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Photoset reblogged from This Is Not A Blog
Keep Looking Up
Yeah, I borrowed the title for this series from the great Jack Horkheimer (if you don’t know, now you know: Star Gazer August 16-22, 2010), but, well, shut it. Jack Horkheimer rules. And astronomy rules too. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s irrelevant or inscrutable, boring or a waste of time. And don’t ignore it.
In the link above, as in every episode, Jack flies around the greenscreen cosmos, talks like your drunk grandma at Thanksgiving, rocks a sweet wig, and teaches you something important. Like he says, the sky is a very different place lately. In just the last century, for the first time in the history of the world, the stars have disappeared. Light pollution extends much farther than the urban sprawl and poor public lighting regulations that cause it; nowhere is unaffected. The true night sky is such a foreign image to most of us that urban blackouts cause 911 calls about mysterious lights. What a shame. What a loss to all of us.
Luckily, there are some places in the world where we can still see the sky, and we can send telescopes into orbit, away from both light pollution and the light-scattering atmosphere. And we have robots! In just my short lifetime, the planets in our solar system have received their first visitors, robotic explorers built by human hands, and mankind has had the almost unbelievable opportunity to study these other worlds up close. With Keep Looking Up, I’d like to feature some of the images of these places and try to explain why they mean so much to me.
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The first image above shows the Moon and Venus, both in crescent phase and seen during the day. It reminds me that despite the distances involved, everything is interconnected. An entire planet the size of Earth appears as just a cute little toenail, flitting behind the immense curve of the Moon, yet you can plainly see that it shares the same Sun with its less distant cousin, and with all of us. I get a little shiver of the infinite when I look at this.
The second, one of just 9,000 pictures that exist of Neptune, was taken by Voyager 2 in 1989. I remember staying up all night at age 12, watching the first close-ups come in from billions of miles away. This is a place so distant that I might not be here when we return in another 30 or 40 years, if we ever make it back. This image, of a crescent Neptune and its largest moon, Triton, has been my desktop wallpaper for the last few months. When I look at it, I get that shiver again. I imagine the sunlight that formed these crescents streamed by all of us before warming the cloudtops of Neptune. But there’s also a feeling of loneliness and isolation here. It’s such an impossibly immense universe, filled with planets like this. Planets that will live and die, and no one will ever visit; no one will ever even know about them. How lucky we are to live in this age of exploration of our solar system, to be alive to see any of these worlds in such incredible detail.
Source: thetreacheryofwords
