Sharing the Sky
WebLog No. 27
Sharing the Sky visits PATS
The highlight of my visit to Los Angeles last weekend was to speak at the Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show in Pasadena. My lecture, “Poetry of the Night”, tried to discover relationships between the night sky and English Literature. Loosely based on my recently completed Ph. D. thesis, in this lecture I sought to connect writings of Shakespeare, his colleagues, Jonathan Swift, Lord Byon, and George Eliot to events in the night sky. To me, these relationships are as important as the night sky itself.
But the best part of the trip happened on the way to the airport. I detoured slightly tro visit the beach at Santa Monica, and captured an image of a seagull hovering over the crowded parking lot. I thought I was giving myself sufficient time to reach the airport but a series of small delays, and a long queue at security, nearly resulted in my missing the return flight. I did make it, thank goodness, and the trip was a complete success for Sharing the Sky.
America's West Coast: The Sun shines low in the west over the Pacific Ocean Beach at Santa Monica, photographed at about 6:30 pm on Sunday, september 18, 2011 by David H. Levy.
In my lecture, it was easy for me to begin with Shakespeare. Early in his life, I like to imagine, his father took him him outdoors to view the great supernova, the new star of 1572. It is likely that this star explains some of the opening lines of Hamlet, his most famous play:
Last night of all,
When yond same star that’s westward from the pole
Had made his course that part of heaven
Where it now burns, Marcellus and myself,
The bell then beating one . . . (Ham.1.1.37-39).
Cmparing these ancient lines with the Spitzer Space Telescope’s beautiful image of the SN 1572 remnant was a highlight of my presentation. I have no proof that Shakespeare witnessed this star, but it is very likely that he did. It is also possible that, as James Joyce argues in Ulysses, that Shakespeare crept out of his boyhood home one summer night to witness the star in the northern sky, for it is the sort of thing an intelligent and adventurous boy would want to do:
A star, a daystar, a firedrake rose at his birth. It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbrant constellation which is the signature of [Shakespeare’s] initial among the stars. His eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight . . . (Joyce 210).
Shakespeare’s most involved astronomical thetoric concerns the eclipses of 1605, particularly the lunar and solart eclipses that October: Gloucester begins:
These late eclipses in the Sun and Moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects: Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide” (1.2.101)
To which his bastard son Edmund argues:
“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity” (1.2.115-127).
Shakespeare goes on for almost two pages arguing whether eclipses can predict the outcomes of human actions and events. Today we know that they do not, but in those pre-telescopic days, a large portion of England’s populatrion believed that they could.
Shakespeare’s most famous reference to a solar eclipse actually occurs in Macbeth, and in a statement that mentions neither the words Sun, Moon,. or eclipse.
By the clock, ‘tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp:
Is’t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame,
That darkness does the face of earth entomb,
When living light should kiss it? (Macbeth 2.4.6-10)
It took me some time to understand this obvious reference to an eclipse of the Sun where night indeed “strangles the traveling lamp”. I learned of it after dinner one evening while standing on the strarboard deck of the Regal Empress, during a cruise that successfully captured the total eclipse of 11 August 1999. Another passenger approached me that evening, and told me of this marvellous connection, really one of Shakespeare’s finest eclipse analogies.
Moving away from the early modern period to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, I then made the connection between Gulliver’s ttrip to the flying Island of Laputa (see also the episode from Star Trek [The original series] called “The Cloud Minders”) about a city in the clouds. It is much like the city Gulliver visited. While there he learns that scientists there had discovered two moons circling Mars:
“This advantage has enabled them to extend their discoveries much further than our astronomers in Europe; for they have made a catalogue of ten thousand fixed stars, whereas the largest of ours do not contain above one third part of that number. They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars; whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost, five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the centre of Mars; which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies.”
Amazingly Swift was not too far off in both their diminutive sizes or their distances from Mars. Even more amazing, the actual pair of moons was not discovered until 1878, when Asaph Hall located them using the great refractor at the U.S. Naval Observatory. Likewise, Lord Byron anticipated the launching of Apollo 8, in December 1968, in Don Juan:
Man fell with apples, and with apples rose,
If this be true; for we must deem the mode
In which Sir Isaac Newton could disclose
Through the then unpaved stars the turnpike road,
A thing to counterbalance human woes:
For, ever since, immortal man hath glowed
With all kinds of mechanics, and full soon
Steam-engines will conduct him to the moon.
--Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto the tenth
1823
During the Romantic period, George Eliot has the surgeon in Middlemarch ask what it would be like to be a discoverer:
Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should dream of himself as a discoverer? Most of us, indeed, know little of the great originators until they have been lifted up among the constellations and already rule our fates. But that Herschel, for example, who “broke the barriers of the heavens”-- did he not once play a provincial church-organ, and give music-lessons to stumbling pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among neighbors who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame: each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his course towards final companionship with the immortals. (Eliot 108-109)
These quotes, from an unending stream in English Literature over the ages, formed the backbone of my talk. In my thesis I explained their significance, but for the purpose of this talk, designed to motivate the audience, it was sufficient to quote them.
The lecture was a big success, and is enshrined as an important part of what Sharing the Sky is trying to accomplish. It is not enough to read books on astronomy; really to know the sky, one should be acquainted with Shakespeare, Eliot, and other writers, writers who knew the sky not for its physics but for its magic.
The Vail Astronomy Unclub
Last month, and again last week, Sharing the Sky inaugurated a new season at the Corona Foothills School in Corona de Tucson, Arizona. Both nights began with a cloudy sky. The August night began to clear later; the September night was cloudier, but a spot opened up so that I was able to point Uncle Guy, our 14-inch Meade telescope, toward Vega so that the young observers could look at a not-too-distant bluish-white star through a telescope.
The purpose of these sessions is to inspire the children of our neighborhood to acquire an informed interest in the night sky. Other telescopes, which have been donated in recent years to different institutions and schools, are hopefully fulfilling the same objective. Unfortunately, not all of the telescopes we have provided are getting the use we were hoping they’d get. Some other groups insist that astronomy is not astronomy without photography, which means that objects are viewed not directly through the telescope but rather on a computer screen as a digital photograph.
Whether I lecture before a room full of astronomy enthuisiasts or a yard full of children, this foundation;’s goal remains the same, to inspire my listeners to enjoy the night sky.