The Sunflower Galaxy
Springs of Distant Past
What is spring?
Is it only an objective event, a simple orbital phenomena, the warming rays of the sun the right distance from a growing earth, a function of geometry and temperature, repeated annually?
Blend in the subjective, and we have our experience of the season- Tennyson’s young man’s fancy lightly turning to thoughts of love, the way the scent of the wild roses hangs on a dewy morning, the promises of a summer, gathering in the woods…(or the horse getting hay fever. Weirdo.)
Happy Friday, folks. Got your coffee? Good deal.
The Objective Messier 63
I lugged the big reflecting telescope out back last night, and pointed it 37 million light years to the north, paying a visit to The Sunflower Galaxy, Messier 63, in the constellation of Canes Venatici, the Hunting Dogs of Boötes the herdsman.
Aiming the scope at the alpha star Cor Caroli, and slewing towards the Big Dipper, I scooped it up - a faint, fuzzy glow floating in the nothing, 37 million x 5.88 trillion miles away from my earthbound cares. The Sunflower Galaxy.
(A light year is roughly 5.88 trillion miles.)
Stars in the outer fringes of our home galaxy sprinkled across the view, a faint wreath pattern of twenty five little points of light framing the view of the Sunflower Galaxy.
When we look deep into space, we’re often looking past “nearby” stars (still impossibly distant.) If I went to lower Manhattan, and had super vision, looking north to Boston, I’d see a few streetlights from Harlem in the view, too. Such was the effect last night looking past “field stars.”
Changing eyepieces, I zoomed in. Two field stars shone to the west of the Sunflower, and a few dim ones barely poked through the darkness to the east.
The galaxy itself was a gray oval smudge, with the vaguest hints of mottling in the outer regions that give a “petal” appearance in photographs. Unlike the neighboring (and gravitationally bound) Whirlpool Galaxy, with mighty spiral arms, the Sunflower is a flocculent spiral.
(It sounds either like a tasty pasta, or an unpleasant disease. Let’s go with the pasta.)
The center glowed brighter, an idea of a condensed nucleus.
The Sunflower is similar in size to our own Milky Way, it’s 400 billion suns glimmering feebly across a blinding distance, all merging into a haze and a smudge.
The tumult of half a trillion stars living, dying, forming, birthing, innumerable planets orbiting, the supermassive black hole at the core eating, eating, and the entire system spinning and hurtling through space became tranquil at such a distance.
The toads trilled down in the horse pond on earth, and the soft spring night pressed in with a gentle kiss of humidity.
The Subjective Sunflower
“That is nice” I muttered to nobody.
To think - the light of 400 billion suns, blazing through space for 37 million years, to grace my eye…and perhaps I’m the only one looking.
The Chuck Will’s Widow called from the pines. He’s a larger cousin of the Whip Poor Will, a nightjar (bird) who prowls through the wee hours, with starlight for company.
I wondered how many springs past I was seeing. What if some of those stars with planets had life?
Maybe an alien poet would write: “Gorf gorf, gobledymuck, noi!”
(And his friends would sit around, never waving their antennae - that’s for octagons - but instead stamp their flippers in appreciation, just like Andy Warhol taught them.)
Spring again.
And even if they didn’t, they’d still have their version of spring, if “nothing more” than the particular warmth returning to faraway cliffs.
The little smudge floated in the telescope eyepiece. Who knows what I was looking at?
One way or another, it sure was pretty.
The carpenter frogs resumed their clattering in the pond, and Vega sparkled in the east, higher now.
Summer’s on the way.
This one, here.
I packed up the gear, and retreated back, walking under the denser night of the pecan tree, back inside to Twitter and food and answering text messages and all the stuff that obscures starlight.
But part of me remembers. And you can, too, even if you’ve never seen a photon.
The Sunflower Galaxy is forever blooming out there, field stars looking like a bee or two zinging away.
And spring hopes eternal.
Treasures from Earth
“No, no, not Bruce Lee…Bruce LIU.”
Have a Chopin nocturne, folks.
It’s good for the soul.
Book Updates
WOW! I stopped by Book No Further in Roanoke, VA yesterday, and Cities on a Hill is everywhere…on the local rack, on the table, IN THE WINDOW!
They requested I sign copies (!) When I was a teenager, it was a running joke that I’d sign everything. Wait…something is surfacing in my head. I think I signed a girl’s arm with sharpie. Yes, two girls arms, actually. I was such a goober.
So it’s weird to do this seriously, but I shrug my shoulders, and scribble away.
Uhhh…stop by to get a signed copy? (And if you’re a paid subscriber to this blog, and haven’t claimed yours, let me know and I’ll send you one.)
And THANKS to Karen, Cristina, and Eirenne for the reviews on B&N and Amazon!
What fun!
Have a great weekend - catch ya on the flip side.
Josh