In spring the Earth is smiling
Because she enters now
The beaches of relining
With sun upon her brow.
Yes, the stars in the background of the March picture are in Virgo, and the more numerous ones in the June picture are in Sagittarius.
John Goss has suggested that I use a bit of pleasant astronomy to distract you from quarantine life under the coronavirus plague. Or that may not be quite what he meant; his message to me says “Have you thought about issuing special notices or activities to keep people’s minds focused on the comfort that the starry realm can give – instead of the worries on Earth?” Perhaps that’s what the Astronomical League, of which John is the distinguished past President, is doing.
Space activities: well, perhaps we’ll think of some. Just going to your favorite dark-sky observing hilltop will serve for self-isolation, there’ll be nobody else about. A spacewalk from your rocket would serve even better, of course.
The starry sky has served as an angel of peace, for instance to Van Gogh in the Saint-Rémy asylum.
When I was producing my annual Astronomical Calendar, I three or four times received letters from men serving time in prison, who asked me to send them books (which I did) to inform their gazing between the window bars of their cells at the sky they yearned to be free under.
On March 19, the day after I got John’s email, the editor of Scientific American, Clara Moskowitz, said in a post introducing a new map of the Milky Way: “When the world gets crazy, I find it can be a huge comfort to read about galaxies and particles and supernovae for a while.”
Yet I’m not sure that I find the cosmos comforting. Reading experts’ calculations about how many centuries it would take to reach the nearest star, or how the orbit of Neptune will evolve or where the Sun will be in its journey around the galaxy two million years ahead, is terrifying. The whole human race is a set of atoms that flicks through an instant of consciousness in a desert of time. We might be happier in a universe consisting of a garden.
(With a hospital.)
__________
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Thank you for this post, Guy – I found the last two lines oddly comforting (perhaps because I hear Roland in those sentiments as well.) Madeline was so excited about the first day of spring, which was in our first week of school closure here, and the three of us went for a walk that day to look at the flowers beginning to bloom. I will show her your post tomorrow because she always recognizes the Starry Night painting, which appears in a few of her books. This morning Roland talked with her about planets, and in the afternoon she and I went into a “rocket ship” in the backyard (her play set) and she told me she saw Mercury and Venus through her (play) telescope.
In reference to the universe as a garden.. and a hospital: herbalists know a garden is both!
A garden or a hospital?the ancient gnostics saw it as a prison.perhaps it’s all 3 and more?
It’s not a coincidence that most of our medicines come from plants. Plants are superb organic chemists, able to catalyze reactions with close to 100% efficiency at ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure, reactions for which the best human chemists are happy to get 5% efficiency using high temperatures and pressures. Plants are sentient beings and they want to live in a healthy environment. From their perspective we animals are part of the environment, so they make medicine to keep us healthy. If you think this is all nonsense, please read _The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicine to Life on Earth_ by Stephen Harrod Buhner, and read the peer-reviewed botanical and medical references he cites.
El coronavirus causa la enfermedad pero la situación mental de la humanidad de los últimos años ha elaborado el medio en el cual éste patógeno y los que vienen pueden medrar y causar muchos desastres. La pandemia se llama Trump, Putin, Maduro, Guaidó y toda la constelación infame que ha coronado al miedo, al odio, la desesperación, el hambre y la desesperanza donde antes había primavera, verano, otoño e invierno y todos eran lindos y vivibles.
Thank you for the post Guy, very comforting. With respect to Whitman, I never understood why he ‘ became tired and sick’ of learning from the Learn’d Astronomer; would probably not happen to me.
“The whole human race is a set of atoms that flicks through an instant of consciousness in a desert of time.”
Take comfort in the improbability of our being able to understand this…and just go on putting one foot in front of the other. Best of health to you.
MLB
A catastrophe for the human race but a blink in the eye of the universe around us which won’t have noticed us or corvid-19.
On behalf of ravens and crows everywhere, I want to make it absolutely clear: corvids are not responsible for this pandemic. ;-)
Or the Corona beer company (Mexican I think?)not to my taste…. neither the beer or virus.
Thanks Guy. It’s good to hear from you. I hope you and yours are well.
I’ve been enjoying looking at Venus’ waning phase through my little refractor from the front yard. It feels sad not to be able to invite my neighbors and passersby to come have a look. Once it’s dark I can see a fair bit of sky from the back yard, from northwest through southeast, with windows to the south and southwest between houses and trees. My neighbors are very considerate in turning off their outdoor lights except when they’re actually using them, so the yard is usually fairly dark, given that I’m in the middle of a city. Jupiter and Mars are now high enough to see from the back deck before dawn, and Saturn is starting to peek over the neighbor’s rooftop. Last night was very clear and I was going to walk up to the top of Bernal Hill, but by the time I was done with dinner I was tired and ready for bed. Now we’re in for a few days of clouds and welcome rain, but I’ll be up on the hill once it’s clear again.
The poet Jane Hirshfield has just published a new collection of poems, “Ledger.” I love how Hirshfield finds the poetry in science. Here’s a poem from the new book:
* * *
TODAY, ANOTHER UNIVERSE
The arborist has determined:
senescence beetles canker
quickened by drought
but in any case
not prunable not treatable not to be propped.
And so.
The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-cries.
The trunk where the ant.
The red squirrels’ eighty-foot playground.
The bark cambium pine-sap cluster of needles.
The Japanese patterns the ink-net.
The dapple on certain fish.
Today, for some, a universe will vanish.
First noisily,
then just another silence.
The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.
Of bewilderment after the glacier,
the species, the star.
Something else, in the scale of quickening things,
will replace it,
this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.
* * *
Ah, Guy, I would view the universe and time as flittering happenstances experienced by humans in an eternity or existence. I align with C. S. Lewis. I would say of nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, suns, solar systems, galaxies, and the universe… “these are mortal and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.” It is a glorious universe while it lasts!
“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Hi Guy, and all his readers, What books did you, would you share with your readers in prison, locked up from the stars?
I used to send them my Astronomical Calendar for the year and also my friendly book To Know the Stars.
Very nice, comforting thoughts, Guy. Thanks.
Is that March Equinox illustration for the year 2000? I read that the Equinox occurred at 11:49 p.m. and I am pretty confident that the sun wasn’t shining on much of the USA.
I set both pictures for Universal Time 14, rather than for the exact time of the equinox or solstice, so as to have the same countries facing the viewer.
Meant Equinox 2020.
For the few of your readers who have not come upon this yet …
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
—Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Very nice. Especially about the “silence at the stars”. It viscerally recalls the nights I’ve watched the sky wheel around me in its perfect silence.