One More Post About a Recent Celestial Event

Lilly and some of her friends filled up water balloons in the back yard yesterday and soon were throwing them at each other. Ann got in on the action, too. Then they lit sparklers, even though it was still daytime, followed by smoke bombs (tamely called "smoke balls" on the package, and it's true that they don't explode). During all that, they also ate pizza and drank soft drinks.

A fine way to pass the summer solstice, and a day that hit about 90° F. under clear skies, even if no one commented on the fact that it was the longest day of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere. I'm commenting on it now. First day of summer? I don't think so. It's been summerish here for weeks.

Back on June 5 -- also a very summerlike day -- some 5,000 people showed up on the grounds of the Adler Planetarium on the shores of Lake Michigan to see the Transit of Venus. At least that's the number an employee of the planetarium told the crowd at one point. But there's no doubt there was a crowd.



A number of people had come with their telescopes and binoculars, and a lot of others had eclipse glasses. There were families making a picnic of it, and TV news coverage. In this case, WGN, according to the back of the camera.



These were the mounted binoculars I looked through.



Through them, Venus was a clear, crisp dot on the background of the pale yellow Sun. Afterward, I found the rest of my family and Lilly's friends and encouraged them to wait a little while in line to look through the binoculars, too. The lad in the picture is one of Lilly's friends as he saw the transit, with the gentleman who owned the binoculars holding them steady.

Not far away, I waited in another line to look through a largish telescope, which produced a large, white image of the Sun. Venus was proportionally larger than in the binoculars, and there were sunspots visible as well, but there was no mistaking the planet. Still, I liked the binocular view better.

I got home that evening late to a pile of unfinished work, which caused me to have a long day on the 6th. But as I lay thinking about it before drifting off the sleep, I knew it was worth the aggravation.

The 2012 Transit of Venus

I did a quick check about Copernicus yesterday and found out a few things. I hadn't realized that element 112 had been named "Copernicium" about two years ago. Or that Copernicus and Kepler have a feast day (May 23) in the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church. A full facsimile version of De Revolutionibus is available on line, but my meager learning isn't up to anything more than glancing at it.

Also, there's this from the National Science Foundation. One of the survey questions is, Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? It looks like about 70 percent of Americans go along with heliocentrism; which means that 30 percent do not. What? How is that possible? And somehow I don't think that 30 percent objected to the question based on the fact that the orbit of the Earth is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.

Anyway, on the grounds of the Alder on June 5, not far from the statue of Copernicus, a transit enthusiast had set up a large pair of binoculars mounted on a frame so that they swiveled up and down. The instrument was fitted with a solar lens and people were lined up to look through it. I joined the line at once. Next to me were a couple of youngish fellows, one from near Chicago, the other passing through (I think he was a Korean student living in St. Louis, but I didn't get all the details). We talked about the transit, and they told me Venus was at about 1 o'clock on the disk of the Sun.

So I looked again through my eclipse glasses and after a few moments I saw a round dot on the Sun, a little faint but there at roughly 1 o'clock. A few minutes later I saw the transit again through the binoculars, and after that through a larger telescope, but I first saw it with my (nearly) naked eyes at about 5:30 CDT under clear blue Chicago skies.

Point Venus, Chicago

To reach the Adler Planetarium, our Point Venus for the June 5 transit, I took a train downtown, arriving just before 5 pm. Yuriko, the girls and Lilly's friends were already there, and I was going to meet them. I walked part of the way, but broke down and hailed a cab on Michigan Ave. for the rest of the trip.

At first the cabbie was one for small talk, in Middle Eastern-flavored English, and I mentioned the transit to him. I'm not sure what he made of it. I also said there was an important election going on in Wisconsin, and I'm sure what he made of that, either. But he must have been eager to please his fare, since he found a news station on the radio to listen to while we were stuck in traffic, which was a lot. It was rush hour, after all.

On one station a couple of goofballs were talking about the transit, something along the lines of this can't possibly be interesting because it isn't a CGI three-ring circus. But they did confirm that the transit was under way. So I took out my pair of eclipse glasses and looked at the Sun through the cab window. I could tell the cabbie was trying to see what his odd passenger was up to, but I didn't explain.

I also didn't see anything on the disk of the Sun which, through the glasses, looks like a pale traffic light. But then again the cab soon moved and I lost my view. Traffic on Solidarity Drive, which leads right up to the Adler, was achingly slow, so I paid my fare and walked the rest of the way to find a better vantage point. But first I noticed this statue in front of the planetarium.




It's none other than Copernicus. At that moment, in fact, it was a statue of Copernicus watching the Transit of Venus, something the man Copernicus never got to do.

Planning for the Transit

I can't remember when I first read about the Transit of Venus, but it was before the 2004 transit. Must have been years ago — how many events combine exploration of the Earth with exploration of the Heavens? Capt. Cook goes to Tahiti, figures out how far the Earth is from the Sun. To simplify the story a lot.

Anyway, the '04 transit was early in the morning, and I couldn't be bothered with it. Eight years ago I wrote, "according to today’s paper, about 1000 people showed up at the Adler Planetarium yesterday morning to see the Transit of Venus. I figure that represents the hard-core astro-buffs. Lazy duffers like myself, who knew about the event, but didn’t go, probably represented 100 times as many people in the metro area. If that assumption is true -- and it’s only speculation -- that would mean 100,000 people out of 9.1 million or so in the metro area understood what was going on, celestially speaking. Nice to be part of a knowledgeable elite, especially if you don’t have to get out of bed early to be part of it."

This time I knew the event would be in the afternoon. Months ago I wrote a note about it on the hanging calendar we refer to most often, and on another calendar hanging in my office: TRANSIT OF VENUS. No one asked what it was until the page was flipped to June. As it happened, June 5 was the day after the girls finished school: Ann's last day of 3rd grade was the 4th, and Lilly's "graduation" from 8th grade was held on the evening of the 4th as well.

If it's sunny on June 5, I told them, we're going downtown to the Adler, which is bound to have telescopes set up for viewing. At once Lilly wanted to invite some friends and spend time at the nearby beach as well. I agreed with that, as long as we made our way to the planetarium by about 5.

So early in the month, I paid special attention to the weather forecast. As I've mentioned, the last day of May was rainy all day. If the transit had been that day, we wouldn't have seen a moment of it. But by June 3, all predictions were for a clear day on the 5th. SUNNY, the forecast said on the 4th for the next day. So I knew we were going to see it. More about that tomorrow.

The Butt-End of the Eclipse

What could the recent eclipse augur? The death of disco music stars, maybe.

Yuriko tells me that the Japanese media were all atwitter about the annular eclipse over the islands. As well they should be, since apparently the last time Japan saw a ring-of-fire eclipse was nearly 1,000 years ago. Yamato Japan, that is, since Okinawa caught one only a few decades ago.

Not long ago I bought a few pairs of eclipse glasses. Were these even on the market in the mid-80s, the last time I experienced a partial solar eclipse? I don't remember. I didn't have any anyway. Actually I bought the glasses for the Transit of Venus next month, but they came in time for the partial eclipse.

Except that I didn't think we'd get to see any of the eclipse, since it rained much of yesterday afternoon. But at about 7 o'clock some of the clouds cleared away. Since the sun was pretty low, we went to the nearby park and stood on some of the playground equipment. It was still hazy, but even so a slightly clipped Sun was just visible through the glasses for a few minutes, before dropping below the trees.

The transit is near sunset, too. We're going to have to find a place with fewer trees, or a higher elevation.

Yerkes Observatory

We went to southern Wisconsin on Saturday not to discover monuments to long-forgotten fictional characters (see yesterday) -- though that's always a bonus in traveling -- but to get a look at the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory, which is in the town of Williams Bay, Wisconsin. We'd visited and taken the tour before, almost 10 years ago, but I was sure Lilly didn't remember and even more sure about Ann, who was in utero at the time.

I didn't mind going again. Once in a lifetime's not quite enough when it comes to seeing the world's largest refracting telescope, a 40-inch marvel. I learned this time around, or maybe relearned, that every part of the telescope except its lens had been displayed in the Manufacturers Building at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 before it was installed at the new Yerkes Observatory. So not only can you stand under an important telescope in the history of astronomy, it's an artifact of the Chicago world's fair. No doubt fairgoers appreciated it as a marvel of the age.

The guided tour was fairly short. The guide first talked about the design of the observatory, which was the work of Henry Ives Cobb. According to the University of Chicago, Cobb "was fond of ornamentation rooted in classic mythology. At Yerkes, he let his imagination roam: everywhere in the structure, both inside and out, the viewer finds hundreds of ornate, often playful representations of animals real and fanciful, signs of the Zodiac, phases of the Moon, and many other embellishments."

Such embellishments included swastikas, which the guide commented on. "We had them before the Nazis," he said, pointing them out with his laser pointer. The ones at Yerkes were non-Nazi anyway, pointing the other direction and featuring a square at the center, which is a variation I'd never seen before.

Later, I wandered around the grounds for a few minutes, and managed to take some shots of Yerkes' penile main dome in its park-like setting.

Under the big unheated dome -- Saturday was in the 50s, so it was cool in there -- is the 40-inch telescope, one of six at the observatory, and the only one seen on the Saturday tours. The guide told us a little more about the instrument, and moved it a little. He also raised the floor a few feet, and told us of the time Albert Einstein visited the observatory in 1921, passing around a photo that commemorated the visit.

The photo of Dr. Einstein and the Yerkes staff is at the bottom of this National Park Service page; the one looking Einsteinian is, in fact, the great physicist. I didn't think to ask the guide what Einstein was doing there, but from what I read later, the observatory was doing followups to Sir Arthur Eddington's observations of starlight bending around the Sun during the May 29, 1919, eclipse that confirmed general relativity, though the details of what Yerkes would do as a followup are beyond me.

Einstein is one thing, but he was only passing through. E.E. Barnard, an astronomer who worked at Yerkes, ought to be better known. I've known about him since I read about Barnard's Star in junior high (in one of the 8mm movies I made with some other junior high friends, we imagined a spaceship journeying to Barnard's Star, I think).

Besides Barnard's study of the red dwarf that now has his name, he discovered the fifth moon of Jupiter and a lot of comets, determined that certain dark regions of the Milky Way were actually vast clouds of dust and gas, was a pioneering astrophotographer and -- I didn't know this until this weekend -- was from Nashville and attended Vanderbilt, later receiving the institution's one and only honorary degree. His name remains as Barnand Hall, one of the dorms off Alumni Lawn.

Pointing Out the Pointers

Early last week, Ann asked me to go outside with her and point out some stars. She'd been studying the sky in school. It was one of the clear but cold nights just before we actually got snow around here, but I was only too happy to oblige. The sky's not very dark in the suburbs, but dark enough for me to show her some basic items, including the way that the easy-to-identify Big Dipper and Cassiopeia appear to circle the North Star tightly.

After we went inside, she said down and drew this. Not for school, just because she wanted to.

Spot-on, except for the minor detail that the Pointers actually refer to Dubhe (α) and Merak (β) at the edge of the Big Dipper's bowl, not Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper itself. I showed her that when you draw a line from Merak to Dubhe and beyond, it will point to Polaris (without bothering with the stars' formal names; I never can remember which is which, anyway). It's unlikely that she'll ever forget how to find the North Star.

This evening the sky was layered with high thin clouds, but when I went out to the garage I could still see a thin-crescent setting Moon (new moon was yesterday), a bright Venus above that, and a less bright but still visible Jupiter high in the southern sky. I went inside and asked the girls to come look at the sky. Lilly didn't want to, citing the cold (only about freezing), but Ann went. The Moon, she said, looked like a smiley face.

The Cernan Earth and Space Center

Classic Northern November today. Gray, rainy, mostly leafless, though some yellows and reds are hanging on. Not too chilly, at least, and there was other good news from out there, beyond the clouds: the asteroid 2005 YU55 didn't actually hit the Earth.

On Sunday I took Lilly to the Cernan Earth and Space Center, a planetarium in west suburban River Grove, Illinois, named for the last (most recent) man on the Moon, and part of Triton College. It's a little far to go regularly, and it had been a while since we last went -- four or five years, though Lilly said she'd also gone there on an elementary school field trip.

The show, "Journey to the Stars," promised to be "a multimedia program that combines stars, video, panoramic scenes, planetarium special effects and numerous space images to describe what research astronomers now know about the birth and death of stars, how backyard stargazers can better understand the immense scale of the universe, and how humans have developed space probes and manned spacecraft to extend our reach into space."

The show promised, in other words, to cover a lot of ground. Or rather, cover a lot of space. So it did, with some narrative cohesion. That's my complaint about most of the planetarium shows I've seen as a adult. Lights go down, stars come out, and there's tons of neat stuff in space! This, that, and the other thing! I'm not sure what kind of thinking goes into writing like that, but it might be that since the show's for youth, any damn thing in any order will do, as long as there's enough light, noise and motion. A lot of cartoons seem to be created on the same principle.

"Journey to the Stars" was mostly familiar territory for me, but not as much for Lilly, which of course was the point of bringing her. Later I asked her what she hadn't heard before, and she said the prediction that the Sun was going to expand to a red giant in some billions of years and fry (or completely engulf) the Earth. The show offered that information in the context of the life cycle of stars, including stellar endgames, from supernovas or plain novas or mere expansions to collapses into dwarf stars or neutron stars or that famed bizarro celestial object, the black hole.

Naturally there was also some discussion of the Hubble Space Telescope, but no mention, not even in passing, of the other orbiting Great Observatories, the lost Compton (gamma rays), Chandra (x-rays) and Spitzer (infrared). Too bad. Individually and as an ensemble, they're marvels of the age.

Before the main event, the planetarium also showed the equivalent of a newsreel -- namely, what's in the sky in early November -- and a cartoon -- namely, a mini laser show, "Mini Pepper." The laser images danced around to three songs from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, mostly colorful Spirographic-like images, but sometimes laser-drawn representations of the lads in their day-glo band uniforms, except not day-glo but neon in outline. Interesting effects, but 10 minutes was about enough. I'm not sure I could have sat through a longer laser show, but then again I wasn't in a chemically enhanced frame of mind.

The Cernan web site -- which doesn't address the issue of chemical enhancement -- says that its equipment is "a Voyager V-17OWC laser projection system [that is] is one of the most advanced domed theater visual projection display systems in the world. Manufactured and installed by Aura Technologies Inc. of Chicago, Ill., this system represents the latest in state-of-the-art entertainment and educational laser display technology. The laser itself is a Color Pro krypton-argon water-cooled laser, which is capable of producing more than 18 quintillion color combinations, stunning special optical effects and dazzling aerial beam effects."

Tippecanoe and the Comet Too

Today is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Tippecanoe, so naturally I poked around a little and found out about other things. I have a knack for tangential learning.

Also 200 years ago, the people of the world were treated to the Great Comet of 1811 -- and presumably both sides at Tippecanoe saw it overhead. The Comet Primer says, "One of the largest comets in history was the Great Comet of 1811. It was one of the few comets in history to be discovered with a relatively small telescope at an unusually great distance from the Sun, in this case over half-way to the planet Jupiter's orbit. The nucleus has been estimated as between 30 and 40 kilometers in diameter. At one point during September to October 1811, the coma reached a diameter roughly equivalent to the diameter of the Sun and was a very notable naked-eye object seen by people around the world."

We need one like that to liven up the sky again in our time. After all, it's been a while since Hale-Bopp, and the 1811 comet sounds brighter yet (even though Hale-Bopp was bright enough to see within the city of Chicago). A new comet might help make up for the visual disappointments of the most recent Halley's and Kohoutek before that. Even better would be the entertainment provided by those who see the end of the world in such an event -- and there would be such people. Along with others to help them prepare for the end of the world, for a small fee.

The fine radio program Stardate did a two-parter about the Comet of 1811 recently. This is Part One and Part Two of the program, in transcript and podcast form.

Dog Day Songs

Time to knock off posting for a while. The Dog Days are here, after all. I'll pick it up again around August 21 -- probably still doggish, but much closer to the top of the long slide down into ice and snow.

Sirius is high, so we get Dog Days. Or so goes the learned explanation. But there's some charm in thinking that this is time when dogs lie around even more than they usually do, because the weather's so steamy hot. Not that we can see the Dog Star at the moment, so cloudy has it been lately. But I know it's there.

Here's a version of "Summertime" you don't hear much any more. But fitting for the weeks when Sirius is riding high.

Link for Facebook readers.

And what would summertime be with the Flying Lizards' cover of "Summertime Blues"? Pretty much the same, since the song's an acquired taste, and if you haven't acquired it by now, it's probably too late.

Link for Facebook readers.

Finally, what would we do without the Internet? How would we learn about lightweight one-hit British pop songs of previous generations, such as the borderline novelty "Luton Airport"?

Link for Facebook readers.

Best not to think too much about the song. But talk about peculiar. She was in Majorca for what, two weeks of vigorously shagging the bloke? And he didn't mention once that he was an airline pilot?

Item From the Past: The Eclipse of July 20, 1963

I found this picture in a box of mostly '50s and early '60s black-and-white images at my mother's house last year.

I'm the one sitting on the stairs to the left, the smallest boy in the picture, wearing only shorts. It gets pretty hot in North Texas during the summer, after all. I was a little younger then, just two years old, because according to the information on the back of the print, the photo was taken by my father on July 20, 1963.

The date is significant because there was a solar eclipse visible from much of North America that day -- a partial eclipse from our vantage. According to my brother Jay, 11 at the time and holding a camera in the picture, it was a highly publicized event. Naturally I have no memory of it.

This NASA map shows that totality was visible mostly in Canada, but also in parts of Alaska and Maine. Curiously, the eclipse figures in "Seven Twenty Three," a third-season episode of Mad Men. When Don Draper's daughter and some other school kids are out looking at the eclipse through camera obscuras that a teacher, the fetching Miss Farrell, helps them make, it's a chance for Don to eye Miss Farrell more closely than the eclipse.

Fictional characters weren't the only ones using camera obscuras that day, it seems.

I've experienced a couple of partial solar eclipses that I do remember: one on March 7, 1970 and another on May 30, 1984. In 1970, I made my own camera obscura, which worked well enough even though the day was partly cloudy in San Antonio. Before I went inside, I had to see the thing with my own eyes, despite being warned ad nauseam against it. I glanced upward for an instant and my timing was perfect. I saw the bright disk of the Sun, the dark disk of the Moon, and clouds rolling past them, all in a fraction of a second. No harm done.

In 1984, North America experienced an annular eclipse. I worked part time as a proofreader for a publisher in Nashville in those days, and all of us in the proofreading ghetto noticed a distinct dimming of the daylight. We were in a single-story office building, so we spilled out into the parking lot for a few minutes. The sky was clear and this time I didn't look at the solar or lunar disks. But I didn't need to for the full experience. It was the strangest daylight I've ever seen, as if a dimmer switch had been turning down the Sun.

A Neptunian Year

The heat's still on here at my little corner of the Earth, but not as much as in Texas, sources tell me. We're lucky that we didn't lose power Monday morning when a fast-moving storm blew through, as many thousands in metro Chicago did. The storm woke me up around dawn, but didn't seem all that vicious. Guess that was a mistake on my part. My head's pretty foggy in those circumstances.

Wired UK reported that today marks 164.79 years since the discovery of Neptune by Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d'Arrest in 1846. Interesting because 164.79 Earth years is the orbital period of Neptune.

I'm not energetic enough to figure out the exact day when that maligned planet Pluto will mark one Plutoian year since Clyde Tombaugh discovered it, but I know it will be sometime around the year 2178 (1930 + 248). Maybe by then mankind will have that pesky "what's a planet?" question all sorted out.

CCC Shelter, Lockport

How good of Google to remind us yesterday of a lunar eclipse than could not be seen from North America. But Google is an international company, so it makes sense, and it was a fine doodle. At about 9:30 last night, a full Illinois moon emerged from cloud cover, and it was a fine moon. But ordinary bright white. I'll try to catch the December 2011 lunar eclipse, but something tells me that will mean getting out of bed during the wee hours of a winter night, rather than standing in the warm air and green grass of a June evening.

A web site called Civilian Conservation Corps Legacy tells us that "today citizens still drive on roadways built by the men of the CCC. Vast expanses of public land are connected through scenic byways and fire trails. Lodges, cabins, picnic pavilions, and many other recreational structures still stand as a testament to the craftsmanship and design of the CCC program. One of the most recognizable examples of a scenic road in the central eastern United States is the Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah National Park."

That, and that the men of the CCC planted nearly 3 billion trees, built the infrastructure of 800 or so state parks, fought fires, operated fish hatcheries and did other things. Besides remitting $25 in fat 1930s dollars every month to their families, who presumably needed it. Looking around more, and I found this newsreel clip.

The CCC comes to mind because as we strolled along the I&M Canal in Lockport, I saw this structure across the canal and across the street paralleling the canal (fittingly, Canal Street).

Though on the other side of the canal, it was easily accessible by footbridge. Ann and I went over for a closer look. It's in reasonably good shape, though some of the stonework is worn, and clearly people have been ignoring a NO FIRES sign on the building, since the fireplace inside had been used not too long ago.

Quasi-Spring Break

Not a bad spring break, if you could call it that, since temps hovered down toward the freezing end of the thermometer most days, with the bonus of cold rain several times and a light snow at least twice. The equinox has come and gone, and so has the new year's day of March 25. Orion tilts toward the southwest in the evening, and there are more birds around that before. But all those things don't quite add up to spring, which won't be till I can sit on my deck and read.

Missed the perigee full moon on the March 19. "The biggest moon in 18 years," said National Geographic on its web site. I'm sure it was up there somewhere over northeastern Illinois, but an overcast sky denied me the sight.

Last Thursday afternoon I went downtown with Ann. At Dearborn and Adams at about 5:45, we passed by a small demonstration. Why they were at that particular location, I couldn't say. Ann was eager to keep going, so I barely had a moment to document the scene, taking this shot from across the street and on the flip side of a banner that said "Stop the War on Libya Now!" Almost the entire group is in the image, plus a handful of passersby.

The building in the background is the 1.5 million-square-foot Citadel Center. I inadvertently captured an image of its copy of the Winged Victory (Nike) of Samothrace in the lobby -- the golden shape in the upper right.

Last week I also learned that Utah now has an official state firearm, the Browning M1911 semiautomatic pistol, along with a state tree, animal, fish and cooking pot (the Dutch oven). I'm glad the Utah legislature was able to take time out to tackle that subject. It reminded of a graffito I saw in a bathroom in the early '80s in Logan, Utah. "Don't sing in the shower," it said. "Utah shoots john singers."

Nuclear Notes

Time, I figure, to reacquaint myself with other nuclear accidents. Back when I took a seminar about the Manhattan Project, that subject was an appendix to my studies. That was so long ago that Chernobyl hadn't happened yet, and previous Soviet nuclear accidents were mostly still secret, such as the one at the Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant near the city of Kyshtym in 1957, when tons of nuclear waste overheated and apparently caused a non-nuclear explosion that released radiation in an amount second only to Chernobyl.

Chernobyl might have remained secret longer but for how far the radiation blew. Word got out, of course. The first I heard of it was at a little store, and post office substation, in the first floor of the building in Nashville where I worked at the time. The proprietor, a bearded, chatty fellow, told me that "a nuclear power plant blew up in Russia." Unlike the Challenger accident a few months earlier, I don't remember that we huddled around our small workplace black-and-white TV that day to find out more, and looking up information on line wasn't an option.

I haven't had time to make it all the way through "Meltdown in Chernobyl," an episode of the excellent series Seconds From Disaster, but what I've seen so far is good.

The Windscale fire of 1957 -- clearly a bad year for nukes -- is an incident that ought to be better known. Maybe it is in Britain, but not here. In those days, the British were eager to make plutonium and tritium for an assortment of nuclear weapons, and let's just say that corners were cut. I'm not any kind of expert on nuclear energy, but even I'm astonished that Windscale featured an air-cooled reactor. With a chimney. The accident involved a massive fire in the reactor and clouds of radiation going up and out through the chimney. It seems that the crew narrowly averted a much larger disaster.

The gruesome SL-1 accident in early 1961 in Idaho inspires morbid fascination. I might be misremembering, but I first saw it mentioned on a calendar I had at some point in the mid-70s (published by National Lampoon?). The theme of the calendar was something bad every day, and the January 3rd entry mentioned that three men had died in a nuclear accident that day, but details were sparse, it being a calendar.

"Three workers were reassembling the control rod drives on 3 January in preparation for startup the following day," notes a site called Johnston's Archive, which is maintained by a physicist. "At about 9:01 PM the three workers were on top of the reactor when one manually removed the center control rod as rapidly as possible, over a 0.5-second period. The reactor became supercritical... producing a steam explosion. The worker who extracted the rod was killed instantly, impaled on the building's ceiling by a control rod... [One] hypothesis is that the rod was intentionally withdrawn in an act of murder-suicide; this was the conclusion of the investigation of the incident."

So as not to end on such a glum note, here's an amusement from Johnston's Archive, "A TEXAN definition of a planet." Or maybe he's serious. But I'm amused.

Solstice Silence

A lunar eclipse is set to happen on the solstice, I hear; from about 12:30 to 4 a.m. Central tomorrow. NASA says: "If you're planning to dash out for only one quick look --­ it is December, after all -- choose this moment: 03:17 am EST [2:17 for me]. That's when the Moon will be in deepest shadow, displaying the most fantastic shades of coppery red." (I'm glad the agency capitalizes Moon.)

Trouble is, it's snowing heavily where I am, and isn't expected to clear up anytime soon. Rising from bed in the wee hours in December is a hard sell in any case, but a no-show coppery red Moon puts the kibosh on the whole deal. I will sleep through this common yet rarely timed event.

"A lunar eclipse smack-dab on the date of the solstice... is unusual," continues NASA. "Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory inspected a list of eclipses going back 2000 years. 'Since Year 1, I can only find one previous instance of an eclipse matching the same calendar date as the solstice, and that is 1638 DEC 21,' says Chester. 'Fortunately we won't have to wait 372 years for the next one... that will be on 2094 DEC 21.' " (And how did he say "DEC" in all caps like that? December 21! he screamed.)

So it goes. The Moon was lovely yesterday, lording over a clear sky that also sported the winter hunter Orion. A few hours ago, I went out on the snow and listened. During a heavy snow -- not after, when the roads are being plowed, but right in the thick of it -- is the quietest time these suburbs of millions. There's still a faint bit of road noise, but not much, and muffled airplanes course by sometimes. That's about all. It was so quiet this evening out in my back yard that I could hear the snowflakes hitting my coat. It was like the sound of wax paper being slowly crumbled in another room.

Tannenbaum '10

It's a cold, snowy night in mid-December. The kind of night when one's thoughts naturally turn to that coldest of planets, Pluto. Provided there's an interesting discussion about its planetary status within easy reach, that is.

Closer to home, I'm glad we got a little snow, enough to cover the roof again. I'm pretty sure that helps the house keep its heat.

Our Christmas tree went up on Saturday, but because it was raining when we bought it, I insisted that we let it dry out until Sunday before decorating it. Amazingly, the girls didn't complain about that plan. On Sunday, they were all over the task, leaving only the lights and the star on top to me.

We have two stars that could be on the top: a gaudy, multicolored electric light star that plugs in, or a golden-colored hard plastic star with an elongated point on top that looks exactly like the star that went on top of our tree when I was growing up, at least in shape. My childhood star, older than I am, was silver instead of gold.

At some point about 10 years ago, back when I started putting up Christmas trees again, I acquired the golden star somewhere, and no fancy electric rainbow star is going to muscle it out of the top spot. But the girls wanted the more colorful star somewhere near the top, so now it sits a few inches below the golden star. Like Pluto, its status will not change in this house if I can help it.

Slate-Gray November

The weekend was classic November: slate-gray skies, intermittent rain, cold wind, mostly bare trees. A thin sheet of ice formed on the windshield and windows of both cars in wee hours this morning, only to melt later under the feeble November sun. The slate-gray was gone today, replaced by November blue.

I wondered about that color, "slate gray." Is it really descriptive for days like Saturday and Sunday? So I looked into it and decided that it's close enough, especially if there's no need to be literal. I also found this table called "shades of gray," which also happens to be the cliché used when talking about nuance. Are all those colors really part of the gray clan? "Glaucous" seems blue-like to me, and the various "taupes," except for taupe gray, seem more aligned with brown.

But it is Wiki, after all. Take your glaucous and taupe with salt.

Around sunset on Friday, I noticed something new up in the branches of our back-yard honey locust: a nest. The last of the leaves finally fell only a week or so ago, exposing it. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there last year, so some birds moved in during the spring. Or maybe squirrels. Now I need to figure out a way to charge them rent next year. Trouble is, birds might want to pay in earthworms, and squirrels in nuts.

I took a picture of the nest on a whim, and caught the waxing moon too. Invisible to us under the clouds, it was half full the next day, and is headed for full on the 21st. The Farmers' Almanac quaintly claims November's full moon is the Beaver Moon, and maybe it was in 1818. In our time, the Almanac ought to consider selling naming rights to the full moons (or would that be the prerogative of the International Astronomical Union?). November, for instance, could be the Walmart Moon, in honor of the beginning of the holiday shopping season.

Shine On Harvest Moon, Provided It Isn't Cloudy

I forgot about the "super harvest moon" on Wednesday, but I figured this evening was close enough. All I saw here in northeastern Illinois when I went out to look at about 9:30 CDT this evening was the fuzzy orb shining behind a layer of clouds. An intense wind blew at the same moment, foretelling rain.

In fact, it was windy all day. I went out to my deck for lunch, since we aren't going to have many (any?) more 80° F-plus days this year, that is for the next six months at least, so I wanted to savor the moment. The moment was nearly blown away, however, along with my napkins.

I'm pretty sure I linked to this clip a few years ago, but of course that link went the way of all YouTube clips. Someone has put it back. But I didn't link to this, which I should have, since it's a lovely song.

Cathedral Park & the Bishop Jones Center

It's been a run of clear, very warm days during declining summer this year, but cool nights. Meaning that Lilly and Ann weren't dressed for it on Saturday evening when we went to Spring Valley Nature Center to look through an amateur astronomer's fine telescope. So there was a fair amount of complaining about being cold while we walked to the viewing area. But it was worth it in the end, at least for me, since we saw the Ring Nebula (M57), which I'd never seen before outside of photos.

The colorful ring in photos isn't what you see through a small telescope. Instead, the lens reveals a wispy smoke ring among the solid background stars.

During the afternoon of the last day of 1977, some four or five friends and I gathered at a house on Patterson Ave. in Alamo Heights, where one of our group lived, to begin celebrating the new year. It might have been the end of December, but the day was pleasant, and so we took a short walk down Patterson to where it meets Torcido Ave. Ellen, the girl who lived on Patterson, told us this was the way to Cathedral Park.

The property is fenced in, so the gate must have been open that day. We repaired to a large patch of land at the foot of a large hill, in view of some buildings up on the hill that were partly obscured by trees. We sat under a copse of trees at the base of the hill, next to a small, rocky stream, and talked about whatever we talked about. I remember that it was warm enough to dip our bare feet in the water (a cold front in the early hours of 1978 brought more seasonably cold weather).

When it's flowing, that stream must be one created by the Edwards Aquifer that feeds Olmos Creek, which, together with the Blue Hole on the campus of the University of the Incarnate Word, form the headwaters of the San Antonio River. I didn't know any of that 32-plus years ago. Or exactly what was up on the hill, though I did look up and wonder about it out loud. Ellen said the park belonged to the Episcopal Church, but I don't remember any mention of the Bishop Jones Center. Turns out, that's what was atop the hill.

On August 18, 2010, I spent time looking around the Bishop Jones Center and its 19-acre grounds, unexpectedly answering the question about the place that I asked years ago, but had long forgotten asking.

The web site of the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas has a paragraph's worth of information about the Bishop Jones Center: "In 1962, the bishop of the diocese and his staff moved... to the spacious new Cathedral Park in Alamo Heights. Already on the property, when it was given by the Kamko Foundation, was the lovely and quaint 'pink house.' Cathedral Park rapidly became a location of worship, rest and refreshment for the people of the diocese and community neighbors. Today, the Bishop Jones Center -- which comprises Cathedral House, Chapel House, and Cathedral Park -- is home to the diocesan bishop and his staff and continues to be a gathering place for the diocese."

During my recent visit, I drove my mother to the center late in the morning and while she did what she had to do as a volunteer for the Episcopal Church, I took a look at the chapel and meeting center, done in a charming Spanish Colonial Revival style inside and out, and set in a lush landscape all around the hill that sports enormous old trees, plantings at short intervals and thick grass. Stone-surfaced trails wind through the grounds and also lead to a columbarium built into the hillside. The columbarium must be fairly new, since I counted only about 20 permanent residents, with space for many more.

Though I took a few pictures, the photo collection of this fellow, who obviously works (or worked) at the Bishop Jones Center, provides a much more complete look at this gorgeous property.

Some stairs lead down the hill in one direction, to Patterson Ave. In another direction, the hill slopes down without the benefit of stairs, or many trees or much grass either. I went down the hill at that point, reaching a small group of trees surrounding a dry, rocky stream bed. I couldn't remember whether this was the spot we visited all those years ago, but I figured it could have been. Then I turned around and looked up the hill -- and that jogged my memory. Whoosh. For an instant three decades and then some vanished. This was the same place, absolutely.