The World As It Is

Artsparker has a gift for connections: verbal, visual, artistic, personal. She pointed me toward a startlingly lovely poem at the Larabee and Liza site a couple days back to read Carolyn Miller's poem, copied below. There are "no ladders, no descending angels" in my worldview, so it had some resonance with me, in particular the comfort found in sideways Orion, trembling Venus, firefly Jupiter. Or, to use John Prine's more plain language, "to believe in this living is just a hard way to go."

The World as It is

No ladders, no descending angels, no voice
out of the whirlwind, no rending
of the veil, or chariot in the sky—only
water rising and falling in breathing springs
and seeping up through limestone, aquifers filling
and flowing over, russet stands of prairie grass
and dark pupils of black-eyed Susans. Only
the fixed and wandering stars: Orion rising sideways,
Jupiter traversing the southwest like a great firefly,
Venus trembling and faceted in the west—and the moon,
appearing suddenly over your shoulder, brimming
and ovoid, ripe with light, lifting slowly, deliberately,
wobbling slightly, while far below, the faithful sea
rises up and follows.

-Carolyn Miller

Thank you Susan. Thank you Laura. Thank you Carolyn.

Daytime Star

I like to think of myself as not easily swayed by the machinations of political theater. But I must admit I got a little choked up seeing Springsteen and Seeger singing "This Land Is Your Land" on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial Sunday (along with tens of thousands of others). Particularly when they got to those later, more subversive verses.

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

Let's hope so.

Stevie Wonder rocked too.

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Venus is bright enough and high enough so that you can see as a daytime star now, if you know where to look. Check out the sky just before sunset. Look 40-ish degrees above the sun (your fist at arm's length is about 10 degrees) and off to the left. Quite bright, and once you spot it it's easy to pick out again.

Very pretty. Trust me.

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Got a Prémio Dardos award from Eric over at My Heart's Porch. Thanks, Eric. I hope it's not just the tamales talking.

He's a good writer, from what I've read. Just finished his second novel. Check him out.

Very Big and Very Weird

There's a cool little dance going on in the western sky for the next several days. The new moon is on the 2nd (meaning you can't see it, because the sun is almost directly behind it), but after that it will appear in the west as a young waxing crescent moon. A beautiful sight in itself, but there will also be three bright objects near it: Saturn, Mars and Regulus (the brightest star in Leo). They'll shift positions slightly over the next several nights, and create quite the pretty picture. On the 10th, Mars and Saturn will be at their closest to each other, .7 degrees apart (of course they're still 800 million miles apart, but let's not split hairs).

Plus, while all this is going on, over in the east, Jupiter will be rising at the same time. On the 4th you're gonna be looking up at the sky anyway, for fireworks, so take a couple minutes and try to find some planets. Show your kids! Impress your girlfriend! Or boyfriend, of course.

I stole the image from Sky and Telescope's excellent This Week's Sky at a Glance.

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I've fallen off the orbital mechanics train the last couple weeks, so I'm making up for it today with a double post of things orbital.

100 years ago this week something very big and very weird exploded in the sky above Tunguska River in Siberia. I remember the small thrill I got reading about it when I was a little kid. It flattened trees for 800 miles, lit up the night sky half a world away with luminous clouds, set seismograph needles a-twitter, painted halos around the sun. There was no crater, and no remnant of the explosion has ever been found (admittedly, no one bothered to examine the impact site for 19 years). Ground zero was easy to find only because the trees flattened in a circle, all pointing toward the center. This odd lack of any debris has spawned a bucket of strange theories, ranging from collisions with anti-matter and black holes to alien spacecraft, nuclear fusion, and methane explosions. The more likely theory is that an asteroid or comet exploded a few miles above the ground. There is a little round lake about six miles away, with a peculiar cone at the bottom, that points to this theory (i.e. - a piece of the asteroid thrown by the explosion created the lake). But no one really knows.

A pretty cool deal, though, regardless of the specifics. It's known as the Tunguska event. It even sounds cool. Very X Files.

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This just in! I read this morning that Nikola Tesla, the guy who invented both the radio and AC power before going utterly freakin nuts, caused the Tunguska event. According to "sources," he test-fired a death ray on the evening of June 30, 1908, and once he found out about the Tunguska event, he dismantled the weapon, deeming it too dangerous to remain in existence.

Easily he coolest explanation I've ever heard. Wish I'd known about it when I was a kid. Gotta call Art Bell.