The evening sky has changed –
– since I last showed it to you. (See the end note about enlarging illustrations.)
The great winter-evening constellations are lower by about 20 degrees toward the dusk horizon. Venus, well past its April 3-4 passage of the Pleiades, is about 8 degrees lower. The Lyrid meteors of April 21-22 have come and gone, without my having time to create my usual diagrams for them.
I’ve been the prisoner of two endeavors. One was the intense work of finishing the rich details of my Venus book. Its production is now blocked by just one technical problem, which I hope to get solved today. The other was our move, by 0.76 degree of latitude northward, from Lyme Regis to Isleworth. It wasn’t so much of a struggle, but books and papers are still mostly in piled boxes, for lack of shelves.
It’s a less hilly environment. I can ride around in one gear, whereas on Lyme’s cliffs and valleys I had to change gear every few seconds.
It’s an urban instead of a rural environment – or should be, since it’s part of London. That was why we had to move. Without a car, life in a place far from even a train station had become too impractical. Yet we are deeper in greenery. Immediately across the water from us is an uninhabited island. And around are some of the large green lungs of western London:
This is my schematic map, with more detail near the focus of interest, the short row in Old Isleworth where we are. Isleworth was once a village on the left bank of the Thames, a dozen miles upstream from mediaeval London.
A bit more about its name, which has nothing to do with islands – its first part rhymes with “reprisal.” It was recorded as Gislheresuuyrth in an Anglo-Saxon document of 695, and Gistelesworde in the Domesday Book of 1086, the Norman warlord’s census of the nation he had conquered. So it was the worth or “enclosure, field” of a Saxon called Gislher.
Yet Isleworth is alongside an island in the Thames, called Isleworth Eyot. The word eyot, prounounced and also alternatively spelt ait, means a small island in a river. I remember listening on the radio to the annual race on the Thames between the rowing teams of Oxford and Cambridge, and the commentator referring to landmarks such as Chiswick Eyot.
The word for “island” in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) was a short one, ieg or ig. It is preserved in the endings of place names such as Chertsey, Chelsea, Anglesea, Jersey. Eyot is that word with a diminutive ending. Isle is a borrowing through French from Latin insula. (And it takes the diminutive ending: islet.) There was a combination ig-land, ilamd, which was later misunderstood as a compound of isle and land and so came in the 18th century to be spelt with a silent s: island.
And, by the way, the island nation Iceland is in its own language Island, which means “ice land.”
Isleworth, even though its name does not refer to islands, is not only alongside an island in a river, on the island called Great Britain, it is partly on another sort of island. The Thames has a tributary called the Crane, which comes out a bit south of us. And the Crane has a distributary, that is, a stream branching off it, called the Duke of Northumberland’s River, which take a devious course and comes out only a few yards to the south of us. Though called rivers, they are brooks, partly hidden. So the area between them, though an island, doesn’t feel like one.
Not so the Ait, as its devotees prefer to call it. It is nine acres of undisturbed forest, the tidal waters around it patrolled by swans.
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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.
Swans are quite expert at patrolling their territory! And those necks can sure stretch – I know this from experience. :D
Have you ever been to King’s Observatory? Looks like it’s 5 km by bicycle, or 1 km if you can swim across the Thames.
Not yet. I’m sure it’s closed at present. More about this locality to come. Not too much at one (modification of the Greek saying “Meden agan” – “Nothing in excess£).
Be a window of opportunity,you might not get again unless you join Donald Trump in talking up golf!!,to visit the Kings observatory.i read that it’s a private dwelling now and on a golf course and not visible from outside of the golf course.all the golf courses are shut at the moment and I have done a lot of trespassing on my local course exploring some ponds I never knew where there in 30 years because they’re hidden on the golf course.as I have no intention of taking up golf I’d never have known about these ponds had covid-19 not come along.
I’ll add a PS to the above; just been researching the Kings observatory.it was built on the orders of George the 3rd to observe the transit of Venus.it still has a large brass telescope,a refractor guessing around 6″?.a site called ianvisits has quite a detailed article about a visit to it.it looks like it has public tours.it would appear to be a private residence and owned by some wealthy Hong Kong oligarchs.im quite interested in human observations of the skies and thus have visited quite a few observatories but not been in them all.apart from Greenwich there’s another in London too at Mill Hill although the only London one I’ve been to is Greenwich
The Kings observatory is similar in style to Oxford observatory now Green Templeton college, Oxford (was plain Green but merged with Templeton a few years ago).
How fortunate for you that Covid-19 came along, Too bad about all the dead, but at least it gave you an opportunity to trespass.
You’re fortunate to have such a long documented history of where you live. People have lived in this land that we now call California for thousands of years, but our written history only goes back to Spanish colonists in the 18th century CE. There are still some oral traditions among the few surviving native people, but much more has been lost.
Many of the locals might insist Isleworth is Middlesex rather than London which it probably was until 1974.many of these outer London suburbs like to style themselves as belonging to the old countries they where in such as Kingston, Surrey or Bromley, Kent.for some reason the Post office kept Middlesex as a postal address long after it ceased to exist but those further north and west had such modern counties as Avon, Tyne and Wear,merseyside, West Yorkshire,etc imposed with great enthusiasm by the authorities but in London there you have Uxbridge, Middlesex!