It is the morning of July 5, 1054 A.D. You wake to a thin crescent moon between the horns of Taurus the Bull, low in the eastern sky. And nearby — wonder of wonders — a brilliant new celestial object, apparently a star, but shining more brightly than any star you have ever seen, four times brighter than Venus, so bright that for the next several weeks it will be visible even in daylight.
Astronomy
Detail of a Hubble Space Telescope mosaic image of the Crab Nebula • NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)
A portion of the Ultra Deep Field • NASA/ESA (Public Domain)
The visible and the invisible
“The power of the visible is the invisible,” wrote the poet Marianne Moore.
Artist's conception of the Cassini spacecraft arriving at Saturn • NASA/JPL (Public Domain)
Cassini at Saturn
Each of us is born at the center of the world.
Photo by Klemen Vrankar on Unsplash
To see stars, let’s turn off the lights
I first became familiar with the stars on the sleeping porch of my grandmother’s house on Ninth Street in Chattanooga, Tennessee, during the early 1940s.
Rosette Nebula • Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope / 2003
Skyward looks bring existential thoughts
Every now and then astronomers come up with a photograph that deserves wider circulation than it gets in the science journals.
Photo by Hikarinoshita Hikari on Unsplash
Blinded by the night lights
In the year 1750, a baby boy was born in Gambia in West Africa. On the eighth day after the birth, as was the custom, the village paused from its normal routines to celebrate, with feasting, music and prayer, the naming of the child — Kunta. Kunta Kinte.
Composite image of Saturn and the angle of its rings relative to Earth from 1996 to 2000 • NASA Hubble (CC BY 2.0)
Modern science can thank Saturn
Every stargazer with a telescope has been looking at Saturn lately. This year the planet reaches the point in its orbit that brings it closest to the Earth. It appears bigger and brighter than at any time in the past 30 years.
Detail of a Hubble Space Telescope mosaic image of the Crab Nebula • NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)
Appreciating our bizarre universe
On the evening of January 4 [2003], Saturn passed in front of the Crab Nebula.
“Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition” by Cristiano Banti (1857)
We wish he had been more heroic
On the evening of January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei, citizen of Florence and mathematician of the University of Padua, turned his telescope to the planet Jupiter. He saw the planet as a round disk against a background of three tiny stars, all in a row.
Detail of the Eagle Nebula as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope • NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Poetry in interstellar motion
Each of the three books of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” ends with the same words: “the stars.”