Good Heavens

Bode's Galaxy M-81

I have lived a life that while not always easy has mostly been very fun and usually rewarding. I am a lucky guy. My bucket list is actually pretty scant.

I never learned to dance properly, being stuck in the do your own thing, sixties modern, mutual gyration style of dancing and that has always been a source of some regret.

I have never felt truly comfortable in the kitchen, which is really something when you consider my skill with a fork or with algebra either for that matter but have never missed it a single integer in my adult life.


Another thing that I know next to nothing about is the sky. I can find the Big Dipper and Orion and then I am basically lost. I am embarrassed by my lack of knowledge. Now decades ago I used to like to pyramid hop down in the Yucatan and I was astounded that a primitive people had an oral and codex record of celestial happenings that was several thousand years old. Not to mention an astronomical calendar that was even more accurate than our own. Savages. (By the way they added a quarter second to the nuclear clock the other day. Did you feel it?)

The Mayans were not the only supposedly primitive people with mad astronomical skills. The arabs, greeks, romans, babylonians, chinese and native americans all studied the sky and developed their own mythology about the heavens. We now of course are so involved in watching our high def televisions in our secure little smials that we don't even bother to go outside or look up anymore.
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I am reading an interesting book from the local library called Southern California Starwatch,Voyageur Press 2007. The tone of the book suggests that it was written for younger people but it is packed with neat facts. It is written by meteorologist and stargazer Mike Lynch and pretty fascinating.

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One of the first things that struck me in the book was the fact that disparate cultures, sometimes continents away, might have the same general name or description for a constellation. How the hell does this happen?

The Big Bear, or Ursa Major, is one such constellation. It has an oral tradition that stretches back over 13,000 years. It is mentioned by Ptolemy in the second century and also known as a bear formation in Iroquois, the Finnish epic Kalevala, asian, judaic and roman texts.

Artemis discovers Zeus's perfidy with Callisto

The legend in Greek goes something like this: Zeus seduces a young nymph named Callisto. Callisto is knocked up "with child" and ends up birthing a son, Arctas. Zeus' wife, Hera, becomes a little pissed off with the old boy and finally so enraged she turns Callisto into a "Great Bear", the celestial equivalent of hitting her with the ugly stick, to take away her beauty.

Callisto's son grows up to become big strong hunter. He hunts the sky one day and sees the bear his mommy had become. Callisto gets so excited at seeing her son she forgets she is a bear now and runs to him. Arctas is going to kill her, when Zeus, taking pity on the boy, changed him into a "Little Bear" and placed him in the sky next to his mother, who become the Big and Little Bear constellations.

So I again ask, how does a group of twinkly celestial bodies, that look nothing at all like bears, or hunters, or three sisters all get seen as the same thing in different parts of the globe? Is this a jungian, fount of collective consciousness or unconsciousness thing? Got me.

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KJ and Jasmine have been in Yellowstone again. They sent this picture today of a bear that they took on Mt. Washburn at 5:30 the other morning. They call this particular grizzly bear Scarface.

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Some of the major eye openers in the book are issues of scale. Here's one for you; if you shrunk our 864,000 mile diameter sun down to the size of a period on this blog page do you know that the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would still be over five miles away. If we keep the same period scale, the milky way would be 120,000 miles away and the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy three million miles.

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Stars are essentially giant balls of hydrogen gas held together by their own gravity. These gravitational forces make them very heavy.  The mass of our relatively little star is 2,000,000,000,000,000,000000,000,000,000kg. The gravitational pressure at the core exceeds 500 billion lbs. @square inch. Our sun converts almost 700 million tons of hydrogen to helium and energy every second and isn't expected to run out of juice for another five billion years.

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Without supernovae there would be no heavy elements like gold, silver and uranium on our planet.

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Star maps show the east to your left because they are meant to be held overhead.

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If you want to measure angular distance in the sky, a fist width is approximately 10 degrees. An index finger width is about 1 degree.

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Blue stars are much hotter than red stars. Spica, a blue star, is over 36,000 °f. Betelguese, a red star, is a rather chilly 5800° f. Star spectrums are graded by the scale obafgkmrn or "Oh, be a fine girl; kiss me right now."


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If you took an airplane on thirty roundtrips between Miami and Seattle in less than a second, you would be traveling at the speed of light. There are 5.8 trillion miles traveled for one light year of a light beam. Star light is old light. The light we see today from the star Deneb in constellation Cygnus left the star before 1000 b.c..

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I could go on and on but will spare you. I encourage you to turn the television off, or better yet, shoot it and walk outside later on tonight. Look up. That's all there is to it.

Higg's Boson