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54
Galileo (1564–1642) is known colloquially as the “Father of
Science” and was a great Italian Renaissance astronomer and
teacher based in Padua. Galileo Galilei, to give him his full, har-
monious name, was a Copernican who developed the telescope as
a means of observing the stars and with which he discovered the
moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, which proved that the
Earth must go around the Sun, rather than vice-versa. He was the
first astronomer to stand up against religious restraints on science
in Roman Catholic Europe, when he was put under Papal trial in
1633. His heliocentric views ran counter to the official stance of
the Vatican, which effectively censored his work and kept him
under house arrest until his death in 1642.
MATHEMATICAL MUSIC
Galileo and Kepler shared another inter
est: music. But
rather than playing instruments, they were
interested in
the mathematical and physical aspects
of musical scales
and instruments.
Galileo came by
this interest natu-
rally: his father,
an accomplished
lute player, estab-
lished a important
physical law deter-
mining the con-
nection between
the tension of a
string and its
musical pitch.
74 SEEING STARS
SEEING STARS 75
The Early Universe
T he only remnant of our early universe is the Cosmic
Microwave Background Radiation—a kind of universal static
that hisses everywhere but is so faint it brings no light from the Big
Bang itself. The earliest we can look back is through infrared tele-
scopes such as the Spitzer Space telescope, which has discovered
faint galaxies with extremely flat light wavelengths that were
formed about 500 million years after the Big Bang.
It is theorized that the universe at only half a million years old was
still very much a homogenous soup of gas and basic particles such as
hydrogen and helium and lithium. A few million years into its youth,
the universe began to develop clustered matter, like strands of woven
94 SEEING STARS
STAR MAPS
Star maps were created to be guides
to the
night sky. The one at right is a
typical
European star map, with elaborate
draw-
ings of the mythological character
s on
which the constellations are based. The
first
star atlas to show the entire celestial
sphere
was Johannes Bayer’s Uranometria (160
3).
The star maps of different cultures vary
with
their different constellations. A trad
itional
Chinese star map would look muc
h different
than a European one. The oldest repre
sentation of
a constellation is thought to be an ivory
tablet found
in Germany. Carved with what look
s like the figure
of Orion, the tablet is 32,500 years
old.
SEEING STARS 95
Gemini
The Twins. Castor and Pollux, sons of Leda, represent all our dual-
ist myths and are rich in metaphor for the heavenly search for
immortality. They were two devoted mythical twins; one brother
died heroically and the other beseeched the gods to allow him to
follow his soulmate into death and immortality. According to
some versions, Pollux was the son of Jupiter, while Castor was the
son of a mortal man. In the Roman myth, Jupiter (Zeus) allows
Pollux to share his immortality with Castor, with the provision
that they must alternate their lives on Olympia and in Hades
(heaven and the underworld).
GEMINI –
THE TWINS
Abbreviation: Gem
Genitive: Geminorum
Brightest Star: Pollux
Right Ascension: 7 hours
Declination: 20 degrees
Visible between latitudes:
90 and -60 degrees
Best seen: February
Pleiades
Buzzing above the mass of Taurus like a swarm of fireflies, the Seven
Sisters or Pleiades asterism is to the naked eye a fuzzy ball of stars
that needs a good squint to split into its constituent stars. All cos-
mologically young blue stars, barely 100 million years old, they are
doomed to drift away from each other into the cosmos. Known to
the Australian Aborigines as the Campfire of the Women, they are
huddled together around their fire not far from the cluster of the
Hyades in Taurus, which to the Aborigines was the Campfire of the
Men… just like the gender split at any Sunday afternoon barbecue!
Far left: An
artist’s impression
of Epsilon
Eridani.
Left: A NASA
image of the
Pleiades star
cluster.
ANDROMEDA
Abbreviation: And
Genitive: Andromedae
Brightest Star: α And
Right Ascension: 1 hour
Declination: 40 degrees
Visible between latitudes:
90 and -40 degrees Right: An artist’s depiction
Best seen: November of the chained maiden,
Andromeda.
SEEING STARS 129
Less inspiringly known to astronomers as the M31 spiral clus-
ter, Andromeda’s billon-starred mush of light has traveled 2.5
million light years to delight us. That means traveling at light
speed for about 36,000 human lifetimes. Even if we traveled to
woo her beauty first hand, we would have evolved into some
other creature entirely!
The Andromeda galaxy can be seen in her eponymous con-
stellation between the “W” of Cassiopeia and her father Perseus.
Very much a faint smudge of light hidden away in the furthest
reaches of our vision, she appears like an oval jewel nestled in
a maiden’s hair: stars stream back from Alpheratz, the head star
of the constellation, which is itself the cornerstone of the great
square of Pegasus.
Perseus
The champion of Zeus and father to Andromeda, he rescued his
daughter from Medusa (the snake-haired Gorgon). He was the
mythical king who founded the civilization of Mycenae.
This constellation lies in the Milky Way underneath Cassiopeia
and is rich in galaxies and clusters and nebulae. It contains the
California Nebula and also the popular Double Cluster, visible
through binoculars between Perseus and Cassiopeia. It is also
home to the eagerly watched Perseids meteor shower in the north-
ern hemisphere, seen on August 12 and 13 each year.
It has two main stars, the brightest being Algenib, or Mirfak
(the “elbow” star), and also the twitching blink of Algol—from
the Arabic for “the ghoul star” and known colloquially as the
Demon Star, representing the eye of the Medusa. This is an
eclipsing binary system, where the brighter and fainter stars
eclipse each other in turn. It was the 18th-century astronomer
John Goodricke who first suggested that this was the reason
why the star’s light seemed to vary in intensity.
Eclipses
F rom Earth, the Sun cannot be looked at directly without strong
filters, but one opportunity to observe its corona is during a
total eclipse, when the Moon passes exactly over the Sun to shade
its mass. These occasional conjunctions are rare and occur only a
few times during a lifetime in a given place, though they occur two
or three times annually and are worth traveling to see. These areas
of full eclipse are known as paths of totality. As the Earth, Moon
Above: Sun dogs and ice haloes. The cetnral sun is the
real one; the ice halo that surrounds it creates the sun
dogs. Opposite: A close-up of an ice halo.
Left: An image of gegenschein, captured by a NASA
photographer. Gegenschein is so faint that it can rarely be
seen with the naked eye, and only on a dark night in a
dark region of the sky.
Zodiacal Light
& Gegenschein
I f you look long enough after sunset, or just before sunrise, along
the ecliptic line of the zodiac and the Sun’s path, a slight glow
can appear briefly as a faint triangle of blue/white light. This is
known as zodiacal light and is the sun’s reflection off cosmically
distant dust particles and collision debris in space. It is not to be
confused with any atmospheric glows, which tend toward the red
spectrum. Another example of this kind of cosmic reflection is
Gegenschein, which is a weak glow of light in the night sky directly
opposite the sun’s position. Again, this is dust reflection. Its name
is the German for “counter shine.”
Opposite: A 1901
postcard showing a
Brazilian airship flying
over Paris.
when the rays of the sun heat up the ground. Air that comes into
contact with this surface is warmed and begins to rise. Cooler air
is drawn in and warmed: again, it pushes upward in its turn in
what becomes a cycle. As we saw in Chapter 3 above, the currents
created by the warming of large areas of sea give rise to the winds
and breezes that blow all over the Earth’s surface. Within the sys-
tem, however, at the “micro” level, convection currents are con-
stantly being formed, strengthening and weakening with the com-
ing and going of the sun.
Only gently at first in the early morning, maybe, but more
strongly as the day goes on and a steady updraft of warm air, known
3 2
1947. He was at the controls of his private plane at the time, and
saw nine shiny disks flying in a line across the sky, spread out over
a distance of approximately 5 miles (8 km). They appeared to flip
over from time to time as they flew, sending out dazzling flashes of
light as they did so. Partial corroboration came from another air-
man who had been flying nearby. That same year came reports that
the US military had actually taken possession of the remains of a
craft that had crashed outside Roswell, New Mexico. The claims that
this was a UFO have only grown more insistent with the years (and
with the repetition of the authorities’ denials).
The official attitude to such sightings has always been dismissive,
but documents obtained under Freedom of Information law make
it clear that the authorities have hedged their bets. They have had
to. The Kentucky Air National Guard had to be scrambled in 1948
Space Junk
The pollution of our Earth ends not in the atmosphere, but in
space! Since Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957 we have sent a further
28,000 satellites into space, with 9000 currently in orbit, only 6%
of which are operational. That’s a big backyard full of junk! There
is so much unintended orbital traffic that collisions occasionally
happen: dropped wrenches from space-walking repairs, flecked
paint, broken heat tiles, as well as disused satellites—all have
joined the natural pieces of dust and debris that get caught in our
Earth’s gravity well. Most of these items of space junk will decay in
orbit and eventually burn up in the atmosphere, but with the
increased satellite traffic, we are seeing more collisions and more
potential cosmic “dandruff” than usual. In 1997 a Tulsa woman
was hit on the shoulder by a scrap of burned cloth that had come
from the fuel tank of the Delta 2 rocket the year before. It is the
only report of someone being hit by falling space junk, though in
1960 a Cuban cow was killed by junk from a rocket launch in
nearby Florida. Space stations such as the abandoned Skylab of
1979 and the Mir Station of 2001 also decay. Skylab was supposed
to be ditched in the Indian Ocean, but most of it crashed down in
Western Australia, where an enterprising young Stan Thornton
retrieved some space junk off his roof, sped to the airport and took
the first plane to the USA, where he had read that the San Francisco
Examiner was offering $10,000 for the first piece of Skylab delivered
Chemicals
The most common air pollutants we find are nitrogen oxides, car-
bon monoxides, sulfur dioxides, ozone, chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs) and radioactive particles. We must also not forget CO2
(carbon dioxide), our most significant greenhouse gas, which has
been the protagonist in the story of recent climate change.
Nitrogen oxides are various compounds of nitrogen and oxygen,
the main toxins of which are nitrogen oxide (NO) and nitrogen
dioxide (NO2), both produced in the combustion of fossil gases
such as coal and natural gas. Carbon monoxides and dioxides,
produced naturally in volcanoes, are also significant pollutants
from the combustion engine, most commonly used in cars.
Carbon monoxide is a lethal, odorless and tasteless gas which can
Left: An artist’s
impression of our
planet bombarded
by asteroids.
Opposite: An
asteroid’s impact
crater known as
Meteor Crater,
near Flagstaff,
Arizona. A meteor
or asteroid impact
is believed to have
caused a mass
extinction event,
and another could
occur at some
point in the future.
Solar Activity
The cyclical patterns of our own sun could also affect our climate.
There is some evidence that there is a correlation between sunspot
activity and climatic periods such as the Little Ice Age, which lasted
from about the13th to the 19th century. This cool period seems to
have been characterized by an average 1.8ºF (1ºC) drop in tempera-
ture, with longer, harsher winters and more glaciation. Evidence for
Northern Europe’s cooling is documented in the so-called Frost Fairs
of London, the first of which was in 1607, when the Thames was
completely frozen. Businesses took their stalls onto the ice, where
people crowded for skating, fun and just to move about London
unimpeded. The last documented Frost Fair was in 1814, well into
the Industrial Revolution era, when mean temperatures had begun to
rise again. Many rivers, canals and lakes in the Netherlands also froze,
as seen in the work of such great artists as Brueghel and Avercamp.