Planets and rockets by threes

There is a trio in the morning sky of Wednesday March 23.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

Mercury, Jupiter, and Neptune get to be within a circle of diameter just under 4°. But they are only about 11° from the Sun, thus below the horizon, at least for us in the northern hemisphere.

So, better just take another look at the three planets that still hang as a bright dawn triangle in the roughly triangular constellation of Capricornus.

 

Down to (and from) Earth Department

Ukrainians can emerge from their basements only at dawn, after the all-night bombardment, which pauses presumably to let the ground attacks resume.

Russia’s cosmonauts wore the yellow and blue colors of the Ukrainian flag as they boarded the International Space Station on March 19. Officials hastened to deny that this signified anything.

Articles in the dear Guardian are often sloppily worded. Russia is “threatening to pull out of the space station and drop it on the US, Europe or elsewhere.” A mighty piece of space junk, maybe a weapon to be added to the shells, rockets, supersonic missiles, and airstrikes with which Ukrainian cities are already being lacerated?

 

Delights of Language Department

We used to see the name of the Ukrainian capital rendered as Kiev, but in British media, at least, it is now Kyiv. Wondering what exactly this represents, I’ve been learning a little about Ukrainian from my friend E. Wayles Browne, professor of Slavic linguistics at Cornell University and leader of the Amnesty International group there. Kiev renders the Russian form. (A medieval state called the Kievan Rus gave rise to Ukraine, Russia, and White Russia or Belarus.) Kyiv is a transliteration of the Ukrainian form.

If I understand correctly, the “y” renders a vowel that is like English short “i” in “chin”; the “i” renders a vowel that is more high and front, as in English “machine,” though not lengthened like that English vowel. Thus it is rather difficult for English speakers to say the name correctly, because our “chin” vowel does not occur before other vowels. It is as if one were to say KIN-yeef but without the “n.”

 

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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.

 

6 thoughts on “Planets and rockets by threes”

  1. The Kiev V. Kyiv reminds me of when I once asked a Chinese person why Peking was renamed Beijing. She said I was wrong, the city has never been called Peking, and has always been Beijing for centuries. If that was so, I asked, then why is the airport code for Beijing ‘PEK’?

    1. Peking and Beijing are rederings of the name in two different systems of romanizing Chinese. The two syllables mean “northern capital”. Similarly the “southern capital” was formerly transliterated as Nanking, now as Nanjing.
      The difference between P and B is because, whereas English has two consonants, Chinese has three: like our B; like our P in “pin”; and like our P in “spin”. The P in “pin” has aspiration (a puff of breath after it)
      Someone who knows more about Chinese than I do may correct me.

    2. St Petersburg airport code is still LED for Leningrad and a history program I was watching claimed that Vladimir Putin was born in St Petersburg when in fact he was born in Leningrad.

  2. Here in Sydney yesterday morning (22 March), Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were all visible in the very clear pre-dawn sky.

  3. In English, as well as in many/most/all other languages, there are traditional ways of speaking and spelling foreign place names, which aren’t necessarily the same as the ways they are spelled and pronounced where they are. So if you were to ask me to spell and pronounce the capital of Italy–unless you were to ask me to spell it and pronounce it the way Italians do–I would say R-O-M-E, and would pronounce it the same way I pronounce “roam”. I wouldn’t say R-O-M-A, and pronounce it to rhyme with “coma”, and my accent would not match any Italian’s anyway. So even though I’m 100% behind the Ukrainians, and about 3/4 of my ancestry comes from Ukraine (which is not at all why I’m backing Ukraine), when I’m using the English language, I will continue to spell Ukraine’s capital K-I-E-V, and pronounce it the same way I pronounce kee-EVV. (The other 1/4 of my ancestors comes from Przemyśl, Poland, which has also been in the news, it being very close to the border with Ukraine.)

  4. It’s just colours and doesn’t mean anything like the Queen’s flowers where said to be in the Ukrainian colours she couldn’t care less about the Ukraine just about knighting planet destroying racing car drivers.People like to read things into things and form patterns usually wrongly.But back to astronomy I think that Venus must have dropped out of the skies of northern England as I did a rather eccentric overnight hike along Hadrian’s Wall on Sunday/Monday,41km and took 15 hours leaving Haltwhistle at 2235 and arrived in Carlisle at 1330, and no Venus in the predawn sky.However I did ponder on the vastness of the universe and how the constellations now are pretty much the same as when the Romans built the wall 2000 years ago despite everything moving.

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