Apollo on the Hornet

EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY! Just in time for the anniversary of Apollo 11, the USS Hornet - Sea, Air and Space Museum has posted never-before-seen home movies of the Hornet's recovery of Apollo 11! The film is from museum volunteer Joe Holt, who in 1969 was a Marine sergeant stationed aboard the Hornet. 

Nobody but Mr. Holt and his family have EVER seen this footage! The first half shows the recovery of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins and their spacecraft, Columbia, with glimpses of the astronauts inside the Mobile Quarantine Facility (a tricked-out Airstream trailer) and President Richard Nixon. The second half shows the crowd that welcomed the Hornet to Pearl Harbor where they offloaded the MQF, and then quite a survey of other Naval ships in port at the time.

I think eyewitness records like this offer a whole different perspective on historic events from people who played a role in them. Many thanks to Mr. Holt for sharing it with the world.

These Are the Days of Miracles and Wonder

Too many media are casting this as a cutesy story about "googly eyes" on Mars. What it really is is freakin' amazing: video of a Martian solar eclipse as Mars's moon Phobos glides between the planet and the Sun, seen by the rover Perseverance.

Think about what's happening here: a robot that we sent to Mars in 2020, which is still rolling around and exploring nearly four years after it landed, looked up into the sky and watched an alien moon eclipse an alien world, then beamed those images tens of millions of miles to Earth.

Just mull on that for a moment instead of scrolling to the next meme. Let it take your breath away. What a time of wonders we take for granted. 

The Occult

Photo by Ethan Chappel, used with permission because asking is the right thing to do.

Last night the Moon glided between Earth and Mars, an event called an "occultation." Lunar occultations of planets are kind of rare but not really significant, except as a reminder of what my astronomer friend Sherwood called the "beautiful, graceful minuet they've been practicing for billions of years." I have thoughts.

My neighbor Mari took these photos before and after the occultation, with a regular camera. Mars is the speck at lower left (left) and upper right (right).

Photos by Mari Haber

I was trying to explain the Moon's motion to Mari's husband Ron, and said something like, "The Moon actually moves from right to left (west to east), and it's going to pass Mars pretty fast." It occurred to me later how confusing that is, because the Moon obviously rises in the east and sets in the west (left to right in the Northern Hemisphere), just like the Sun and stars, so how can it also move from west to east?

It does both at the same time.

Because Earth spins once a day, everything rises in the east and sets in the west. But on a slower time scale, from day to day or week to week, the Moon and outer planets meander in the opposite direction, from west to east (the word "planet" means "wanderer")*. 

The Moon's motion is actually incredibly complex. Since its orbit isn't a perfect circle, from our point of view the Moon gets slightly larger and smaller, and moves slightly faster and slower, over time. Its orbit is also tilted with respect to Earth, so from month to month it bobs north or south, similar to how the Sun moves higher or lower from season to season.

All these different motions--wheels within wheels within wheels--repeat in a 19-year rhythm called the Metonic cycle (or the slightly more accurate 76-year Callippic cycle). Whatever spot and phase the Moon is in today, it'll be in that exact same spot and phase 19 years from today. Ancient astronomers knew all about it. The Babylonians, Hebrews, Celts, and perhaps Polynesians all built calendars around it. 

The Metonic cycle depicted in a 9th century manuscript from St. Emmeram's Abbey in Bavaria.

Here I'm approaching something like my point: marvel at how smart they were! Ancient astronomers didn't have Newtonian physics or what we'd call modern scientific discipline, but they were careful and brilliant observers. A civilization that can watch, track, document, and mathematically express the motions of lights in the sky over decades is working at a very high level. It was somebody's job to do that, and probably one they passed down to generations of apprentices because some celestial cycles last longer than one astronomer's lifetime.

Never underestimate the intelligence of ancient peoples. They had the same physical brains, the same cleverness and insight and genius, that we do. They had their Newtons and Einsteins. Could you observe the Moon every day for 19 years and discover the Metonic cycle? I couldn't. But people did, thousands of years ago, in many cultures independently throughout the world.

The Metonic cycle is an example of why I hate any ideas of "ancient astronauts"--for example, that the Egyptian pyramids are too perfect and complex to have been built without the help of aliens. Baloney. We are very clever apes who excel at finding patterns. We use language, writing, and mathematics to describe the patterns to others, who can then build on them. What an insult to all those ancient geniuses to claim they were too stupid to do it without outside help.

Related: here's a page from a book-length science comic I was working on before my 2017 fire destroyed my research and documentation for it. We hadn't come up with a title yet, but the working title in my head was Don't Be A Dumbass. I think the project is dead, and some of it is already obsolete anyway, but don't be surprised to see bits and pieces of it float up in my stuff from time to time.

* Footnote: Yes, I know about retrograde motion. Go soak yer head.

Space, the VR Frontier

 

My daughters treated me to an extraordinary experience yesterday. "Space Explorers: The Infinite" is a pop-up virtual reality trip to the International Space Station that, as far as I can tell, is only available in Richmond, California through the end of November (a previous installation in Tacoma is over). I've wanted to be an astronaut my entire life. This is as close as I will get.

The front door.

Wearing VR headsets, you and your party walk into a room the size of a basketball court with about 20 other people. But of course it doesn't look like that to you--as far as you can tell, you're floating through space into a kind of translucent CGI model of the ISS. Your own body sparkles like you're beaming up to the Enterprise. You can walk through the ISS layout while other visitors fade in and out around you as glowing avatars. That's all well and good, and kind of what I expected. Fine, fun, neat.

Heading in. It was not crowded yesterday.

But the experience gets dialed up to infinity (and beyond!) when you touch one of the many glowing orbs floating through the model. Suddenly you're aboard the actual ISS, standing right beside real astronauts doing tasks, greeting newly arriving colleagues, getting a haircut, throwing a football. SpaceX sent VR cameras to the ISS in 2019 to get this immersive footage. It's amazing. Breathtaking.

I can't emphasize this enough: YOU ARE THERE. IN SPACE. Full-scale 3-D, 360 degrees around. Floating weightlessly beside real astronauts who are the same size as you. You look up, the space station modules extend for dozens of meters away. You look down, another corridor stretches beneath your feet. 

That's what really got me: the SCALE of the thing. I know the dimensions of the ISS, but to be inside these modules that each feels about as big as a railroad freight car or a transit bus, was stunning. It's the difference between knowing and experiencing.

A good overview of how the experience is laid out.

Better: toward the end, you're directed to a chair for more VR, and I think the reason they need you to sit down is that most people would find floating freely in open space so disorienting they'd flop to the floor like a carp. You look to your left, and an astronaut opens the ISS cupola windows to peer out at you. You look up, and two astronauts back slowly out of a hatch to do a spacewalk. You look down, left, right, and the disk of the Earth covers nearly half the universe as you fly over Italy and across the Mediterranean. The ISS is an enormous, complex machine stretching away in every direction around you, and YOU ARE THERE.

I confess, I may have shed a tear inside my VR kit. It moved me. I could've spent an hour just flying over the Earth like Superman.

The whole thing takes 35-40 minutes to go through. I see that an adult ticket costs $44 (less for children and students). It's worth it. In addition, there are more floating orbs than anyone could touch in one visit, so everyone gets a different experience and I'm sure repeat visits would be different every time.

I don't know if other versions of this are or will be available elsewhere. They must be. If you're a space nut who gets the opportunity, take it. I can't promise it'll change your life, but you'll never forget it.

First Light

I realize nobody's clamoring for a graphic novelist's take on the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Nevertheless.... I was also a physics major and science writer and amateur astronomer, and wanted to offer a straight take on why this is damn cool.

First, JWST is simply the best telescope in history, and sees farther--and therefore further back in time--than any scope ever has. Hubble couldn't get this view.

Second, JWST operates in infrared, the invisible redder-than-red wavelengths humans can't see. Earth's atmosphere is especially good at blocking infrared--hence global warming--so, except for a few smaller space telescopes, we've never really seen the universe in these colors before (the colors in the image are false colors made to look approximately how we'd see them if we could see them). That alone opens up a whole new universe to us.

Third, everything in this image, except the bright stars with six spikes, is a galaxy formed shortly after the Big Bang. (The stars have six spikes because JWST is made of hexagonal mirrors!). 

You've noticed that some of the galaxies look curved and stretched, arcing around the center of the image. That's gravitational lensing. The little galaxies are so far away that their light is bent by the gravity of other galaxies between them and us. The in-between gravity distorts their images like a funhouse mirror. In fact, it's possible that one distant galaxy is responsible for multiple distorted galaxy images as its light is bent in different directions on its way to us. That's something astronomers will be looking for: are two or three or four of those smears actually pictures of the same galaxy?

There's no intuitive reason that gravity should bend a beam of light. Light--a photon--has no mass, and only objects with mass attract each other gravitationally. But Einstein's General Theory of Relativity says that gravity bends SPACE. Not light, but the space that light travels through. In a strong enough gravity field, the shortest distance between two points isn't a line, it's a curve. 

So this image is a couple of things: it's proof (yet again) that Einstein was right. And it's an actual, honest-to-goodness photo of a space warp. 

There've been many other photos of gravitational lensing; this isn't a first. But it's the prettiest, cleanest, clearest one I've seen, and the SCALE of this photo is stunning. The farthest galaxies are just about as far away as it's theoretically possible for us to see, while the galaxies whose gravity is warping space are somewhere between that frontier and our little telescope, a mere million miles out, bobbing on the far side of the Moon.

And here's a high-res version from NASA!

Splashdown!

The aircraft carrier USS Hornet was built during World War II, served in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and recovered Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 from the South Pacific in 1969 before being decommissioned in 1970. She spent a couple of decades in mothballs before becoming a National Landmark and museum now floating in San Francisco Bay at the Alameda pier. As my six regular readers know, my daughter Laura is on the museum staff, and I never tire of telling people that my little girl has the keys to an aircraft carrier.

I think Laura had something to do with me being invited to speak and sign copies of Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow at last Saturday's "Splashdown 45" event, marking the 45th anniversary of the flight of Apollo 11. But it wasn't entirely nepotism; I believe that at least some Hornet board members independently knew about my book. Still, I think I owe the kid a lot.

Did I mention that the star of "Splashdown 45" was Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin?

That was sufficient motive to rise at the crack of dawn Saturday and leave Comic-Con for a flight to the Bay Area.

Got there on time, thanks to my daughter Robin's airport shuttle service.
Same clothes I wore at Comic-Con; I travel light.

The Hornet is a huge ship that usually swallows crowds with ease, but I've never seen it as packed as it was Saturday. I was talking with the museum CEO and he guessed more than 3500 attended. Buzz Aldrin was scheduled to speak on the big main stage in the Hangar Deck at 1:00. I was slated for the same stage at 11:30, asked to talk on the topic of Space Art and Illustration.

I widened that mandate to include a lot of the themes I worked into WHTTWOT: mainly the idea that the stories we tell about ourselves and our future are as important in shaping that future as the hardware we build. "Beat the Commies to the Moon" is as much an aspirational narrative as "Boldly go where no man has gone before." I focused mostly on art and illustration but also ventured into movies, TV, literature, and tried to tie them all together.

So I took the big stage and gave a 35- or 40-minute talk that in 162 fast-paced slides managed to name-check Galileo, Hevelius, Cassini, Maria Clara Eimmart, John W. Draper (who took the first photograph of the Moon), Gustav Dore, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Angus MacDonall, Scriven Bolton, Lucien Rudaux, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Frank Paul, Will Eisner, Wally Wood, Frank Frazetta, George Melies, Fritz Lang, George Pal, Chesley Bonestell (of course!), Wernher Von Braun, Walt Disney, Charles Schulz, Robert McCall, Ludek Pesek, Don Dixon, William Hartmann, and more.

Just reeling off names like that makes it looks like a random laundry list, but I think I was able to build a theme and make a point that people seemed to get and appreciate. The Hangar Deck was set up with several hundred chairs facing the stage, and projection screens and speakers hanging half the length of the deck. It was obviously rigged that way so that everyone throughout the ship could see and hear Buzz Aldrin, but it worked to my advantage as well!

At the Hornet's book sales tent. One of these things is not like the other. They had about 1000 of Aldrin's books and 50 of mine, plus maybe another dozen in the museum gift shop. I'm very happy with that ratio.

Blah blah blah blah. Why won't this guy shut up? We Want Buzz!

Pulling back a bit, my wife Karen took this shot from the first row of seats. The podium was not initially set up with a monitor for me to see my own slides, which would have been disastrous because a lot of my talk relied on a rapid-fire "bang bang bang" clicking through the pictures. The speaker before me resorted to standing at the back of the stage and watching the rear projection on the big screen. I griped enough to the audio-video team that before I spoke they rewired one of Buzz Aldrin's teleprompters to show me my slides instead. Saved the day. Hope they remembered to re-rewire it for Buzz.

Stepping farther back into the cavernous Hangar Bay to show one of the screens set up to broadcast presentations throughout the deck. There were three of these screens hanging from the ceiling. It's a big ship.

My view from the podium.

From the start I had a pretty big audience, which grew as my talk went on. For a little while I thought I must have been orating better than anyone had ever orated before: more and more people were coming to watch me! Slowly it dawned on me that no, they were just staking out good seats to see Aldrin, who was going on 45 minutes after I finished. Still, it also worked to my advantage. Captive audience or not, I was the only thing on the stage at that moment so they had no choice but to sit and listen.

After my talk I sat at a bank of tables with other speakers and presenters to sign books. That went splendidly! Not everyone who bought a book got it signed or even realized I was there, but I had a steady stream of really nice people come up to chat and get an inscription. Having just left Comic-Con, I couldn't help noticing that Space People are a lot like Comics People but generally brighter (no offense to Comics People but c'mon!).

My book signing set-up amidship.

From time to time I had a little line, but nothing unpleasant. People couldn't have been nicer.
That's my daughter Robin beside me. 

This whole family was terrific. Very enthusiastic about the book and posing for photos with its author.
That doesn't happen to me very often.

I think this guy was hired by the Hornet. I hope this guy was hired by the Hornet.

Aldrin was preceded by a short video highlighting the Apollo 11 mission. I was surprised. I've seen the same old footage so many times I thought I was relatively numb to it, but I got an honest-to-God lump in my throat and tears in my eyes watching that Saturn V blast off into the Florida sky. Man. Aldrin was introduced by astronaut Yvonne Cagle, with whom I once shared a pizza.

At 1 p.m., Buzz Aldrin took the stage. Topic One of every conversation the rest of the day: how does an 84-year-old man do it? He boarded the ship at 9 a.m., did press interviews for three hours, then gave a one-hour speech, then signed books for three hours, then appeared at a reception and dinner in his honor until probably 10 or 11 p.m. Could you do that? I couldn't do that. I guess once you have the Right Stuff, it never really goes away.

Buzz drew a bigger crowd than I did.

Buzz's talk touched on his Air Force and academic career before settling on Apollo 11. I'm sure he's told the same "magnificent desolation" stories 300,000 times before, but he tells them well. Then he segued to his current passion, drumming up popular support for manned exploration of Mars. I wouldn't presume to debate Aldrin on the wisdom of that, but will say that he makes his case convincingly and enthusiastically.

Buzz World
Preparing for "Splashdown," I jokingly told some people I'd be spending the day "hanging with Buzz Aldrin." In fact, one does not hang with Buzz Aldrin. He had a black-shirted security detail of about six persuasive men who kept the respectful mob at bay. He also had one handler whose main job was being the bad guy so Buzz didn't have to. No, you cannot have a private word with him. No, he will not shake your hand. No, he will not sign your photo.

Buzz's book signing was a rapid assembly-line process--necessarily, given the hundreds of people in line. I had no special access, just queued up with everyone else, wondering what I might say to the Great Man when I had the chance. What hasn't he already heard 30 million times before? What could I possibly say that he might chuckle at and remember at the end of the day? Maybe something smart and obscure, a question about orbital rendezvous (the subject of his Ph.D. thesis) or his Gemini 12 mission?

In the moment, I froze up tighter than little Ralphie meeting Santa Claus in "A Christmas Story."

Buzz Aldrin and me.

To be fair, I only had about two seconds to spin around for Karen to snap a photo and spit out my carefully crafted bon mot. I believe I said, "It's a great honor to meet you." He looked up and said, "Thank you." Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's still got that original insight rattling around his brain.

I should have asked him for a Red Ryder BB gun. 

After the day's main public event, Karen and I stayed for a VIP reception. Here, again, you get a unique perspective on spending time in the orbit of one of the most celebrated men in the world. Buzz came to the reception and seemed accessible--he was 10 feet away! Yet actual interaction with him was defined by invisible circles enforced by his polite but firm security team. Only certain people got inside the circles. I wasn't one of them.

Here's what I mean. It appears that I could just walk over to Buzz's table and share a nice drink with him. There he is! Right there! But if I'd taken one more step in his direction, a large man would've gently taken me by the elbow and steered me away.

This is no criticism of Aldrin. I'm sure it's what he has to do to manage the millions of people who "only want a minute of his time" and get through the day. I just found it a fascinating glimpse at what goes into being Buzz. It was impressive and a little sad. I imagine it gets very tiring.

As it was, this was a very special day for me. In addition to spending the day on the Hornet (always fun!) and making such a memorable impression on Buzz Aldrin, I think this was my most successful speaking/book-signing event ever. My talk went very well. The museum sold all of its WHTTWOTs, so that by the end of the day I was doing sketches for disappointed people who hadn't been able to buy my book. That never happens for me.

I opened my talk by saying that if I had a time machine and went back to tell 1969 Brian that someday he'd be standing in that spot, on that ship, speaking on the same stage that Buzz Aldrin would be taking in less than an hour, there's no way I could make him believe it. "Splashdown 45" pushed every emotional button I've cultivated for 45 years.

I was Buzz Aldrin's opening act. Lifetime achievement unlocked.

The Evening Star

Just wanted to share this lovely photo I found of the Evening Star following the setting Sun down behind a distant dusky mountain range. The star's about halfway up the sky, one-third of the way from the left side. See it?

I expect you're thinking that's a pretty picture but nothing remarkable. You've probably seen a thousand sunsets like that yourself.

How mischievous of me not to mention that this sunset took place on Mars, and the Evening Star is us, photographed by the Curiosity rover.

Because Earth is closer to the Sun than Mars, Earth is an evening and morning star there, just as Venus and Mercury are to us. A Martian would never see the Earth directly overhead at midnight.

What elevates this photo beyond "Gee whiz!" all the way up to "Holy moley that's one of the best space photos I've ever seen!" is that if you download the full-resolution version here and take a real close look, you can see a simple truth we take for granted: we live on a double planet. This picture doesn't just capture the Earth, it shows our Moon.

Doing some quick math, I'm pretty sure you'd be able to see both with the naked eye. Earth had a magnitude of -1 (comparable to an extremely bright star like Sirius, or Venus or Jupiter from Earth) while the Moon's magnitude was about +2.7, same as a mediumish-bright star. (The magnitude scale is weird; it's both backwards and logarithmic. Negative numbers are brighter than positive numbers, and the limit of the naked eye is about Mag +6). The apparent separation of the Earth and Moon when this photo was taken was about as large as it gets, say 380,000 km, and JPL says we were 160 million km away, making the separation as seen from Mars about 8 arc-minutes. A full Moon as seen from Earth is about 30 arc-minutes across, so the Earth-Moon pair as seen from Mars is separated by a distance about equal to one-fourth the diameter of the Moon.

By way of comparison, the famous star pair Alcor and Mizar in the handle of the Big Dipper are about 12 arc-minutes apart, and Mizar's magnitude (+2.2) is similar to the Moon's in this photo. Alcor-Mizar are not difficult to see. Also keep in mind that the Earth and Mars are relatively far apart right now. Sometimes that 160 million km shrinks to one-third that distance.

Easy peasy!

Imagine what ancient Martian astronomers would have made of us, watching this pair of stars--the piercing blue one among the brightest objects in their sky--circle each other every 26½ days (Martian days just are a little longer than Earth days). Imagine the mythology they'd create to explain us. We'd be gods to them; maybe a parent and child? We would be the most awesome and mysterious thing in their heavens.

This is a view humans will get to enjoy someday. I envy them.

Clair de Lune

Seduced by the crescent Moon, I dusted off my little telescope and took it out for the first time in a long time last night. I don't stargaze as much as I'd like because I'm in a bad place for it: tree canopy blocks most of the sky in my backyard and there's a street light out front. But it was a warm and pretty night, I hadn't yet peeked at Jupiter this season, and I wanted to check out a yellowish star in the southeast that had no business being where it was. So I lugged the 'scope out front and parked it literally under the street light (figured I might get fewer annoying reflections that way) and began my tour.

The Moon was gorgeous, Earthshine illuminating its shaded side. Jupiter was low in the western haze, trembling in the warm air rising from my neighbor's roof, but still and always worth a look. And the yellowish star in the southwest was Saturn, always stunning.

When I was in college, and taught astronomy labs once or twice a week and ran my university observatory's public viewing sessions, I really knew the sky. Not just the names of stars and constellations, but where to find the good stuff. I could spin a telescope around and point it right at a nebula or galaxy without looking, and tell you what it was and how it got there. I liked to flatter myself that I knew my 'scope and sky like a mariner knows his ship and sea. I'm not as facile now as when I starhopped two or three nights a week thirty years ago (and had better eyesight), but it turns out I can still bumble my way around the neighborhood.

People are often stunned when they see the Moon or Saturn through a telescope for the first time. At public viewing sessions, I had more than one visitor peer into the front of the telescope to be sure I hadn't hung a little model in there. Despite millions of photos a million times brighter and sharper than any image I could show you through my 'scope, there's something uniquely thrilling about seeing it in real time with your own eye. It's authentic. If you're looking at something particularly small or obscure, there's a possibility you're the only person in the universe seeing it at that moment. Anything could happen!

Anyway, just before I closed shop for the night, I thought to run inside and grab a camera. I don't have a high-end SLR, just a little point-and-shoot digital camera, and I didn't have the time or inclination to try anything fancy. I literally held the camera up to the eyepiece to see what I could see. My results are below and, to be clear, they aren't examples of my astrophotography prowess that I'm proud of. They're bad. I shot much better pics in college on film. Still, for shoving my camera lens against the eyepiece and clicking away on the automatic setting, I was kind of pleased with the results.

Go out, take a look. Get to know your way around the neighborhood.

The haze in this photo is real. The fog had started to come in.

Saturn. The image is fuzzy because I couldn't hold the camera steady for the 1/8-second exposure. It looked very crisp to the eye. 

Sir Edmond and Sally

I was peeking in on an astronomy blog discussion recently when a comment brought me to a skidding stop. If my brain could make that sound of a needle scritching across a record, it would have.

Someone lamented that Comet Pan-STARRS had turned out to be kind of a dud. Someone else replied that there was still hope Comet ISON could be pretty spectacular later this year, but early observation suggested it might be less showy than expected, too. And then someone said:

"At least I'll be around for the next appearance of Halley's Comet."

And that's what brought me up short. Because barring extraordinary luck or some breakthrough in human longevity ...

I won't.

Damn punk kids.

Halley's last passed through the inner solar system in 1986. Its period is about 75 years, putting its next pass in 2061. I'll be 101. Although the comet wasn't very impressive in '86, owing to the geometry of our respective orbits at the time, I understand it's expected to put on a good show next time.

Comets had been inexplicable one-off apparitions until Sir Edmond Halley calculated his namesake's orbit and realized "Hey, this sucker's been here before!" Halley's fame was made, and his iceball became THE quintessential comet, when he correctly predicted it would return in 1758, 16 years after his death. Of course, once you realize you're dealing with a regular guest, you can dig through history and find records of its visits in worldwide media as diverse as the Bayeux Tapestry (appearance of AD 1066) and a Babylonian clay tablet (164 BC).

"Oh, it's you again."

Comet Halley also strikes a cultural chord because its period is just about the length of a human life. Mark Twain was famously born when Halley's appeared in 1835 and died when it returned in 1910. For most, it's literally a once-in-a-lifetime event.

In 1986 I'd graduated from college but still lived nearby and had the keys to the campus observatory, which I'd helped run while a student (just between us I still have the keys, though I figure by now they must have changed the locks). My university's observatory was poorly located atop a five-story building in the center of campus--next to which they then constructed a six-story building, blocking the view of a good chunk of sky--but it was a neat little facility at which real research could be done.

The comet was due to be especially well positioned on one particular night. So on that night I took my keys, circumventing the university's process for reserving the observatory, and set off for the roof. I assumed I'd be alone but arrived to find a small group already there. Quiet. Almost reverent. There in the little round cinderblock building were my old professor mentor and half a dozen people, all of whom I knew from my college days. Hadn't seen some of them in three or four years. As far as I know, nothing had been planned. Everyone just showed up, gravitationally drawn to meet in that place on that night. No one seemed the least surprised to see me unlock the door with my unauthorized keys and join the party.

That was special.

Many of my blog posts get written because two or more notions collide in my brain to spark something interesting. As documented in past posts, I've spent the last couple of weeks refurbishing my office/studio, and as part of that process cleaned up my bulletin board. At the top of my old board I kept pinned for nearly 30 years what could be my favorite "Peanuts" comic ever, from October 18, 1985. It nearly disintegrated in my hands, but remained intact enough for me to scan it:

Man, that's a dark comic. Bleak! That punk kid on the astronomy blog is Sally Brown and I am Sally Brown's teacher. Anyone born in the early Eighties has a decent chance of catching Halley's Comet twice. I had one shot at it, and am glad I made the most of it.

Moondance

If you've been outside after dark the past month and had clear skies to the east, you must have noticed the planet Jupiter, the brightest nighttime "star" right now. It's near the red giant Aldebaran, which makes for a pretty pair. On Christmas day the Moon swept close to Jupiter in the sky, and in fact observers in South America could watch the Moon actually pass in front of the planet. Astronomer Rafael Defavari had his telescope set up to record it. The first part of the video shows Jupiter disappearing behind the Moon, while the second part shows it emerging from the other side.

This sort of alignment, called an "occultation," isn't especially rare. The Moon and planets lie on roughly the same plane in the sky so they line up occasionally (though not exactly the same plane, or similar occultations would happen several times a month). Still, I found this video unexpectedly beautiful and moving. For me it drives home the truth that we really are sitting on a round rock in space watching other rocks and balls of gas circle the Sun in a cosmic dance. Though the video is silent, I couldn't help but hear the soundtrack from "2001: A Space Odyssey" in my mind (specifically, Ligeti's Lux Aeterna, though another piece may pop into yours).

Look up once in a while and enjoy the dance.

Eclipsin'

My slice of the world experienced a partial solar eclipse yesterday, and it was pretty neat. If I'd traveled a couple hundred miles northeastish I could've seen a full annular eclipse, which you might recall is when the Moon is a bit too distant to completely cover the Sun but instead leaves a "ring of fire" circle of sunlight around the lunar shadow. Or I could experience a 91% eclipse at home. Tough choice.

Although my house is blanketed in shadows in the late afternoon, our across-the-street neighbors Larry and Mary had a perfect view. Larry and Mary are about the best neighbors ever. I wouldn't ask them to help me bury a body, since they're both former FBI, but anything short of that I'm confident they'd have our backs. They didn't bat an eye when Karen called yesterday to inform them we were having an Eclipse Party in their front yard and they were welcome to come. They pulled out their lawn furniture, we grilled some chicken-apple sausages, everybody brought wine.

California Eclipse Party essentials: grilled sausage, potato salad, cherries, grapes, cheese, crackers, olives and other pickled things, red and white wine. Sun optional.

I chose wisely.

I also took a few minutes to whip up a couple of "solar telescopes." The first was simplicity itself: a flat mirror covered in foil with a dime-size hole cut in it, which I propped up to reflect an image of the crescent Sun onto a poster board leaning against a tree 15 or 20 feet away:

The foil-covered mirror. Note the box it's leaning on, I'll get to that in a minute. Sunlight reflecting off the small center hole cut into the foil reflected across the yard onto...

...white poster board, which made it very easy to sit nearby and watch the eclipse happen LIVE without actually staring stupidly into the Sun.

The second telescope was that empty box above, which I taped up and then cut holes into its opposite ends. One end I covered with a sheet of foil through which I poked pinholes. At the other end I taped a sheet of white paper to serve as a rear-projection screen.

The back end of my pinhole telescope, showing four tiny crescent Suns (because I poked four holes in the other end of the box) back-projected onto a sheet of regular paper.

But in truth we hardly needed my telescopes at all because the best optics of the eclipse were provided by the two tall trees in my neighbors' yard, whose leaves formed thousands of tiny pinhole lenses that projected perfect little crescent Suns onto their home's siding:

We just sat there and watched the wall.

As you can see in the photos, even with the Sun 91% covered it never got dark. It definitely got darker, with the light and shadows taking on a quality I can only describe as eerie, but someone unaware of the eclipse probably wouldn't have noticed at all.

Then when the Sun went down and it got windy and cold, I picked up my telescopes and went home. Perfect.

I might've felt more urgency to witness the full annular eclipse if I hadn't already had the ultimate total eclipse experience on February 26, 1979. That one covered the Sun completely and swept across the Pacific Northwest; I was in my freshman year of college and determined to see it. At the same time, I had a friend who was a big train buff. Ed knew all about their history, routes, lines, station architecture, everything. He theorized that we could board Amtrak's northbound Coast Starlight holding a cheap ticket to the very next station and then ... just not get off. Move around, avoid conductors, act casual. He was sure it would work, and the very worst that would happen if we were discovered is we'd get kicked off.

And I'll be darned: it worked.

(Important note: I do not advocate illegal activity. Do not try this. But if you do, let me know if it still works.)

After a long night huddled in the observation car, we (our merry band of adventurers had grown to five) detrained in Portland, Oregon, which on February 26, 1979 turned out to be the only spot in the Northwest completely covered in clouds. We nevertheless rose early the next day to find a bluff overlooking the Willamatte River to watch the Sun disappear.

Even though we couldn't see the Sun through the clouds, even though we understood precisely what was happening, it was one of the most remarkable, chilling experiences of my life. As the still of sudden nighttime swept across Portland like God drawing a curtain--as the birds stopped chirping and the streetlights blinked on below us--I knew deep in my gut why my ancestors were so terrified they prayed to the giant sky dragon to disgorge the Sun and set things right. Every biochemical cycle in my body that evolved through millions of years of days and nights, moonrises and moonsets, seasons and years, down to the cellular level, screamed out "This is wrong!" It was frightening, exhilarating, and disturbingly weird.

The coda to the story is that we successfully used our train-hopping trick to return home. The funny part is that we saw all the same people in the observation car going south as we had going north. The train both ways was full of freeloaders who'd had the same idea.

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One other related tale that taught me something about people: when I was in college majoring in Physics, I worked as an astronomy laboratory teaching assistant. It's unusual for undergrads to TA, but at the time Astronomy was such a tiny backwater at my university that none of the Physics grad students wanted to do it (that has since changed, and I'm proud to say my alma mater now has a world-class Cosmology program. But it didn't when I was there.)

So I was TAing Introductory Astronomy when a student came to see me during office hours. Several weeks into the class, she needed some help understanding eclipses. No problem, that's why I'm there! We worked on it a long time, with me drawing every diagram of the Earth, Sun and Moon I could think of, and it just wasn't clicking for her. Nothing I did could erase the sad, puzzled look from her face. I began to think I was the worst TA ever. And then, after maybe 20 minutes, she lit up.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "Do you mean that the Sun is farther away than the Moon?"

That was the problem. She couldn't understand why the Sun and Moon never ran into each other.

That's when I had my own epiphany: there are enormous numbers of people who aren't necessarily stupid--after all, this girl was smart enough to get into a good university--but simply have no idea, even in the broadest conceivable terms, how the universe around them works. They probably get through life just fine. But to look up into the sky and never ask "What is that? How does it do that?" I can't imagine living a life like that. (To that student's credit, she did take an astronomy class, which is more than most of her peers did.)

Sometimes I like to think my work as both a science writer and graphic novelist is a tiny antidote.

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Speaking of higher education, last weekend my daughter Robin earned her Masters Degree in Archaeology, and Karen and I couldn't be prouder. She wrote an impressive thesis and has already done some good work in the field and lab, and we're confident she has the skills and contacts to make a go of it. She worked very hard and we're very happy for her. Congratulations, Sweetie!

Rather than embarrass Robin by posting the traditional posed snapshot, which would mortify her, I thought I'd use this one showing her Master's hood and floppy-sleeved gown. I just noticed as I uploaded this photo that I unthinkingly labeled it "Robin Hood." Somehow we went 24 years without making that joke.

The Gift of Touching History

Tomorrow's my birthday, as Karen reminded me as she woke me this morning. "Do I get to sleep in?" I moaned. "Actually, no," she replied. Something was up.

Out of bed, showered, quick stop at Starbucks (which faked me out), then south toward San Francisco. I'm no dummy (no, really!) and figured it had something to do with our girls, Robin and Laura, who live in The City. But Karen faked me out again, veering off toward the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge that crosses the North Bay toward Berkeley, Oakland . . . and Alameda.

Which is where they berth the USS Hornet aircraft carrier--once a warship and recovery vessel for the Apollo 11 and 12 space missions, now a floating museum and historic landmark--and where my girls were waiting for me. Surprise!

I've written about my girls and the Hornet before: they both volunteer there, giving tours and chaperoning groups of Boy Scouts and such who spend the night aboard ship. Laura trained up to become a full docent and more recently parlayed her in-progress graduate education in Museum Studies to become the Hornet's full-fledged Archival and Collections Manager. Her job is to go through decades of papers and material that came with the ship when it was decommissioned in 1970 plus a lot more donated by old sailors since, figure out what it is, document it, preserve it, and do the gruntwork needed to make the Hornet's junk into a real museum-quality collection. It'll take months. Years. You know that warehouse at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark?" Like that. But what an opportunity for her! So my birthday gift was a backstage tour.

Now I need to tell you about deadly Moon Germs.

There aren't any.

But nobody knew that for certain in 1969, and on the off chance that the first men to land on the Moon brought back some alien face-hugging brain-burrowers, the returning astronauts of Apollos 11, 12 and 14 were locked in a modified Airstream trailer dubbed a Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) (it wasn't necessary for Apollo 13 since those astronauts never left their ship; by Apollo 15, NASA concluded the Moon was sterile and the MQF wasn't necessary at all). The MQF used for Apollo 11 is in the Smithsonian. The one used for Apollo 12 is at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The one used for Apollo 14 is on the Hornet.

So here's a photo of President Richard Nixon on the hangar deck of the Hornet looking through the window of an Airstream trailer--excuse me, MQF--congratulating Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin. Note the "Hornet + 3" sign above the window, covering up the "Airstream" logo with a touch of military whimsy (similar whimsy had the astronauts fill out a U.S. Customs form listing their previous destination as "Moon" and declaring their cargo of "Moon rocks"):

Now look at me this morning, grinning like a loon, holding a piece of painted wood Laura found tucked away on a shelf one day.

Not a recreation. Not a simulation. The wood grain matches. It's the real deal.

Now look at the shelf behind me, under my left hand (here, I'll blow it up for you!), and compare it to a photo of the MQF used for the next lunar landing, Apollo 12:

They kept the signs. On the ship. For forty-three years. Before the Hornet's crew loaded the hero-filled trailers onto military transport aircraft and flew them back to Texas, they kept the signs.

Some of you may say, "So what?" I understand your reaction. Others of you might get chills up your spine and tears in your eyes. You understand my reaction.

Best. Birthday. EVER. And best kids ever.

Robin, me and Laura in front of the Apollo 14 MQF on the hangar deck of the Hornet.

Oh, the View is Tremendous.

Friend O' The Blog Jim O'Kane has pointed out that we're in the midst of a long string of anniversaries that will give people too young to remember the Space Age a chance to vicariously relive it at the same pace 50 years later.

We've already marked the 50th anniversaries of Sputnik (October 1957), Yuri Gagarin's first human flight in space (April 1961), and Alan Shepard's first American flight in space (May 1961). Monday marks five decades since John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, and many newspapers have printed nice articles about Glenn and fellow Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter returning to their launch pad to be honored and reminisce.

I was born in 1960, so was too young to remember these specific milestones. But soon, maybe around anniversaries of the Gemini era (1965-66), we'll get to events I have memory sparks of reading about in magazines, seeing on television, writing school reports about, and even drawing pictures of. If you pay attention, you'll get a feel for how incredibly fast the frontier was being pushed, how enormous the risks must have been. Fifty years ago, the U.S. shot Glenn around the planet; seven years later, it landed Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon. July 20, 2019 should be fun!

Fifty years. Half a century! The further these accomplishments recede into the past, the more astonishing they seem. Capsules held together with duct tape and baling wire (or, per Spock, stone knives and bearskins) were guided by computers less powerful than a 21st Century child's toy. Sooner than we can imagine, all the men and women who made it happen will be gone. Glenn (age 90) and Carpenter (age 86) are the only survivors of the original Mercury Seven. Three of the twelve men who walked on the Moon have died (Irwin, Shepard and Conrad). They're all old men now--albeit old men who could still kick your butt. Don't cross Buzz Aldrin if you don't want your nose punched.



For someone just a few years younger than me, it's history. For anyone my age or older, it's memories. I truly feel that one of the great privileges of my life was being here to witness it.
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My Old Haunts

A few notes before I offer another bloggy re-run to get me through this deadline/holiday rough patch while providing regular infotainment value to you.

Karen and I really appreciate the sympathy and support that we received here, on Facebook, and in person about our stolen car. Thanks. I think the people who called it "mean" best summed it up for me. Stealing someone's car is just a mean thing to do. Human beings sharing this little rock for such a short time simply shouldn't be that mean to each other.

I realize asking a car thief to pause and consider the epochal cosmic perspective might be a bit much.

Luckily, our insurance company is handling it well and we can roll with it financially. As I said, our beloved Honda was getting old enough that we were thinking of replacing her anyway (although we never discussed it within her earshot). So we went car shopping last weekend. Car technology has improved since we bought our Accord 15 years ago. Car salesmen have not.

Today's re-run is nearly five years old. I chose to post it today because it was originally inspired by a sighting of the constellation Gemini, which I happened to notice for the first time this fall a few nights ago. As you'll read, Gemini holds a special place in my heart.

One of the commenters on the original post was "TVDadJim," aka Friend O' the Blog Jim O'Kane, who wrote, "Watching Orion, though, usually gives me something like Galactic vertigo--because I know we're facing away from the cheery fireplace of the Milky Way's core, and out into the inky black of forever." Tell you what, Jim: you head for the black hole at our galaxy's center, I'll light out into the inky blackness the other direction, and we'll see which one of us is in better shape in a couple million years. Your "cheery fireplace" looks like a radiation-drenched gravity-shredding maelstrom to me, but to each his own.

(January 2007)

The stars of Heaven, now seen in their old haunts--
White Sirius glittering o'er the southern crags,
Orion with his belt, and those fair Seven,
Acquaintances of every little child,
And Jupiter, my own beloved star!

--William Wordsworth, The Prelude

I have relationships with stars, which I think may be unusual but perhaps not as unusual as I think.

I was reminded of that (and of Wordsworth's epic poem, which I studied in college and is one of the few textbooks I've kept all these years) the night before last when I stepped outside and noticed Gemini rising in the east, over beside Orion. I can never look at the constellation of the twins Castor and Pollux without remembering another night almost 20 years ago, right after my wife and I found out she was expecting twins, when I looked up at the sky and smiled because I was looking at their constellation. Not their Zodiac sign (bleah), but the distant suns whose pattern in the sky would always remind me of the happy day I learned they existed.

I'm pretty sure that years later I showed my girls Gemini and tried to explain the significance it held for me. If I recall correctly, they were unimpressed. That's all right.

The reappearance of old friends in the sky marks the seasons for me: Antares, Lyra, Orion of course. My pals Zubenelgenubi and Zubeneschamali, about whom I once made up a nifty ditty.* The fuzzy blotch of the Pleiades that always seems to catch me by surprise. I seek out the tiny, obscure constellation Vulpecula and remember freezing nights spent in a small university observatory doing photometry of a dim nova with my physics professor mentor who found it soothing to listen to WWV time signals pinging on the shortwave. And doesn't everyone have a favorite planet? (When I was a kid mine was Mars but I'd have to say Jupiter now, although I've flirted with Venus from time to time. Saturn's nice but just too ostentatious for my taste; I don't appreciate a show-off planet that tries too hard.)

Being in the habit of looking up at night gives me an agreeable perspective. There's the notion that somewhere out there, someone you're thinking about might be looking at the very thing you are (I believe astronomers call this the Fievel Mousekewitz Conjecture). Maybe even an alien looking at it from the other side, or looking past it at you. There's also the notion I've had while peering through a telescope that at that very moment I might be the only person in the universe looking at that particular thing. And there's always the "eternal circle of life" idea that you're just a point in a continuum of people who've looked at virtually the same moon, planets, and stars for millions of years and will continue to do so for millions more.

No profound conclusion. It's just nice to see Gemini again.

* Sample lyrics: "Zubenlegenubi, Zubeneschamali, yeah yeah yeah!"

Astronautical Infographics

Here's something interesting: an "infographic" put together by MIT's Technology Review illustrating numbers of space launches by different countries over time. All types of space launches, not just manned flights.

The size limitation of my blog doesn't do it justice. You can find a much larger version and a link to a PDF here, although only until October 19. Even at this small scale, though, I can explain some of what it shows.

Time goes from bottom to top, starting with Sputnik in 1957 at the bottom. The USSR/Russia is the fat red column at the left, the United States is beside it, and all the other countries that have shot something into space are laid out to the right. Red represents the number of military missions in each year, gray commercial, blue government, and yellow amateur (universities and such). Most noticeable is the big glut of Soviet military missions in the 1970s and '80s (which an accompanying article explains is partly because Soviet satellites didn't survive long) and the explosion of U.S. commercial traffic in the second half of the '90s. There's also quite a drop-off in Russian activity after the dissolution of the USSR, for obvious reasons.

I find it interesting how Russia's and the U.S.'s curves are nearly inverse images of each other, as if they could fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I don't know if that has any meaning larger than, "huh, cool," but it kind of is.

Down in the "Halfway Game" comments, I alluded to the idea that looking at information in a new way can change your perspective on it. This graph does that for me. If you'd asked me to draw something like it, I probably would've shown the United States and USSR with roughly similar numbers of launches, distributed much differently over time (i.e., gradually increasing to a modern peak). For example, I would not have guessed that we rocketed more stuff into space in 1960 than we did in 2010. This one image rearranges my understanding of 54 years of history at a glance. New perspective is always worthwhile.
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Earth Below Us, Drifting, Falling

A lot of folks are posting new photos from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that show the landing sites of Apollos 12, 14 and 17. I mentioned them myself on my WHTTWOT Facebook Fan Page (and the NASA link I provide there is certainly worth a look; I particularly like the slider feature that lets you compare old and new photos of the same sites). But Friend O' The Blog Mike "Sligo" Harkins was the first to send me this video that offers a neat tour of the Apollo 17 site.



The LRO, which has been circling and mapping the Moon since 2009, already photographed all of the Apollo landing sites a while ago.
I blogged about it. What's new is that the LRO recently dropped into a lower orbit that allows much sharper pictures showing a lot more detail. It is completely astounding to me that, nearly 40 years after the last human (so far!) walked on the Moon, we've got a satellite up there taking pictures of their footprints.

Nine of the 12 men who walked on the Moon are still alive. I think it would be fascinating if someone sat them down with these photos and interviewed them. Of course they've all been interviewed to death; the difference now is that we could literally trace every step they took: Why'd you stop here? What were you looking for there? Why that route? Why this detour? I'd expect it to dredge up details they haven't thought about since, providing a nice commentary on history by the men who made it.

The Moon Hoaxers--purveyors of the amazingly widespread belief that the U.S. faked the whole thing--have been pretty low-profile lately. Of course the LRO photos would be no problem for them to explain away. After all, they're from NASA. But technology is implacably demolishing the Hoaxers' case. In the short run, those sad, stupid people can make some harmful mischief; in the long run, they're irrelevant. The Truth is Out There, and will be for millions of years after they're gone.
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Space Station Ahoy!

So Karen and I went out to watch the International Space Station skim our southern horizon and slide beneath the Moon Friday night (this passes for "Date Night" around our house; I'll bet there's some ladies out there right now wondering how they ever let me get away). I took a lousy movie of it:



(If you're having a hard time seeing a tiny point of light in a tiny digital window, take a look at the larger version on YouTube.)

I'm actually surprised and happy with how this turned out. First, I shot it with a simple little digital point-and-shoot in video mode, nothing sophisticated. Second, I did a dry run with a different camera (a Flip) during a very short ISS pass last night that failed utterly. Third, it wasn't long after sunset and the sky was still quite bright and hazy; I wasn't sure we'd see anything. All things considered, I'm very pleased.

The ISS didn't really look much different from an airplane, and you kind of have to think about what you're looking at for the impact to hit you. There are people on that thing. In space. People in space. 200 miles high. In space. In the five minutes it took me to walk home after shooting this, they'd already traveled halfway across North America. So: impressive!

As I mentioned before, the website Heavens Above can give you a list of all the times the ISS is visible from your house for the next 10 days. I think it's worthwhile to take 5 minutes to go outside, look up, and marvel.
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Space Patrol Alert!

Attention West Coast Space Rangers! This Friday, August 12, shortly after 8:30 p.m., the International Space Station will be flying over your town!

Big whoop?

The ISS is always flying over somebody's town, and can cover a given area several times per week. In fact, this week and next offer my part of the planet several opportunities to see the ISS just before dawn or after dusk, when the sky is darkish and the station reflects the light of the Sun just over the horizon.

What makes this apparition special enough to trigger the Space Patrol Orange Alert is that the ISS will be passing very close to the Moon, which'll make it easy to find and could give someone a nice photo op. In fact, it looks to me like observers along a line running from Watsonville (Calif.) through Turlock to approximately Battle Mountain (Nevada) have a good chance to catch the station flying across the face of the Moon, which would be very cool indeed.

The website Heavens Above can provide times and sky charts for your area. The map at the top of this post is for San Francisco, and shows the ISS skimming just under the Moon. Tell the site where you live--either by entering latitude and longitude, searching for your city's name, or pinpointing it on a map (if you use the map, don't forget to also specify your Time Zone)--then pick "10 Day Predictions for: ISS," and it'll provide a list of all your viewing opportunities. This one is for 12 Aug starting around (depending on your location) 20:33.

So, Space Rangers stationed in California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and northern Mexico: go outside this Friday night around 8:30 and watch the southern skies to the right of the Moon. The ISS should look like a pretty bright star moving at a fair clip from right to left. The farther south you're located, the higher in the sky it'll appear. You don't need a telescope, although some people have seen the station's distinctive H-shape through binoculars. If you haven't spotted anything by 8:40, you missed it. Better luck next time!

Don't forget to report your findings to Cap Crater at Space Command, and ad astra per aspera!

Astrophotographer Theirry Legault took this shot of the ISS transiting the Moon last December. Think you can do better? Give it a try!