Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Gegenschein

I saw this once.



Saw it during a very dark night camping at Dinosaur National Monument, the same night I saw the Andromeda galaxy with my naked eye for the first time. The tequila helped.

Gegenschein means counter-glow in German, and that's just what it is. It's a very faint glow, just opposite the sun (yeah, I know, it's night, so the sun is below the horizon; it's just opposite where the sun would be if you could see it). Gegenschein is caused by sunlight reflecting off dust in the plane of the solar system (which is why it shows up directly opposite from the sun). The dust is made of splinters from asteroid collisions, from the tails of comets, from the leftover bits of the formation of the planets. It's quite literally older than the world itself. Gave me goosebumps at the time (as did Andromeda).

Again, the tequila helped.

Friday, January 25, 2008

No (pause).

"No" is the Friday word of the day, thanks to Mona. And to Maggie, who pointed me toward last week's word. Some of this is straight reportage, from conversations overheard on the baby monitor.

Are you sleepin?
No.
(pause)
What’re you thinkin?
About Other Mommy.
What about Other Mommy?
Where she is.
Where?
In the Other House. She lives there.
Can we go there?
Yes.
Will you take me there?
No.
Why?
We live here now.
(pause)
Can we go there tomorrow?
Yes.
Where Other Mommy is?
Yes.
(pause)
Where is Other Mommy?
Across the ocean. She lives there.
Where the war is?
Yes.
Can you see her?
No.
Is she in a hole?
No.
Can we go there?
Yes.
Will you take me there?
No.
Why?
We live here now.
(pause)
Will you take me tomorrow?
Yes.
When?
Tomorrow.
To Other Mommy?
Yes.
(pause)
Where is Other Mommy?
In a hole.
She’s in a hole?
Yes. She lives there.
She lives in the hole?
Yes.
Can she talk to us?
Yes.
What will she tell us?
It’s time to go to sleep.
(pause)
Okay.
(pause)
Are you sleepin?
No.
(pause)
Is that other man with Mommy?
No. He’s gone.
Is he in the hole?
Yes.
In the Other House?
Yes.
In a hole in the Other House?
Yes.
With Other Mommy?
Yes.
Can he talk to us?
Yes.
What will he tell us?
It’s time to go to sleep.
(pause)
Okay.
(pause)
Are you sleepin?
No.
(pause)
Is it time to go to sleep?
Yes.
I’m going to sleep now.
(pause)
Okay?
(pause)
Are you sleepin?
No.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Oh no, there goes Tokyo!

I can't resist. Dig that crazy organ music! And keep on the lookout for a cameo by Godzookie, Godzilla's son. He's the one who blows the smoke-ring at the end.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Korea is the New Japan


It's hard to recapture the innocent stupidity of Toho Studios, home of the Godzilla movies. Ed Wood, William Castle, Roger Corman - those guys could bring it. But Hollywood is too cynical, too bloated, too drugged by the promise of the Big Hit to pull it off (anyone remember that vile "Godzilla" remake about 10 years ago?).

Korea, however, may be a new contender.

Saw the delightfully incomprehensible "D-Wars" this weekend. Like the original Godzilla, it's actually a Korean-American hybrid, with English-speaking scenes inserted into the movie between the special effects. If you can get past the opening 20 minute slab of exposition, the CGI kicks in and it's pretty fun. Just don't expect it to make any sense whatsoever.

A better movie, though equally goofy, is "The Host." The NY Times actually reviewed it, so I slapped it into the Netflix queue, forgot about it, and it showed up in the mail a few months later. It's about a disgruntled mutant catfish.

Below is a poster from my favorite Toho movie ever (well, this and Destroy All Monsters). I had read about it, but never saw it til the lil Hucky found it at a garage sale half a block away from our house. One of the strangest movies you're ever likely to see. Made in 57, the same year as Godzilla.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Drink

It's poetry Friday, sez Maggie, over at Mind Moss. Sounds like fun. Today's word is juice.

It’s cold out
I awake tired and cranky
Impatient for coffee
I watch her rip into the new day
As if into a summer orange
Juice glistening on her fingers
Running in bright rivulets down her cheeks

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Janus and Epimetheus

I used to be scared that the universe was a genuinely random place. Scared there was no destiny, no design, no wheels within wheels.

Fuck that.

In the last 10 years or so I’ve come to not only accept randomness but embrace it. Which is part of my fascination with orbital mechanics (the overarching theme of this blog), the complex structures and counter-intuitive oddities created by the accumulation of countless collisions and near misses. By chucks of rock hitting the sweet spot of a gravity well at just the right angle and speed.

For instance, there's these guys:



This is a picture of Janus and Epimetheus, two moons orbiting Saturn just outside the F ring. Their orbits are very close, about 30 miles apart. And every 4 years or so, when they line up just right, they switch orbits, narrowly avoiding a collision in the process. 4 more years, they switch back. The orbits are actually pretty stable.

As much as anything is stable out there.

More on that later.

Friday, January 11, 2008

from Long Thin Fingers

Nearly all his earliest memories involve his sister crying.

Rarely is her crying the central focus, other things take up the foreground, her operatic gasps for air and stuttered sobs like a gentle breeze at his back, a half-heard song on a faraway radio.

He is riding in a speeding car, staring out the window as the world rushes past. A hubcap flies off clanging onto the asphalt, ringing like a bell; his sister is crying.

It is raining, he hears the loud staccato of rain on the tin can shell of their mobile home trailer as he tries to sleep, he is imagining long thin fingers drumming on a tabletop; his sister is crying.

Their mother is in a shadowed motel parking lot at night, stumbling toward the open door of a strange room, a man's face hovers in the doorway, it looks to his childhood eye as if the man has devil’s horns; his sister is crying.

Always, the gentle breeze, the faraway song. As an adult it reminds him of those old musicals he has seen on late night TV, where the characters feel an emotion so strong it cannot be circumscribed by mere words and gestures and are compelled to break into song to communicate. Perhaps she has colic, a rash, growing pains in her tiny bones and muscles. Perhaps she is revisiting a fearful place, over and over, some memory that can not be put to rest.

Perhaps she is simply very, very angry.

He is four years old, she is two, when the world breaks opens in a baptism of fire and light. They are in their childhood bedroom, the window centered between their beds and the sky beyond, all that sky, and they are sleeping when the smoke detector above their beds begins to shriek, their mother’s door flies open in a rush and thick, black smoke pours through the opening. Their mother appears from out of the shroud of smoke, hurrying them out of their beds, trying to push them out of their beds with the force of her voice alone, but his sister and he are transfixed by the peal of the alarm directly above their heads, they cannot hear their mother, they cannot move their feet, their minds have been emptied by the sheer volume of the alarm.

There is a shadowy figure at their mother’s side. He disappears in the smoke and chaos.

Soon the alarm is joined by the sound of far away sirens; mother has coaxed them to the edge of the gravel path by this time. Their flashing emergency lights join the mix, the firetruck skids to a stop in a hail of gravel, firemen pour out like circus clowns spilling out of a car. And still the children are held spellbound by the smoke alarm screaming from inside the mobile home, convinced it is the source of the smoke, the fire, the crowd of firemen and neighbors, the flashing lights, the acrid smell. Its corrugated shell is like a toothy grin to them; it’s reset button a beady, unblinking eye.

The fireman go in, come out hauling the smoking ruins of a mattress. They admonish the mother in stern tones, then walk over to where he and his sister stand, comforting them with gentle voices and distracted pats on the head. Someone turns the smoke detector off. The firetruck drives away. The crowd disperses. Mother goes inside and opens all the windows, sets a box fan in the doorway and turns it on. She is able with much coaxing to get her children to come inside the trailer but cannot get them to lie in their beds. They are terrified and crying, too young to express why, clambering out of their beds as quickly as she can tuck them in. She tells them the fire is out, the fire is gone, there’s no more fire, please, please go to sleep. Mommy needs her rest. They cannot be comforted. She brokers a compromise for the night by allowing them to sleep on the living room floor, while she sleeps on the couch beside them.

The children keep their eyes on their bedroom door until they can keep their eyes open no longer. The smoke detector is inside. The toothy grin, the beady eye. They cannot understand why the firemen took the mattress but left the hellish thing that caused the fire. They spend much of the next morning huddled under the bedroom doorway, eyes glued to the smoke detector, refusing to leave their post for more than a few minutes at a time. She has to remove it from the ceiling and pretend to throw it away before they will eat their breakfast.

They regard all smoke detectors they see with suspicion for years afterward.

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Not Gonna Happen

During Christmas break it was announced that not only might an asteroid slam into Mars, but it might do so right in front of one of the Mars rovers, giving us all a front row seat. I was excited. So were the kids. So were all the wackos calling up Art Bell that night. The initial odds were set at 1 in 75, but a week or so later they shot up to 1 in 25.

Sadly, they are now setting odds at 1 in 40, and estimate it'll miss by 20,000-ish miles. Bummer.

It reminded me of when this thing slammed into Jupiter back in 94. Now THAT was cool.


It's Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the "string of pearls" comet, one that got broken up by Jupiter's gravity in 1992, then utterly demolished a couple years later. On national TV, no less.

Monday, January 7, 2008

State of the Union

"Bush also took time from his hectic schedule of staring blankly into the gaping maw of absolute dissolution to reflect on the country's past and look forward to its 281-day future."


The Onion has quietly become the best source of day-to-day political satire around (the Jon Stewart/Steven Colbert one-two punch is a close second). This is particularly grim. Funny, though.


Saturday, January 5, 2008

Christmas comet

I promise this blog won't always be about comets. Here at The Cloud we have many interests.

But there's a new comet out there (8p/Tuttle), just below naked eye visablility, that I hope to get out and see as soon as this damn cold subsides. And I saw this beauty - Comet Holmes - over several nights in late October/early December. It brightened a million fold in just over an hour in October 07, and was easily visible to the naked eye as a fuzzy patch just below and to the right of Cassiopeia. With binocs you could make out a little of the structure. Very pretty.

It's still around now, bigger and dimmer and in pretty much the same place, since it's heading more or less straight away from the earth.

I took the family out to see this one, because it was so bright. The girls said they saw it, but they could have been looking at anything: a star, an airplane, a squirrel, the TV antenna. They're pretty young.

L-Hux and I have been good about teaching them the night sky. I show them the planets when they're out, and they are pretty good at finding them on their own. Though they think everything is Jupiter. And L-hux has begun the delightful tradition of driving us all out to a bluff over the Arkansas river a couple blocks from our house to watch the full moon rise. Not every month, but most. We sit in the car and let the girls play in the front seat (otherwise verboten territory) and see who can spot it first. Fun. Don't now if we are making little amateur astronomers of them or not, but hopefully we are making some memories.

Thursday, January 3, 2008

About the title

The Oort Cloud is a sphere of comets (sans tails) surrounding the solar system about a light year away from the sun. Think of the cloud as a hard candy coating, the solar system as a chewy nougat center. Most of the objects in the Oort cloud have been there for billions of years, traveling in lazy, placid orbits. Every once in a while something big and ornery and entirely unexpected comes waltzing through, twisting the orbit of every object it encounters, flinging iceballs in all directions.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

Sometimes the iceballs are flung toward us, and they develop tails as they near the sun. The big, glitzy comets naked-eye comets show up about once a decade, but with a good pair of binoculars you can easily spot one or two small comets a year, even with the light pollution of a medium-sized city. I look for them sometimes, in the back yard, while the rest of my family sleeps. They are easy to spot, fuzzier than the surrounding stars in the background, often trailing faint ion tails.

I like the metaphors offered by old-school Newtonian physics. I'll leave non-local effects, entanglement, quantum mechanics and string theory to others. I prefer the elegance of Kepler's Laws, seemingly random structures, the dance of mass and gravity, the aftermath of great collisions. I like the inevitability and predictability of orbits. I like how almost everything in the universe is a sphere or a disc. I like that nearly everything spins.

I like how nothing is new, everything is a result of previous cataclysms, the pieces merely rearranged.

I can relate.