The below poem by Walt Whitman kind of makes me chuckle a bit. Much of science can seem to be dry if presented solely in the form of numbers and charts and diagrams. To a poet, it may seem kind of dry and without romance. But, really, it is all romantic. All of it. Enjoying the beauty is quite simple; the numbers are the hard parts. It takes a driving passion and curiosity to want to dig, do the work, and figure out the details behind the natural beauty of the universe. When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
The Leviathan of Parsonstown was the telescope that Lord Rosse, also known as William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse (mentioned in the two previous posts), built in Parsonstown, Ireland, now known as Birr and situated at what is known as Birr Castle. That telescope was the telescope that trumped all telescopes of that century. It was a big mother of a telescope. It was 72 inches in diameter.
The telescope’s mirror was made of speculum metal. What is speculum metal, you ask? Speculum metal is a very hard white alloy consisting of a 4:1 ratio of copper to tin. To be more exact, percentage-wise, it is 67% copper and 33% tin. The problem with speculum metal is that it is prone to tarnishing. Because of Ireland’s damp weather, the mirror had to be repolished every six months. They even built an extra mirror to be put in place while the other was receiving its bi-annual polish treatment.
The telescope was powerful and exceeded the expectations of the time-period, enabling astronomers to observe 18th magnitude stars and spiral galaxies. But, even with this gigantic, powerful telescope, Ireland’s sky was certainly not the best for observing. Wikipedia notes that there were only about 60 clear nights of viewing per year.
I was reading about Birr Castle in Ireland, the site at which the Lord Rosse telescope (biggest telescope of the 19th century) was built, and thought it interesting that they made an arboreal replica of the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) with lime trees in the gardens there.
What a strange and so very novel idea this was. I wanted to find a sky cam/aerial view of the spirally oriented lime tree orchard galaxy, but, alas, could not find one. I did, however, find the below photograph of a sign giving an introduction to the gardens on Flickr:
When I attended David Levy’s talk about astronomy subjects in art and classic literature, he noted that many experts point out that Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” painting bears some resemblance to the Whirlpool Galaxy sketches of Lord Rosse. They say this because the swirling background spiral in the sky in that painting really looks a lot like a swirling whirlpool galaxy amongst the stars.
Van Gogh painted “The Starry Night” 44 years after Lord Rosse’s sketches in 1889, so it is feasible that the sketches could have been a major influence and inspiration for the painting of “The Starry Night.”
The Earl of Rosse KP, William Parsons, also known as “Lord Rosse”, (June 17, 1800 – October 31, 1867) built the world’s largest telescope of that century in 1847, recording and observing many galaxies throughout his lifetime. The first spiral galaxy he observed and sketched was the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51). Amazingly, his detailed sketches look much like the photographic images of spiraling galaxies taken today.
The possibility that the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy may have influenced one of the greatest paintings of all time is definitely nice to think about.
The Earth Hour project, promoted by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) , encourages people around the world to turn their lights off for one hour from 8-9pm in their local time zone today, Mar. 29. Even Google (www.google.com) “turned their lights out” for the cause. They simulated the lights being turned out today on their search engine to promote the Earth Hour energy conservation project; the Google home page’s background is pitch black!
Major cities around the world will be holding events to spread and raise awareness about energy consumption and climate change, and you can get in on this too. In fact, as I announced yesterday, National Dark Sky Week starts today and lasts until April 4th–so if you participate in National Dark Sky Week to minimize light pollution, you are also participating in energy conservation for Earth Hour. You accomplish TWO for the effort of ONE. So flick that switch, people (or, if you have one of those clappers, you can just clap your lights off)!
This year’s National Dark Sky Week begins tomorrow and lasts until April 4th. The idea behind this is to simply raise awareness:
How will National Dark-Sky Week reduce light pollution, given that it only lasts a week and not everyone in the country will participate? The main goal of NDSW is to raise awareness about the harmful effects of light pollution. It is not possible for all of the light pollution in this region of the world to disappear. However, it is possible to make a small difference in the quality of the night sky and inspire us all to preserve the beauty of the sky. Another main goal of this event is to promote the use of better lighting systems that direct light toward the ground where it should be and not up into the sky. (Web Page)
While you should always be doing this, at least for the coming week, turn off some lights. I mean, come on, this is ridiculous:
The Earth at Night
This year’s Dark Sky Week also coincides with Earth Hour, a time when people all over the globe turn off lights for one hour. It is scheduled for March 29th, 8pm, your local time.
Kelly Beatty over at Sky and Telescope has a great post on this.
This is a very striking photo. I can’t imagine anyone seeing much in the skies over Dublin on a clear, cloudless night. I hope it’s not this bad all the time.
I’ve never really thought of Ireland as a place where amateur astronomy could flourish, primarily because I thought it was cloudy most of the time there.
The above photo is one of the best I’ve ever seen of Saturn using amateur equipment. It was taken using a Phillips toucam webcam on a 20-inch Obsession telescope at f15. The clarity rivals Cassini photos. I have this exact same webcam and I’ve yet to produce results like this. Excellent work.
David is a really cool guy. A REALLY COOL GUY. He is, among a great many other things, the author of 35 books, the discoverer of 22 comets, the co-discoverer of the Shoemaker-Levy comet that collided with Jupiter, the science editor for Parade magazine, the receiver of five honorary doctorates, and he is the host (along with his wife Wendee) of a weekly radio show in Arizona called “Let’s Talk Stars.”
I love the idea of astronomy radio. That’d be really neat to have an astronomybuff radio show. Anybody interested in giving me my own radio show? For booking info, contact my private booking agent: Ima S. O’Fulloshit.
I love working at a university and being surrounded by cosmologists. In my last post, I alluded to the idea that astronomers may one day regret calling the impulsive force pushing spacetime apart dark energy.
I was chatting with a colleague last week where we talked about this nomenclature. It may turn out that dark energy is neither, but for very innocent reasons, the term dark energy has stuck.
The term probably came about from the discovery of dark matter. The existence of dark matter was inferred from a variety of observations of both the microwave background radiation and the Bullet Cluster of galaxies. The behavior of the matter we could see was influenced by something we couldn’t see (from its gravitational field).
The gravity from the dark matter was affecting the matter we could see.
Likewise, with respect to dark energy, the discovery that the acceleration of the universe was also being caused by something we couldn’t see nor detect, it seemed natural to call whatever that was dark energy.
Dark energy can more accurately be thought of as a negative pressure.
Imagine a gas inside a bottle. Our everyday experience shows that if you left the same amount of gas in the bottle but made the bottle bigger, the pressure would go down. If you made the bottle smaller (leaving everything else the same), the pressure would go up; the molecules in the gas exert a positive pressure.
If that gas was dark energy, the pressure would increase as the bottle got bigger, and decrease as it got smaller.
Another way, usually described by Sean Carroll (and I’m paraphrasing poorly here), imagine a cylinder where the pressure increases when you pull the piston out.
Pulling the piston actually increases the energy in the system, while pushing decreases it.
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I love working at a university and being surrounded by cosmologists. In my last post, I alluded to the idea that astronomers may one day regret calling the impulsive force pushing spacetime apart dark energy.
