Outdoors
Monday, January 4, 2021
North Coast Night Lights: Conjunction - Saturn Overtakes Jupiter
Posted By David Wilson on Mon, Jan 4, 2021 at 11:59 AM
Racing around the sun like slot cars on an elliptical track, Earth was on an inside line and coming around fast. Jupiter and Saturn were in view ahead. Jupiter was taking a much wider line and Saturn was lazily rounding the bend still farther out. Earth would overtake them. Again. The race has been on for billions of years, and Earth never tires of lapping her bigger sisters. This time it appeared she would lap them both at the same time and, for a moment Earth, Jupiter and Saturn would line up in cosmic formation.
Or close enough. It is called a great conjunction when Jupiter and Saturn align closely as seen from Earth. This happens fairly frequently, about every 20 years. But rarely do the two great gas giants appear in such close proximity to each other as they did for us on Dec. 21, 2020: it had been almost 800 years since they last appeared this close together in the night sky. About 400 years ago, the two planets aligned this closely, but they were too near the sun to see. Chalk up something good for the year 2020.
Monday, December 14, 2020
Over the Rainbow: A North Coast Fantasy
Posted By David Wilson on Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 12:22 PM
I’ve been tripping around in the night light of California’s far North Coast for some time now. A lot of nighttime visions have piled up from many late outings, cold nights and wee early mornings. Yet for all of that, this week I had nothing brand new. So the other night I found myself shuffling through the pile on the computer, sorting them, sticking both hands in and pushing them around like a pile of playing cards, trying to find something. I stacked them up, switched them around, built figurative little houses and structures of cards … Nothing, no visions formed. I went to bed.
That night as I slept, I heard the soft slip-slap as my little village of card houses collapsed. No matter, nothing had come of it, and I slept on. But visions of the cards persisted, swirling in my head as I dreamed.
Monday, September 21, 2020
North Coast Night Lights: Visualize the Stars
Posted By David Wilson on Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 4:28 PM
“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need — roads.” - Doc, Back to the Future II.
One of the more challenging visualizations for me is to imagine looking at the Solar System from a point above it in outer space, far enough out that the Sun is but a bright point of light below. With no inhibiting sunlight, the stars are bright all around us; we see deep into the Cosmos wherever we turn. The Milky Way’s misty path forms an incredible ring encircling us completely, from its thick, dense core region in one direction to the thinnest stretches on our opposite side.
Suspended above the Solar System, there is no day or night for us, and time can almost stand still as we hang here in space. But there is movement around the little Sun below us, and where there is movement, there must be time.
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Perseid Meteors 2020: A comet’s tale
Posted By David Wilson on Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 11:02 AM
Currently speeding out from the sun after its last visit to the solar system’s inner reaches in 1992, Comet Swift-Tuttle leaves a trail of debris in its path. Comets are made of frozen gasses, dust and rock; as the sun’s energy warms and sublimates the frozen gasses, some of its solids are blown off into space, leaving the trail of particles. (See the time-lapse video below.)
Every 133 years, Swift-Tuttle comes in from out beyond Pluto to swing by Earth’s neighborhood on its path around the sun, laying down another swath of dust and small particles before heading back out again. Earth passes through its stream of cometary dust every year in early to mid August. As we pass through the trail of dust and small chunks, we collect them in our atmosphere like bugs on a windshield. The particles, or meteoroids, enter the atmosphere at incredibly high speeds (over 100,000 miles per hour) and burn up quickly due to friction with the air. The meteors we see in the sky are their paths burning through the sky.
