon making gorgeous sunsets on humid days. Knowing it allowed me to appreciate the science and the art at the same time.
There’s definitely a time and place for just looking, but we shouldn’t forget the depth behind the beauty; there are reasons for why things are the way they are. For me, knowing the reasons adds another dimension to the view, but doesn’t make it any less “pretty.” And it helps scare away the ghosts of superstition.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
C. Zaitz
I am in the habit of telling people to look in the sky to see various things like planets or the moon. Then I will invariably say “it’s so pretty, just look east, blah blah etc.” Recently I was called on to clarify my statement. “So just what do you mean by pretty? What colors? What should we expect to see?” “Um, well, uh, it’s just pretty,” was all I could say.
I know people want to know what to expect, but describing beauty in the sky is tough, since it’s in the eye of the beholder. I’m always tilting upward to check out the sky, even during the day. I find beauty in the cloud formations, in the gradation of blue to white in a daytime sky, in the windblown condensation trails left behind by high flying jets. But such visceral experiences are hard to put it into words. Words are for the explanation of what a contrail is, but when I’m just enjoying it, I fall silent. I think that’s a pretty common human experience.
Recently the crescent moon, Venus, Saturn and a bright star Regulus were in alignment in the western sky. My parents were visiting so I showed them the line of objects and extended it over to Jupiter, also along the ecliptic, or plane of the solar system as seen from earth. But rather than going into the whole explanation of what we were seeing, I just pointed to them and named them. I know that some people would rather just enjoy the view rather than knowing what they were looking at and why.
On the other hand, sometimes knowing is good. In the past, and even still today, there are folks who would rather make a leap of the imagination and say that the alignment meant something, such as an omen or a foreshadowing. It is unusual it is to have such an alignment of bright objects in the sky. Unusual because it doesn’t happen every night, or even every month, but it is to be expected from time to time, since the planets do all travel the same highway, the ecliptic. For me there’s no need to assign a special significance to it other than “it’s really pretty when it happens.”
The other night I went out on a hot, humid night to gaze at the setting moon and Venus, and they were both tinted orangey red. Immediately I thought “how beautiful, a blood red crescent moon.” It occurred to me that some people in the world might think that something was wrong, that maybe the moon had exploded or was on fire. The truth was not that exciting. It was reddish because there was a lot of water vapor in the air. That’s why it felt so humid. It is the same light extinction that happens when the sun is low along the horizon making gorgeous sunsets on humid days. Knowing it allowed me to appreciate the science and the art at the same time.
There’s definitely a time and place for just looking, but we shouldn’t forget the depth behind the beauty; there are reasons for why things are the way they are. For me, knowing the reasons adds another dimension to the view, but doesn’t make it any less “pretty.” And it helps scare away the ghosts of superstition.
Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.
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