Red Mars and white Venus are about to set in the west, and up in the south is red Antares, the heart of the Scorpion.
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
That ragged vertical line of stars that precedes Antares: there is continual uncertainty about what to call this asterism? – how to refer to it briefly? Anciently, Scorpio included what later became Libra, which was then the scorpion’s claws, so those stars were his fierce face. Are they now his reduced claws, or his head?
How about “the Portcullis”? As the Sun makes his way across the moat of Libra, an evil lord threatens to stop him by dropping the portcullis. Mixing metaphors is part of the fun of talking about constellations and asterisms – star patterns other than constellations. Think of the Coat-Hanger asterism making up much of constellation Vulpecula the “little fox,” or star cluster M44, which is called Praesepe, the Manger, but also the Beehive, and is the carapace of Cancer, the crab.
Heaven to Earth department
This looks like a portcullis, ready to descend and exclude enemies or skewer them if they don’t halt soon enough.
But it’s only an ornamental memory of a portcullis, and you’re invited into this grand space:
Does it remind you of Hogwarts Castle? It was the movie-makers’ model for that. It’s the Great Hall of Christchurch, a college of Oxford University, and we had breakfast at those long tables because we were guests for a couple of nights.
Hanging high along the sides and ends of any college Great Hall are sixty or so portraits of former dignitaries. Seldom does anyone try to read the brass plaques on the frames. These portraits are arranged in perfect symmetry, corresponding with the spacing of the wall panels and the windows above. The symmetry would be shattered by adding just one. So what happens when the portrait of the next retiring Master of the college has to be hung?
Do you know? I don’t. It would be easier to add a star to an asterism.
Christchurch is a vast college, and In the summer absence of students it had a slightly grim castle-like look.
The central opening on the far side of this main quad is the entrance to a cathedral – though one of the smallest – and that spire is the spire of a cathedral.
As we made our way to the college, we were helped by a street map, of the kind that is now frequent on lampposts in British streets, and I was amused to see that the spot on the map that had to be Christchurch college was mis-labeled “Christchurch Cathedral.” But it’s true; the cathedral is inside the college. I had never heard of a cathedral being inside a college, and indeed it is unique.
A local enthusiast tried to explain to us the complex history, but I’ve had to piece it together since.
1122: Frideswide, patron saint of Oxford, founded a nunnery here; it became a place of pilgrimage. 1129: another monastic foundation was at Osney, beside an island in the Thames just upstream from Oxford. 1525: Cardinal Wolsey, wishing to found what he intended to call Cardinal College, seized St Frideswide’s and began to build. 1529: king Henry VIII seized it from Wolsey and made the college his own foundation, calling it Christchurch. 1529: the abbey at Osney was dissolved, and its abbot became the first bishop of Oxford. 1546: Henry brought the seat of the bishop from Osney to Christchurch. (A “cathedral church” is one containing the cathedra, seat, of a bishop.) So the church within the college is both the cathedral of the diocese and a chapel of the university.
Oxford town is quite widely separated from the Thames by flat land that must have been marshy. Christchurch is along the southern side of the town, and the band of green lowland has become Christchurch Meadow. So the southern side of the college is almost like a town wall, and is on the slight brink down to the meadow. We were lucky to be given a room in the Meadow Building. We had to find our way down to it through stone stairways and dark stone passages and smaller courtyards. The room looked straight out onto the meadow, and was next to a portal out to it. So to get to the eastern end of the town, with the boat hire place and the botanical garden, we could walk along the meadow as an alternative to the town high street.
In Matthew Arnold’s great poem “The Scholar Gipsy,” a student abandons his studies for a life with the wandering people, gains a kind of immortality by his persistence in trying to learn their secrets, and haunts the countryside south of Oxford. (This stretch of countryside was part of the traditional county of Berkshire but was torn away to Oxfordshire in the bureaucratic reshuffling of the 1970s.) On a winter night the wanderer looks back from the Cumnor Hills toward Oxford and glimpses:
`”The line of festal lights in Christ-Church hall”
I once, when working in a library, had a colleague to whose eyes this line – the line of verse, the line of lights – almost brought tears. It symbolized the nostalgia he felt for his Oxford student days. Bernard Robinson, scholar of Syriac, where are you now?
__________
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 publishing 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.
The Coat Hanger asterism in Vulpecula must surely be different than the Coathanger asterism between Altair and Vega. The second one I know quite well – a popular summertime favorite.
The coathanger in Vulpecula is about seven degrees south of Albireo, roughly on a line between Altair and Vega. I think we’re all talking about the same asterism.
A great poem indeed! Twenty-five ten line stanzas telling a story within a story within a story, with a rhyming pattern that I don’t remember seeing elsewhere. These few lines touched me:
[…] and we others pine,
And wish the long unhappy dream would end,
And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear;
With close-lipp’d patience for our only friend,
Sad patience, too near neighbour to despair—
I wish the poem came with a pen and ink map of the countryside, like the frontispiece of a Tolkien fantasy novel. And I don’t get the bit with the boats at the end. What’s that about?
That is a great publishing idea: the map of the poem’s landscape.
The last two stanzas do come as a puzzling change of direction. They are an extended simile (introduced by “As”). A Phoenician ship captain sees a Greek ship approaching (apparently in the Aegean, Greek waters where the Phoenicians had been the dominant mariners as all over the Mediterranean), realizes that this new race has now become the “masters of the waves”, and indignantly takes off westward, all the way along the Mediterranean and out into the undiscovered ocean, and lands to trade with a country the Greeks have not reached.
The poet seems to be advising the Scholar Gypsy to keep on flying from contact with “our” modernity. I’m afraid the choice of the simile can be criticized, since the Greeks are described as “young light-hearted”, whereas it is modern society that is “sad with mental strife”.
When I discovered this poem, what I loved was not the philosophy but the natural history! – the named flowers and other evocative detail of that countryside southward from the Thames, toward the chalk scarp that is the boundary of a different geographical region.
When I used to read things aloud to Tilly, Arnold’s “The Forsaken Merman” was the archetype of those I could not read without being choked by the onset of sentimental tears. “Dover Beach” is another famous poem.
An article I once saw in, I think, American Scholar (the journal of Phi Beta Kappa) contrasted Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) unfavorably with T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). How can you compare poets of such different eras and kinds? This was for me a prime example of how stupid literary criticism can be. (I wish I could recover the source.)
Ha.
I just bought (for fifty cents, at a local book fair) a copy of Margery Williams’s “The Velveteen Rabbit” with the original William Nicholson illustrations.
.
I’ll probably have as much luck getting through reading it to my little granddaughter as I did reading it to her mother when she was little.
Kenneth A. Heisler,M.D.
Thanks Guy. I wouldn’t have been able to follow the boat metaphor without your explication. Yes, the flowers, agriculture, weather, landscape, times of day and seasons are all depicted with care and affection, a beautiful picture. That’s why I want a map, so I can follow along. I may have to piece one together from google maps, although that wouldn’t have the charm of a hand drawn map.
Dover Beach is the only Arnold poem I’m familiar with. You’re inspiring me to look further into his poetry.
My astronomy club had our first star party for a year and a half on Mount Tamalpais at the most recent new Moon. The weather was very clear all night long, and Scorpius was transiting the meridian during and immediately after twilight. Definitely the star of the show. I scanned through Scorpius, Ophiuchus, Serpens, Sagittarius, and Scutum with mounted 15×70 binoculars, just glorious.
I prefer to see Zubenelgenubi and Zubenelshamali as the claws of the scorpion, although others may see them as the brightest stars of Libra. I also picture Coma Berenices as the tail of Leo. And then there’s the gazelle leaping along the toes of the great bear. The sky is an crosscultural palimpsest of the human imagination going back to prehistory. Rejecting one asterism in favor of another is a bit like saying that TS Eliot was a better poet than Matthew Arnold.
Yes, science ever works toward one interpretation of earth and sky, art toward many.
The best maps are the Ordnance Survey’s. They come close to being picture of the ground. Unfortunately I’ve given or thrown away (unless I yet find them in boxes) almost all of the almost complete collection I had of the England inch-to-the-mile series (scale 1:63,360) and its metric successor at 1:100,000. Even better are the larger-scale 2-1/2 inch series and metric successor, and OS republishes historic series from centuries earlier. I’m afraid that by googling for OS maps you find only ways to buy them, not free online maps. Kevin Hubbard may know better.
How wonderful would be a subscription edition of The Scholar Gipsy with introduction and fold-out map of north Berkshire by Anthony Barreiro!
I use the online OS maps now which costs £24 for a year.I still have loads of paper maps mainly 1:50000 and it’s best to take these as a backup as the OS map app can ‘stick’if there’s no signal.It’s best to store the map you want when you have WiFi as relying on the signal is risky in remote districts.Plus of course there’s the phone battery running out!Also losing the phone but then the wind could blow away your paper map as once happened to me in the mountains of Co Kerry and I had to navigate to a road luckily someone gave me a lift to Killarney as I didn’t know where I was!Very bad if you can’t see the Sun,Moon or stars and you have to go off the dominant wind direction!
You’re better off sticking with the ordnance survey maps. My map of Berkshire would be indistinguishable from Middle Earth, or Narnia.
I lived in Oxford for many years staying on after my degree in theology.The Thames was the boundary between Oxfordshire and Berkshire, and the ancient kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex, until 1974 but places like Osney had been moved into Oxfordshire earlier I think in around 1890 as they had effectively become suburbs of Oxford and the English don’t like joined up urban areas being separate municipal areas although they seem to ignore this with the Birmingham area and Manchester and Salford.The USA and France seem fine with urban areas being separate like Boston and Brookline or Paris and Versailles.The evenings are still too light to catch Venus yet as it sets by 23hr but Jupiter and Saturn have been putting on a good show.