The September equinox got postponed. The piece about it that I prepared and published on September 22 failed to appear in my inbox and probably in yours. (The only one who received it was Erid David, because in using his photo I gave a reference to where it can be found online, and that presumably caused a “pingback.”)
The mishap has now been traced to part of an overhaul of my website that is going on. On the better-late-than never principle, I’m re-sending the thing now.
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The cosmic trumpet announcing the equinox will sound on Saturday,
September 23, at 1:54 by Universal Time. So on this occasion I’ve set our picture for the Mountain time zone of North America because there this scene, three quarters of an hour after sunset, almost exactly coincides with the instant of the equinox. Clocks in this zone being six hours earlier than at Greenwich, the scene occurs on Friday evening.
The Sun is underground, but you can see, by eyeing the celestial equator and the ecliptic, that it is at the point where they cross. The Sun at this moment falls into the southern celestial hemisphere.
(And underground beside the Sun is Mercury. It was at superior conjunction beyond the Sun on Sep. 21 at 2h UT.)
The ecliptic is the line along which the Sun appears to travel, but it is often visually marked for us by the planets. And at this time we have a row of them: from right to left, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn (and invisible dwarf planet Pluto). But Venus happens to be making a deep loop south of the ecliptic, as it swings inward to pass between us and the Sun on October 26.
Part of an ecliptic-based chart for Venus in 2018, to be in the “Longer View” book for Venus that I am working on.
And this illustrates, as Eric David has pointed out to me, that the ecliptic as spangled by the bright planets can appear to slope differently. In our evening sky it now looks much steeper – from Venus up to Jupiter is closer to vertical than to the ecliptic’s gentle angle to the horizon.
Eric noticed this effect while driving home on Sep. 21 to Fredericksburg, Virginia, and took this photo, which I may not have captured very well.
He annotated it and posted it at https://www.flickr.com/photos/starvergnuegen/44762958322/in/dateposted-public/ He says that “the field of view is very close to 24 degrees wide from left to right edge… I used a lens that gives a slightly telephoto view, so that should be taken into account when looking at how far Venus appears to be from the ecliptic.”
Now, as to “starling” and “starboard”: I asked you what they have to do with stars, and the answer is: Nothing.
The right side of a ship is “starboard” because on that side was fixed the oar to “steer” with. When the ship docked, its other side was placed against the “port.”
The old word for the bird was “stare,” similar to forms in other Germanic languages; the “-ling” diminutive ending was added later, though still in the Old English stage of the language.
But, as Marcia observed in childhood, starlings could be so called because their otherwise drab plumage is speckled with stars. It is astonishing that these gregarious birds, whom I used to see blackening the sky as they gathered to roost on a wooded island in Manchester, are now threatened. There was a pair who learned to alight for crumbs on the palms of our hands on a terrace in Lyme Regis; no more.