There was a Muse for each kind of literature or performing art: Calliope of the heroic epic, Clio of history, Euterpe of flutes, Terpsichore of dance, Erato of lyric poetry and hymns, Melpomene of tragedy, Thalia of comedy, Polyhymnia of the mimic art and sacred song, Urania of astronomy. The lost Library of Alexandria was divided into rooms accordingly, at least as described in my novel. Recent additions include blogging, which doesn’t yet have its Muse. Perhaps Arachne, the spider, since the blog is a Web log? Blogging has a tendency to become tangled. Blog posts can refer back to each other (setting off a subclass of events called “pingbacks”); comments (otherwise known as “remarks” or “thoughts”) can refer to each other or to posts long past; and another thing that can happen is that I compose material for a post and then don’t post it. The way I work, it remains in my source file with “====” in front of it, for which I can search and find the pieces for various reasons I didn’t yet finish and publish.
One of the comments to my New Year day post about flags was from bro Rick Scheithauer:
“I wonder what the one world government flag will look like. Maybe it will be the blue marble image from Apollo 17 on a black background.”
(The Earthrise photo was taken from Apollo 8 on 1968 Dec. 24; Apollo 17 was the final mission, in 1972, the last time humans have traveled beyond Earth.)
This gives me the chance to use “Back to the Earthrise Photo,” which I wrote 2018 December 25 and didn’t publish.
The astronauts aboard Apollo 8 were busy following their instructions to record information about the hitherto unvisited Moon. Looking back at Earth was outside their remit. But they did look back; were struck with an awe greater than the barren Moon could inspire. The words they blurted fell far short of the awe, the photo preserves it. The photo could not be developed till after the spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific on December 27.
The planet seen rising on Christmas Eve resonated by coincidence with religious tradition. “We have seen his star in the east.”
The Earth looks like a Moon that is just past First Quarter phase – the Moon in our sky eight days or so after its first appearance. So the Moon should have been in the complementary phase. Wait a minute! I find that the Moon was not at Last Quarter but at First, just a day later, 1968 December 26, at 14:14 Universal Time. The rising Earth was indeed in lunar east.
I think the photo must be sort of upside down. Because of the way Anders happened to hold his camera, the tilt is to the right, which has us thinking that north is to the left. It’s difficult, in the little “Blue Marble,” to distinguish any land masses under the swirls of cloud, but I’m guessing that under the white mass to the left is Antarctica. I’m not going to speculate on which other blurs mig ht be South America or Australia; I leave that to anyone who can see a higher-resolution copy of the image.
End of the unposted essay, I think. The following must consist of replies I meant to make to a comment on the previous post (blog complication, difficult now to unravel):
Paul Davis in his comment offers friendly advice that:
The view was not from the Moon but from a point in an orbit around the Moon. -True, but I think a view of Earth from a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter could be called not too loosely a view of Earth from Jupiter.
Earth did not “rise” as seen from the Moon-orbiting spacecraft. – I think it did. If you are in a jet plane speeding east, you’re not in orbit, true, but the Sun does “rise” into your view just as, though a little quicker than, it would if you were on the ground. The Moon’s surface was not revolving relative to the Earth, but the spacecraft was like a lifted piece of its surface that was revolving.
Back to: “I wonder what the one world government flag will look like…”
At those words, I expected the comment to be anti-United-Nations. Or even anti-China. But it seems not. The blue marble flag is a beautiful idea.
I’m not sure it is practical as a design. Difficult to simplify the swirls of white and blue to a pattern that people could easily draw. Perhaps not impossible.
(Britain’s Union Jack is, I think, and not for nationalistic reasons, the prettiest flag. But it is next to impossible to draw, because it is next to impossible, at least for me, to remember where the narrow red stripes of St. Patrick fall unsymmetrically in the white X of St. Andrew.)
Will there or should there be a world government?
My ideal is unity in diversity.
__________
Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Coincidentally, “Glint Breightly”, with his remark about short sighted, made me wonder if noticing the daytime moon depends on your eyesight as a child. I have always been far-sighted, and despite growing up not in the country but in New York City, don’t remember a time when I didn’t know you could sometimes see the moon in the daytime. If I had been near-sighted, I might never have noticed it, and possibly by the time I’d have been diagnosed and given glasses, my childlike wonder at the natural world might have been diminished to a serious degree by my not being able to see it very well.
So, a study that a PhD candidate or a research team might carry out could be designed so as to ask a large number of schoolchildren and many others simply whether the Moon can be seen in daytime. They would have to answer immediately, with no preceding cues or information, perhaps would also be asked whether they remembered seeing it, and would also be given a vision test, and the record for each would include not only age and gender but some way of specifying their environment and social background.
Eric & Beth – thanks for the links. The 2015 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image is fabulous and worth getting in full resolution. Although also taken from orbit, this photo conveys much better how LARGE the Earth appears in the lunar sky – an aspect that the more famous, cropped and reoriented Apollo photo did not convey.
The flag of a one world government would more appropriately depict a soviet era propaganda poster with a pattern of barbed wire around the edge. If you believe that the 0.1% have the right or even duty to lord over everyone else, then you would love one world government. The old adage about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely still holds and would apply in that case. For the billions of middle and lower class people all over the world, the best guarantor of their freedom, political and economic, is multi-polarity. When leaders of countries have to compete for good citizens by actually looking after their needs and interests, the 99.9% have a chance. One world government = the global banking / corporation elite billionaires becoming dictators. They are well on their way.
Mercury has been putting on quite a show!
Income distribution continues to become fairer in the EU and more unequal in the US. I think that is because the EU is more willing to regulate corporations. So a broadening union of nations does not have to let itself be dominated by billionaires,
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/29/17627134/income-inequality-chart
I agree with Beth as the image I have, mounted vertically, highlights the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) as a white band crossing the earth’s equator. Do, please, keep up the intriguing delightful and informative postings
I have a neighbor who insists that the Sun does not rise – rather that the Eastern horizon descends. This is one side of a conflict in earth/sky phenomena generally – the critical region being delineated by the horizon. Terrestrial phenomena are perceived in perspective, sky phenomena are perceived as projective and the horizon is the transition of these geometries. Psycho-perceptively we have a problem in resolving the two. My neighbor denies the primary topocentric experience in favor of an heliocentric abstraction. That’s fine – as long as it does not come to blows -as we nearly did as to whether the third millennium began with 2000 or 2001 (it’s the latter).*
Rapid flight across longitudes presents a special case. Here, the experience is blurred. One now has a craft-centric view – which is loyal to neither the ground beneath nor to the heavens above. The whole experience is now blurred in ambiguity and I’m not so comfortable with titling the Apollo photo with such a ground-based-familiar term such as “rising” – which we relate to the naive/direct experience of the motion of a celestial body with respect to the ground-fixed horizon. From orbit, BOTH are in motion.
A casual reading of the title given to the famous photo IMPLIES some connection to the experience of “seeing the Earth from the SURFACE of the Moon” – and my objection intends only to clarify that the EARTH DOES NOT RISE as seen from the Moon’s surface. Rather it moves VERY LITTLE – slowly – in a complex Lissajous figure composed of several nutational components. From the region of the transition from the “nearside” to “farside” – it would tease the horizon only. I think this is an important distinction to clarify. It leads to conquering such as – that the moons of Mars move in OPPOSITE directions across the Martian sky – though they orbit Mars in the SAME direction.
*This neighbor has an advanced degree from Princeton and is INCAPABLE (by his own confession) of comprehending the seasons and the motion of the daily/annual appearance of the ecliptic. He also staunchly denied that one can see the Moon during the daytime – until I SHOWED it to him. The expression on his face was priceless. I recall a certain line in Aristophanes’ The Clouds about @ssh0l&s staring at the sky.
Paul, we are grateful to you for your “priceless expression” anecdote! There must be a contour in everyone’s lives at which they discover that the Moon can be seen in daytime. A subject for a sociological study could be to find the average age at which that discovery is made in various populations, American and Tibetan, sedentary and pastoral…
Here’e the Apollo 17 photo
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/images/index.html
The above link wasn’t the right one. View this link instead.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/as17-148-22727_lrg_0.jpg
Seems appropriate that you would refer to the Apollo program less than one week before celebration of the 50th anniversary of the flight of Apollo 14. Because none of its crew survives today, its commemoration is likely to be subdued or even lackluster compared to other notable missions such as Apollos 8, 11 and 17. Apollo 14 came nearly 9 months after the aborted Apollo 13. The delay, in my opinion, also served greatly to diminish the public interest in lunar exploration.
However, again in my opinion, I think Apollo 12 shares much of the blame. Apollo 12 came just four months after the first landing with Apollo 11 with its ghostly black-and-white video, at least as most of the world saw it, on TV sets of old. But Apollo 12’s new promise was to bring color TV from the moon’s surface in another new first. Unfortunately, Alan Bean triggered a fail safe on the camera when he pointed it sunward. So during the bulk of two moonwalks the world saw nothing. No live video meant TV coverage wasn’t so popular.
Then, five months later, came Apollo 13 and the explosion. Once again, no video from the moon’s surface. By the time Apollo 14 came around the following year, interest had ebbed so much that live TV coverage from the moon was no longer a priority. Short sided critics were calling for a wealth transfer from technology to society. “Why send our money to the moon when it’s needed here on earth?” was the false choice given. As if rocket loads of cash were being crash landed on the moons instead of being distributed around the country boosting the economies of many districts.
So although I blame Alan Bean for accelerating America’s loss of interest in space, he is one of the nicest astronauts I ever met. He was always ready with a hearty hello, and seemed happy to see you again, even if he probably didn’t remember me. I recall one time he teared up when I described, as a pre-teen, meeting Cdr Pete Conrad at a public event not long after the mission. Bean was a true gentleman.
“Short sided” should be “Short sighted.” Believe me, I wasn’t critiquing the critics’ physical attributes.
Nice one. It prompted me just now to look for additional “earthrise” photos from NASA. This one was new for me: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/lro-earthrise-2015.
Cheers.
You may not be a fan of Wikipedia, but the article there on Earthrise describes the orientation of the photo and how it was taken. The Moon was vertical rather than horizontal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise
For the flag, the land masses could be an abstraction that represent the land masses without being accurate. or maybe no land masses. The blue and swirling white clouds could also be abstractions of more detailed reality. Simplify. As Carl Sagan noted, from further out, Earth is just a pale blue dot.
I drew a simolified Earth for this blog post about weather systems; not quite the same sort of simplification but in that direction.
http://universalworkshop.com/guysblog/2017/02/02/groundhog-day-weather/