Celestia, Campfire and Astronomy
I remember every little detail from that weekend trip. From the very first moment we stepped onto the bus that took us to the mountain base, we spent the rest of the first day climbing down into a small cave with narrow hallways leading to the small chamber at its end. I vividly remember the glorious, endless, and hard-to-find second cave we stepped into the very next day, followed by an overwhelming feeling and little fear when we passed through cave chambers, cutting the darkness with handy tools and small flashlights. I will always hate myself for not having a camera to capture the surrounding scenery when we traveled by train later that afternoon, which looked like it came right out of the 19th century with wooden benches rolling on the railways slower than Usain Bolt. All those rock formations and abandoned train stations were slowly losing their battles with nature and were looking exactly like a background from Sergio Leone's spaghetti western movies.
But what I will remember the most is the first camping night between the caves. It was an extraordinary experience only a campfire can provide.
It was the hot middle of the summer, and the forest was mysterious and kind at the same time. I don't remember the exact year, though, but it surely was during my late teenage years, most likely in July or August of 1987. Along with a couple of my peer friends, I was lying down in the middle of a forest clearing on top of my brand-new sleeping bag, hypnotically staring toward the nightly sky. I glimpsed the watch and saw that midnight passed just an hour ago. The campfire was vividly glowing around the small glade surrounded by dark trees. It was the perfect time, and soon it was about to begin. As planned, the first one came on schedule, leaving a straight line in the sky for a millisecond or two. Shortly after, another one fractured the nightly sky, then another, and another, and another... until it became a shower. The Perseids. The icy fragments entering the Earth's atmosphere every summer are body parts of the comet Swift-Tuttle, which travels in this neighborhood every 130 years, providing lots of meteors for our camping TV. That particular year, we planned our adventure by the moon's motion. We wanted to go on the trip when the moon was mostly absent from the sky during its crescent phase. Without light pollution from the Earth and the Moon, the sight was amazing: Perseids, thousands of stars, nebulas, galaxies, planets, the Milky Way in the center of our view, planes, and artificial satellites passing throughout constellations with their leader of the time, the Russian space station "Mir", which was probably one of those brightest moving dots we saw that night. If you didn't see such a sight, you would be surprised how the night sky is actually dynamic. If you add to the scene strange sounds coming from the surrounding forest made by sleepless birds and wild animals, you will have perfect entertainment for the big portion of the night. It was our first camping trip, and the fear of the unknown somewhat spoiled the event, but in our defense, without any experienced guides or team members, I can assure you that every suspicious sound that came from the forest sounded like the ultimate wild predator hungry for young humans. Anyway, we finally fell asleep a little before dawn, partly because of our fear and mostly because of the active heavens, and we managed to sleep for an hour and a half, ready for the next day.
That really was one great summer, and this trip would be one of the highlights of my adventurous history, from many perspectives. But it wasn't the one that triggered my interest in science and astronomy. I couldn't say for sure what it was, but among many things, it was one scientific toy my parents bought me when I was really young. It was one toolkit box**, an optical set of plastic parts and various lenses allowing me to build different gadgets such as a microscope, binoculars, a spyglass, a kaleidoscope, a diapositive magnifier, prism tools, etc. It was my favorite toy for many years. The other equally important trigger is my failure to comprehend the word "infinite" and my everlasting desire to understand its meaning. It was bugging my mind ever since I started to look up at night. Even today, after dozens of courses of various mathematics I had to pass during my high school and university education, infinity remains the most significant unknown, lying right there, far beyond my scope. There were years in my youth when I was convinced that infinity actually doesn't exist at all. I loved the idea that the cosmos is curved to 360° in all directions. I desperately wanted to believe that if you go with your spaceship straight up, eventually you will reach the same spot, only from the opposite direction, just like the surface of Earth and its two-dimensional, fully closed curve. Of course, today within mainstream scientific thought, there is much evidence that the expansion of our universe is real, but still it doesn't solve the infinity of it. At least not in my mind. Even though it is probable that our universe is just a part of a multiverse neighborhood where our cosmos is expanding into something bigger, to me it is only stretching the infinity out, only this time far beyond our borders. Maybe one day we will discover the definite answer.
From the other perspective, if we look at the 'infinite' trouble only with our rational mind, we have to admit that the human race is extremely young, evolutionarily speaking. The real handicap is that we live in a 'finite' world. Everything that surrounds us has a beginning and an end. At least it seems so, and even though we today learned a great deal about our position within the celestial realm, we have only begun to understand it. We only started to explore our own solar system. Due to our own limitations in the form of our unwillingness and hesitations to deal with the unknown and/or our own animosities for each other in the form of militant behavior throughout our history, this is still a very slow process, but inevitably, one day, in the not-so-far future, the time will come when, lacking enough energy to sustain humanity as we know it, we all will have to start looking up, not for searching for the divine but for our own pure survival. Then our evolution will speed up and skip some gears toward answers to many inconceivable questions.
Today I have in my possession an educational reflecting telescope with a respectable mirror size and focal distance mounted on an equatorial tripod along with a motion tracking system capable of fixing the spot in the sky for hours. Unfortunately, amateur astronomy requires a lot of spare time, which I regretfully don't have. In addition to a lack of spare time, watching the heavens requires an unpolluted environment, and life in big cities is beneficial for everything but astronomical observation. But it is still a good thing to have spare moments and spend them in the most enjoyable way. Even today, from time to time, I point the scope up and peek a little. Occasionally I take photos outside, like this one of Mercury transiting the Sun's disc.
To conclude with some short 'observations', if you want to do some amateur astronomy, you will need star maps. Before, they were black and white and printed in the form of atlas books. Today all that changed with the speed of the internet and graphic tools on the average personal computer. They are all online, and you can access them with many apps. I recommend 'Celestia' and 'Stellarium'. Even without a real telescope, they provide endless fun.
Image refs:
https://amsmeteors.org/2017/08/viewing-the-perseids-in-2017/
* https://goldpaintphotography.com/
Kepler project:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fnbJ1hZik
** Me and the optical toolkit box (~1978):
Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
http://www.stellarium.org/
Celestia, Campfire and Astronomy
But what I will remember the most is the first camping night between the caves. It was an extraordinary experience only a campfire can provide.
It was the hot middle of the summer, and the forest was mysterious and kind at the same time. I don't remember the exact year, though, but it surely was during my late teenage years, most likely in July or August of 1987. Along with a couple of my peer friends, I was lying down in the middle of a forest clearing on top of my brand-new sleeping bag, hypnotically staring toward the nightly sky. I glimpsed the watch and saw that midnight passed just an hour ago. The campfire was vividly glowing around the small glade surrounded by dark trees. It was the perfect time, and soon it was about to begin. As planned, the first one came on schedule, leaving a straight line in the sky for a millisecond or two. Shortly after, another one fractured the nightly sky, then another, and another, and another... until it became a shower. The Perseids. The icy fragments entering the Earth's atmosphere every summer are body parts of the comet Swift-Tuttle, which travels in this neighborhood every 130 years, providing lots of meteors for our camping TV. That particular year, we planned our adventure by the moon's motion. We wanted to go on the trip when the moon was mostly absent from the sky during its crescent phase. Without light pollution from the Earth and the Moon, the sight was amazing: Perseids, thousands of stars, nebulas, galaxies, planets, the Milky Way in the center of our view, planes, and artificial satellites passing throughout constellations with their leader of the time, the Russian space station "Mir", which was probably one of those brightest moving dots we saw that night. If you didn't see such a sight, you would be surprised how the night sky is actually dynamic. If you add to the scene strange sounds coming from the surrounding forest made by sleepless birds and wild animals, you will have perfect entertainment for the big portion of the night. It was our first camping trip, and the fear of the unknown somewhat spoiled the event, but in our defense, without any experienced guides or team members, I can assure you that every suspicious sound that came from the forest sounded like the ultimate wild predator hungry for young humans. Anyway, we finally fell asleep a little before dawn, partly because of our fear and mostly because of the active heavens, and we managed to sleep for an hour and a half, ready for the next day.
Space station Mir (1986-2001)
That really was one great summer, and this trip would be one of the highlights of my adventurous history, from many perspectives. But it wasn't the one that triggered my interest in science and astronomy. I couldn't say for sure what it was, but among many things, it was one scientific toy my parents bought me when I was really young. It was one toolkit box**, an optical set of plastic parts and various lenses allowing me to build different gadgets such as a microscope, binoculars, a spyglass, a kaleidoscope, a diapositive magnifier, prism tools, etc. It was my favorite toy for many years. The other equally important trigger is my failure to comprehend the word "infinite" and my everlasting desire to understand its meaning. It was bugging my mind ever since I started to look up at night. Even today, after dozens of courses of various mathematics I had to pass during my high school and university education, infinity remains the most significant unknown, lying right there, far beyond my scope. There were years in my youth when I was convinced that infinity actually doesn't exist at all. I loved the idea that the cosmos is curved to 360° in all directions. I desperately wanted to believe that if you go with your spaceship straight up, eventually you will reach the same spot, only from the opposite direction, just like the surface of Earth and its two-dimensional, fully closed curve. Of course, today within mainstream scientific thought, there is much evidence that the expansion of our universe is real, but still it doesn't solve the infinity of it. At least not in my mind. Even though it is probable that our universe is just a part of a multiverse neighborhood where our cosmos is expanding into something bigger, to me it is only stretching the infinity out, only this time far beyond our borders. Maybe one day we will discover the definite answer.
From the other perspective, if we look at the 'infinite' trouble only with our rational mind, we have to admit that the human race is extremely young, evolutionarily speaking. The real handicap is that we live in a 'finite' world. Everything that surrounds us has a beginning and an end. At least it seems so, and even though we today learned a great deal about our position within the celestial realm, we have only begun to understand it. We only started to explore our own solar system. Due to our own limitations in the form of our unwillingness and hesitations to deal with the unknown and/or our own animosities for each other in the form of militant behavior throughout our history, this is still a very slow process, but inevitably, one day, in the not-so-far future, the time will come when, lacking enough energy to sustain humanity as we know it, we all will have to start looking up, not for searching for the divine but for our own pure survival. Then our evolution will speed up and skip some gears toward answers to many inconceivable questions.
Night Sky and Perseids by Brad Goldpaint (Goldpaint Photography)*
Anyway, astronomy is one of few scientific playgrounds simply because it contains many unanswered questions. There are plenty of proposed theories that will surely stay in their theoretical phases for many years until we finally get ultimate proof. It is entirely based on studying electromagnetic radiation we are picking up on the surface of Earth and several instruments in orbit. All possible frequencies within electromagnetic radiation are telling us many stories from its origin point and the path it is traveling through. Studying the full spectrum requires large instruments, both in size and in the money needed for their manufacturing. Especially if they require being lifted into orbit to avoid atmospheric disturbances. It is amazing what must be done to look up one particular spot in the heavens simply because everything in the cosmos is in motion. We need to solve the rotation and revolution of the planet and, if posted in orbit, compensate for the extremely fast speed of the spacecraft carrying the instruments. As the monitoring object is farther away, the less amount of radiation is picked up by the sensors, so astronomy is one of those indirect or asynchronous sciences where we need to collect the data for some time, which could be years or even more time, and then for an equally considerable time analyze the data, compare the resulting images, and conclude science. For example, take the Kepler orbital space laboratory. It orbits the Sun following the Earth to get a clear view toward the monitoring stars, and it is simply continuously taking images of 'nearby' stars (about 145,000 stars) and sending the data to the Kepler team for analysis. Over time, the team and their sophisticated software measure slight brightness changes during possible orbits of potential planets, and only by these small changes in brightness of the main star is it possible to roughly determine the size and orbit of the planet causing the dimming of the light from the star. However, to get all those facts out of the data, Kepler must take lots of images and cover the planet's full orbit. That means to confirm the planet, Kepler must take at least two images separated by time in order to confirm the revolution time of the planet. It's a slow process, and considering lots, and I mean LOTS, of received data, I am sure we will hear about more and more planets found by this technique.
Among all possible wavelengths within the full electromagnetic spectrum, the coolest one is the one situated between infrared and ultraviolet waves. The greatest visible light. The one we can see. Even though it is just a tiny portion of the full spectrum, this is the one we can enjoy with our own eyes. This is the one we see every night we look up toward the amazing heavens. Thanks to relatively cheap optical instruments, we are able to enhance the view and zoom it in and see further. Some time after I enjoyed my optical set toy I mentioned earlier, I got my own first refracting telescope. It was small without any tripods and fully mobile, but looking at the moon for the first time was something I will always remember. Discovering the fact with my own eyes that Venus, like the Moon, also has phases and seeing it in its crescent shape was the next best thing I experienced. I still have it, and every time I grab this small piece of optics, I can't help myself and instantly remember the times when I was fixing it on the ladder positioned on the top of our garage and spending hours looking toward the stars.
Transit of Mercury over Sun by Sky-Watcher 150/750
Today I have in my possession an educational reflecting telescope with a respectable mirror size and focal distance mounted on an equatorial tripod along with a motion tracking system capable of fixing the spot in the sky for hours. Unfortunately, amateur astronomy requires a lot of spare time, which I regretfully don't have. In addition to a lack of spare time, watching the heavens requires an unpolluted environment, and life in big cities is beneficial for everything but astronomical observation. But it is still a good thing to have spare moments and spend them in the most enjoyable way. Even today, from time to time, I point the scope up and peek a little. Occasionally I take photos outside, like this one of Mercury transiting the Sun's disc.
To conclude with some short 'observations', if you want to do some amateur astronomy, you will need star maps. Before, they were black and white and printed in the form of atlas books. Today all that changed with the speed of the internet and graphic tools on the average personal computer. They are all online, and you can access them with many apps. I recommend 'Celestia' and 'Stellarium'. Even without a real telescope, they provide endless fun.
Image refs:
https://amsmeteors.org/2017/08/viewing-the-perseids-in-2017/
* https://goldpaintphotography.com/
Kepler project:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fnbJ1hZik
Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
http://www.stellarium.org/