Happy Christmas to you! Here’s the sky on the evening of Christmas day –
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
– not Christmas Eve, which was the day before.
Hanukkah greetings have already been given to Karen and Madeline last Sunday.
And Santa Claus, also known as Father Christmas, tries to present you with the glittering gift of a solar eclipse, though his aim is a little off in both time and space (after all, he lives 431 light-years away at the Pole Star) and it descend on those living in Oman, southern India, Sumatra, and a bit late, on Boxing Day, which is the day after Christmas. And it’s not a total eclipse but an annular or ring-shaped one. Still, thats pretty enough.
In this view of Earth from afar, the graded gray shadow is the Moon’s penumbra at the middle time of the eclipse, the narrow track is that of the antumbra or small region where the ring eclipse is seen, the dashed lines are the sides of the antumbra, the broad arrows show how the Earth flies along and rotates, and in the background are the stars of Orion.
And as for pagan imaginary beings, Venus is ascending ever brighter in the evening sky. You may be able to discern with binoculars her tiny disk.
This is how Venus (as seen from Earth) goes around, from superior conjunction beyond the Sun last August 14 to inferior conjunction in front of the Sun next June 3. (In this picture the disk of Venus is of course enormously magnified; and the gray half is the evening sky, the black half the morning sky.
I won’t say any more about my own attitude – not entirely dismissive – to religions, except this.
Republican senators may fear to vote against their president at his trial in January. He is supported by evangelical Christians. But their leading magazine has issued the strongest condemnation I have yet seen of his morals and the strongest demand for his removal from office.
May atmospheric quality improve in 2020.
__________
ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge. Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
I don’t believe that Republican Senators are fearing to vote against President Trump. I, unfortunately think this is politics as usual in Washington. Let’s stick it to the democrats the way they stick it to the republicans seems to be a constant theme in politics. I do believe that the editor in chief of Christianity today, Mark Galli, has spouted nothing more than his opinion. He writes: “…The facts in this instance are unambiguous…” Um, that’s exactly what they are–ambiguous. Any reading of the transcripts will show there was no quid pro quo. Thus, there is no crime. And therein lies the issue with the Senators — most of them don’t believe a crime was committed, certainly one not rising to the high crimes, misdemeanors, and treason which are the sole reasons the Constitution gives for impeachment. Thus there will be nothing but an acquittal of Trump. Nancy Pelosi has shot herself in the foot on this one.
Thanks Guy, and happy Christmas to you. I was trying to figure out what the human figure was in the sky scene. There’s no such constellation between Capricornus and Piscis Austrinus. It’s Venus, admiring her reflection! The planets were imagined as gods for millennia, long before they were reduced to mundane balls of rock and gas.
I appreciate seeing Betelgeuse peeking over the Earth’s limb during the eclipse. If the sky is clear enough for me to see Betelgeuse this evening, that will help me get oriented to where the Moon and Sun are dancing as seen from the other side of the planet.
I admire the editors of Christianity Today for witnessing to their faith and standing up to the predictable backlash from those evangelical Christians who have hitched their wagon to Trump. I believe that there is good at the heart of every religion, and that we humans can make our lives and the world better by sincerely following the precepts of any religion, so long as we do so with honesty and humility. Unfortunately we are all tempted to use religion as a salve for our own conscience and a cudgel against others, and many of the leaders of any given religion are self-important, self-serving con artists. The most dangerous religious leaders have become convinced of the righteousness of their own con game. (Atheism has become its own sort of religion.) The challenge for any person of faith is to find and cherish the kernel of goodness while not succumbing to all the attendant bullshit.
By the way, Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic for the New Yorker magazine, has written a long and edifying article about the fact that he is dying of lung cancer after smoking cigarettes for 60 years. Schjeldahl is agnostic about what happens after we die: “Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side.” But here is his penultimate paragraph:
“God creeps in. Human minds are the universe’s only instruments for reflecting on itself. The fact of our existence suggests a cosmic approval of it. (Do we behave badly? We are gifted with the capacity to think so.) We may be accidents of matter and energy, but we can’t help circling back to the sense of a meaning that is unaccountable by the application of what we know. If God is a human invention, good for us! We had to come up with something.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/23/the-art-of-dying
Amen to your prayer for a better new year. May we make it so.
“It’s Venus, admiring her reflection!” Yes. I didn’t quite dare to put in the Rokeby Venus.
Hey Guy
Always enjoy your detailed descriptions. But I wanted to share with you an anomalous eclipse experience:
On the last day of August, 1970, Anne and were visiting friends in Apia, Western Samoa. We were walking down the street on a pleasant mid-morning, sky partly clouded with about eight-tenths puffy cumulus clouds. (After spending several years in the USAF Air Weather Service I had developed a permanent habit of noticing the sky.) The cloud density was such that the sun was visible through the clouds, and I noticed an unexpected tiny “bite” out of the edge of the solar disk. “Can’t be an eclipse,” I thought. “I would surely know about it.”
But a the minutes went by, the bite grew larger, and even more, it seemed to be progressing straight toward the center of the solar disk! “Well, it is obviously an eclipse, but it can’t be a totality, otherwise there would be hundreds of telescopes here.”
Despite my reasoning, the dark spot did, indeed, progress to the center of the sun, and we were treated ot our first annular eclipse. Although I kept looking up about every fifteen seconds or so, nobody among the thongs on the street paid any attention to the strange palagi’s odd behavior.
The clouds continued to offer an almost optimum opportunity for viewing, and I took a couple photos with my Nikonos. (Its 35mm lens did not produce a very worthy shot, unfortunately.)
Soifua and Aloha
John, thank you for that description of the annular eclipse of 1970 Aug. 21. This was before I ever saw an eclipse. You were extraordinarily lucky, or the eclipse was lucky to have you, a person made alert by your experience, at the center of its path over Hawaii, and it provided just enough cloud to allow you to observe it without equipment! Palagi, is that Maori for “eclipse” or “sun”?
If you had photoshopped in Velazquez’ Venus at her mirror, The shade of Mary Richardson would have come after you with a meat cleaver.
For those who don’t know, as I’m sorry to say didn’t, Mary Richardson was a feminist of a violent kind, and in 1914 went into the London National Gallery with an axe and slashed the Rokeby Venus.
In 1914 when Richardson attacked Velazquez’ painting, the British police were arresting and torturing women who were nonviolently protesting to gain the right to vote. I don’t advocate the destruction of artwork, but I think that torturing human beings is a worse form of violence.