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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
Photoset reblogged from This Is Not A Blog with 5 notes
Keep Looking Up
Beautiful, aren’t they? Like illustrations in a book. Only these are real. No one drew them. These exist. And there are at least 200 billion of them. The nine images above are just a few of our galactic neighbors, millions of light years away. They may seem obvious to us now, but not even a hundred years ago their existence was in doubt.
Under the only magnifications possible until the 20th century, most notably until the 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson in California was built, these fuzzy objects were considered outlying parts of our own galaxy - clouds of gas, perhaps. Other nebulae (“planetary nebulae”, or supernova remnants) had been proven to exist within the Milky Way, and the assumption was that “spiral nebulae” were similarly on the edge of our galaxy, which might just be the edge of the universe.
A great debate about the make up of the universe went on well into the 1920s, when Edwin Hubble, charting Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda “nebula” with the Mount Wilson scope, showed that their distance from us was something near a million light years - much too far to be part of our own Milky Way. Finally proven to be immense conglomerations of stars millions of light years away, they were termed what Immanuel Kant had first called in 1755 the idea of separate Milky Ways: island universes.
Although that term eventually fell out of favor, I’ve always preferred it to galaxy, which sounds like a car model. Galaxy actually comes from the Greek galaktos, literally “milk” (the shared root of our words lactate, lactation, lactic). The myth is that Zeus, desiring his mortal-born son Heracles to have godlike powers, allowed him to suckle on his divine wife Hera’s breast, which, when discovered, caused her to push the baby away, and the resulting spurt of milk created the Milky Way. I think island universe, in addition to separating itself from this mythological nonsense, better communicates the immense solitude of galaxies, surrounded as they are by the vast emptiness of intergalactic space. It also makes me feel like there’s an implied sense of life in those galaxies.
Pause one of those images up there. Imagine that’s our galaxy: dusty disc, spiral arms, supermassive blackhole in the center. Zoom in and pick out one of the tiny pinpricks of light in that whirling disc. It’ll be hard to choose; there are billions. Got it? Now imagine that’s our Sun. And around that sun, visualize our planetary system, a whirling disc too. Along that elliptical plane, on a tiny blue planet circling a tiny yellow star, is, as Carl Sagan wrote, “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was.”
A humbling thought, to say the least. Humankind is nothing. NOTHING to the Universe. We’re a flicker on a speck on a mote. We’ve been lucky enough, thanks to several cosmic coincidences, to not only arise as life, but evolve to intelligence (relatively speaking), and remain protected from the myriad catastrophes surrounding us. Our relatively stable star; our location in the “Goldilocks Zone” of the Solar System (not too hot, not too cold); the axial tilt of the Earth causing seasons; the tidal forces of an overly-large satellite (the result of an unlikely collision between a Mars-sized planetoid and the proto-Earth) creating the right conditions for life; Earth’s strong magnetic field protecting us from radiation; Jupiter, playing gravitational center field, catching our would-be asteroid strikes; the Moon, playing goalie, planting its far side firmly in the face of incoming shots: if it weren’t for these, and a billion other random events, no one would be here at all.
It seems incredibly unlikely that all of the dominoes would fall just so, but they have. And in fact, that’s why we’re here. It’s not a coincidence if these are the prerequisites for intelligent life arising. But as unlikely as it seems, when you’re faced with images like these, how can you not imagine that this has happened countless times, not just in our galaxy, but in the nearly infinite number of other galaxies out there? How can you not believe that right now a vast multitude of individuals across the universe are contemplating images just like these, images that may even include our galaxy, and are attempting to understand their place in the universe - no different than us?
Lets be friends, K?
Source: thetreacheryofwords
