Happy Friday, folks!
Buckle up: we’ve got star stories, treasures from earth, and some New Year greetings. Top off that ol’ cuppa joe - we’ve got much to discuss.
Welcome Home
The farthest a human has traveled is 1.2 light seconds. (To the moon, that is.)
It felt like I had that beat by a good .03 seconds after a long drive down Route 29 on Tuesday evening, but chalk that up to an active imagination.
The stars welcomed me home with a bright twinkle.
Hey Josh, you should get a telescope out or something.
Sirius, the Dog Star was well up over Long Mountain. Good thing there’s always pair of binoculars at the ready for a quick glance into the depths.
Stepping back onto the patio, I lifted them to my eyes, and gasped.
Infinity in the Pecan Tree
The aim was southwards. Between the patio and Sirius grows a pecan tree.
(It’s much closer to me than the “nearby” star of eight light years distance. That’s 8 x 5.88 trillion miles, FYI.)
The tree is a gracious one. Probably forty to fifty years old, it’s reached a strong maturity, with a round pattern of branches, contrasting it’s beanpole cousins in the Hickory family that grow further up the mountain. Spring unfurls dark green compound leaves, and autumn yields a bountiful harvest of oblong pecan nuts, encased in a lime-green soft shell. The squirrels love this tree, rattling around it’s rough gray bark, chattering at anyone who has the gall to walk by.
Winter finds all the pecans down. Tonight, they were replaced by stars.
As I peered through the binoculars towards the sky, dark branches of this tree jutted across the field of view. It looked like it was growing stars.
The Winter Milky Way
Sirius and Orion seem to reside on the bank of a starry river. While all the stars visible in the night sky are part of the Milky Way - our home galaxy - there’s a dim, unresolved haze of millions of faint stars stretching in a band across a fairly narrow portion of the sky. Under dark enough skies, it glows with a faint, milky white, hence the name.
If our spiral galaxy is imagined as a hand, our sun “lives” by the knuckle of our pointer finger, between it and our second finger. If we look “out”, away from our hand, we see fewer stars, and are peering into intergalactic space. If we look across our hand, we see the bulk of our galaxy stretching across the sky in the form of a ribbon…or a river.
Using optics starts to “zoom in”, or resolve the haze into individual stars. Lots of stars. Picture salt or sand strewn across the floor. That many.
The View
Sirius glittered a fierce blue-white, blazing away with a surface temperature of 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly twice as hot as our own sun. Tonight it looked icy cold, though, shimmering through the branches of the pecan.
I moved the binoculars around, marveling at the view. Several dozen dimmer stars shone, mostly white, but a few tinged with faint orange or blue. In the background, several hundred faint stars made the blackness look “rough” with barely resolved light, backed by thousands more.
Below Sirius was a faint patch of silver, a celestial "dog tag” in the night. 2,300 light years away, the 100 members of the open star cluster Messier 41 glinted at me. This “tiny” patch of light is huge - 25 light years across. It’s moving away from us at 14 miles a second.
The contrast between the stars and the sky was thrilling. They reminded me of frost or snowflakes on a jet black piece of velvet.
Across all of this, the branches of the pecan tree swayed in a slight breeze, showing up in my binocular view as dark lines, a tree that grows stars.
I lowered the binoculars, and waved back at the sky, grateful.
‘22 in Review
I’ll be spending the next few days gathering ideas, jotting them down, crossing them out, muttering over the new old electric typewriter, and finally emerge from a pile of crumpled paper, plan in hand. What a great time of year to wipe the slate clean, “recalibrate, and reload”, as Jocko Willink would say.
Good.
It sure has been quite the year! Thanks for joining me on this blogging journey. 2023 promises more fun, more posts, and more stars!
Wishing you an excellent rest of ‘22, and an auspicious ‘23! Here’s Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto number 5 to bring a nice orderly sound to your Friday. Enjoy, and see you next year.
Josh