Star clusters and cultural treasures

Here is tomorrow’s sky, four hours after sunset yet still comfortably early in the long winter evening.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

The glorious winter-evening constellations are swinging up toward the meridian.  The Pleiades cluster is already there, beginning the curve down toward the west.

In the poignant perfection of A.E.Housman’s words:

The rainy Pleiads wester,
Orion plunges prone,
The stroke of midnight ceases
And I lie down alone.

The rainy Pleiads wester
And seek beyond the sea
The head that I shall dream of
And shall not dream of me.

Housman, a formidale scholar of Greek, was building on Sappho’s lines that I quote in my Berenice’s Hair:

Deduke men a selanna
kai Plêiades, mesai de
nuktes, para d’erkhet’ ôra,
egô de mona kateudô.

The moon has set, and the Pleiades
in midnight have gone down,
and another hour goes crawling by
and I lie down alone.

In Persian, the Pleiades are called Sorayyâ, from Arabic thurâyâ – which appears to be the diminutive of thariyah, “rich moist earth”, and shose plura;l, thurâyât, is used for “chandelier,” as if that is a “cluster of star-clusters.”  A well-known lady called Sorayya was the second wife of the last shah of Iran and was a princess of the great Bakhtiari tribe of the Zagros mountains.

One of the best-known odes of the poet Hafez ends with a reference to the Pleiades:

ke bar nazm-e to afshânad  falak eqd-e Sorayyâ-râ.
For on your verse the sky has strewm the necklace of the Pleiades.

Home planet department.

Trump tweeted (forsooth) that he had “targeted 52 Iranian sites, some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD!”

“52,” precisely, must be based on detailed intelligence?  No, it was the number of American hostages at the last Iran crisis.

So which cultural sites are to be bombed?  Universities, the holy cities of Qom and Mashhad, the tombs of the poets, the Koran Gate into Shiraz, the Gonbad-e Qabus tower,  Isfahan’s fire temple and trembling minaret and Pul-e-Khaju bridge and Armenian cathedral?

These images are of poor quality, I’m afraid, because they were slides taken of my paintings before I parted with them.  They show the ancient capital Persepolis and the Madrasee-ye Chahar Bagh or college of the four gardens, one of the blue-domed monuments of Isfahan.

Attacking sites of cultural heritage is a war crime under international law binding on the U.S.  To destroy them would be to descend to the level of the Taliban fanatics who shelled the Buddha cliff sculptures of Bamian in Afghanistan and the Islamic State fanatics who destroyed the statues and temples of Palmyra.

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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.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after positing it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more;, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

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