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Astronomy PDF

984 Pages·1991·41.12 MB·English
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THE BIG ENDIANS; OR, USES OF THE SKY HDT WHAT? INDEX ASTRONOMY ASTRONOMY “Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of its nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the coloured, magnifying, and distorted medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after- thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expensive for Providence to write a people’s doom upon. The belief was a favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar intimacy and strictness.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne, THE SCARLET LETTER “The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore. Many would happily move to somewhere smaller of their own devising, and this what most beings in fact do.” — Douglas Adams (from LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING, the 3rd book of the HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY “trilogy in five parts”) 2 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX ASTRONOMY ASTRONOMY Larry Klaes < HDT WHAT? INDEX ASTRONOMY ASTRONOMY Basically, he looked upward for juicy and fruitful metaphors: A WEEK: The sun-setting presumed all men at leisure, and in a contemplative mood; but the farmer’s boy only whistled the more thoughtfully as he drove his cows home from pasture, and the teamster refrained from cracking his whip, and guided his team with a subdued voice. The last vestiges of daylight at length disappeared, and as we rowed silently along with our backs toward home through the darkness, only a few stars being visible, we had little to say, but sat absorbed in thought, or in silence listened to the monotonous sound of our oars, a sort of rudimental music, suitable for the ear of Night and the acoustics of her dimly lighted halls; “Pulsae referunt ad sidera valles,” and the valleys echoed the sound to the stars. As we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were reminded that it was a rare imagination which first taught that the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on mankind. It is recorded in the Chronicle of Bernaldez, that in Columbus’s first voyage the natives “pointed towards the heavens, making signs that they believed that there was all power and holiness.” We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man. The stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most memorable experiences. “Let the immortal depth of your soul lead you, but earnestly extend your eyes upwards.” ASTRONOMY 13,000,000,000 BCE circa 13,000,000,000 BCE: There was this big bang — we’ve been waiting ever since, for the other shoe to drop. 4 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX ASTRONOMY ASTRONOMY 24,000 BCE circa 24,000 BCE: At this point the precession of the planet Earth was such that Polaris was its pole star. The Earth’s axis precesses (it is like a wobbling top) in a 26,000-year cycle. This cycle known as precession is caused by the gravitational attraction of the sun and the moon, acting on the fact that the planet Earth is not quite spherical. In about 14,000 years, Vega (the brightest star in the constellation Lyra) would become the North Star, and then in another 5,000 years it would be Alpha Cephei (the brightest star in the constellation Cepheus), and in the time of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the pole star would be Thuban (the brightest star in the constellation Draco), but at the completion of the entire cycle of 26,000 years –in our current era known as civilization– it would come to be Polaris again. ASTRONOMY 18,000 BCE-8,000 BCE A gigantic and exceedingly bright comet known only as “The Kreutz Sungrazer Parent” evidently whipped around the sun in a close arc on some date and then disintegrated into a swarm of lesser sungrazing comets due to the tugs of gravitational attraction. Brian Marsden has opinioned that perhaps the two halves of the original split of this comet might have persisted until, respectively, 371 BCE (a comet mentioned by Aristotle) and 1106 CE, disintegrating further on those visits into at least three pieces each. ASTRONOMY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX ASTRONOMY ASTRONOMY 6 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX ASTRONOMY ASTRONOMY 9,000 BCE circa 9,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE: The Maya were making astronomical inscriptions and constructions in Central America. A marked bone from this time (or as late as 6,500 BC) has been found in Zaire that probably was used as a record of months and lunar phases. Goats and sheep were domesticated in Iran and Afghanistan. They were yummy. Emmer wheat and barley were cultivated in Canaan. They were yummy. Yummy yummy in the human tummy. ASTRONOMY 3,200 BCE Astronomy began in Sumeria and Akkadia with a period of simple description. Through the later portion of this period, most such names were Sumerian, so some at least must have been of Sumerian origin. • People watched the sky, and identified and assigned names to the sun, the moon, some of the planets, and some of the stars and constellations of stars. • The “two ways” scheme for the division of the sky was devised. • Informal astronomical knowledge was intertwingled with mythical themes. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX ASTRONOMY ASTRONOMY 3,000 BCE circa 3,000 BCE to 2,900 BCE: Cuneiform writing was developed by the Sumerians as an outgrowth of their method of recording numbers. Impressions of clay tokens used for showing measures of grain were becoming standardized as the first numerals: a small measure of grain was in the process of becoming the number 1, while a larger measure was becoming the number 10 (in approximately the same period, symbols would also be introduced for the multiple quantities 60 and 360). The Babylonians were able to predict some eclipses. Tooth filling was occurring in Sumer. Donkeys and mules were being domesticated in what is now Israel. 8 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX ASTRONOMY ASTRONOMY At about this point, in Uruk, mud tablets were being inscribed with references to a “Festival of the Morning Goddess, Ianna” and a “Festival of the Evening Goddess, Ianna” — presumably these would have been references to the planet Venus in its roles as morning star and evening star. A WEEK: The anecdotes of modern astronomy affect me in the same way as do those faint revelations of the Real which are vouchsafed to men from time to time, or rather from eternity to eternity. When I remember the history of that faint light in our firmament, which we call Venus, which ancient men regarded, and which most modern men still regard, as a bright spark attached to a hollow sphere revolving about our earth, but which we have discovered to be another world, in itself, — how Copernicus, reasoning long and patiently about the matter, predicted confidently concerning it, before yet the telescope had been invented, that if ever men came to see it more clearly than they did then, they would discover that it had phases like our moon, and that within a century after his death the telescope was invented, and that prediction verified, by Galileo, — I am not without hope that we may, even here and now obtain some accurate information concerning that OTHER WORLD which the instinct of mankind has so long predicted. Indeed, all that we call science, as well as all that we call poetry, is a particle of such information, accurate as far as it goes, though it be but to the confines of the truth. If we can reason so accurately, and with such wonderful confirmation of our reasoning, respecting so-called material objects and events infinitely removed beyond the range of our natural vision, so that the mind hesitates to trust its calculations even when they are confirmed by observation, why may not our speculations penetrate as far into the immaterial starry system, of which the former is but the outward and visible type? Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, — these are some of our astronomers. ASTRONOMY NICOLAS COPERNICUS VENUS At about this period, in Mesopotamian astronomy, the Sumerians were establishing their lunar calendar. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 9 HDT WHAT? INDEX ASTRONOMY ASTRONOMY 2,807 BCE May 10, morning: There has recently been speculation that the “Burkle crater” on the floor of the Indian Ocean at 12,500 feet depth, which is 18 miles in diameter, was produced by an impact on this date. The speculation is that this impact produced a tsunami at least 600 feet high, which carried large amounts of ocean-floor sediments onto the coast of Madagascar, producing four enormous wedge-shaped deposits now referred to as “chevrons.” It is Dr. Bruce Masse of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico who has on the basis of cultural records hypothesized that the impact object was a comet and that its strike date was precisely the morning of May 10th in the year 2,807 BCE. (Dr. Masse does acknowledge that since his evidence for the precise date is merely cultural, and since our oral cultures do not do an excellent job of preserving exactitude, the creation of more lines of inference would be appropriate: “we’re not there yet.”) Because we’re not there yet, Columbia University is just now proposing to send a graduate student to collect megatsunami deposits from around the Indian Ocean: Pinpointing the Causes of Holocene Megatsunami Events in Australia Working under the supervision of Dallas Abbott, Adjunct Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the goal of this project is to study sets of Holocene age chevron dunes, in Australia all of which are inferred to be megatsunami deposits. The project seeks to identify the ejecta from the Burkle crater and/or tsunami deposits in bog of lake cores from around the Indian Ocean. This can be accomplished by looking for intervals of abnormally rapid sediment deposition and coarse sediment deposition within the cores. The Burkle impact tsunami should have emplaced chevron dunes in Madagascar and southern Africa. The student will be a partner in an international consortium for tsunami research involving social and earth scientists in Australia, North America and Russia. To accommodate an academic schedule the project will include library work and lab work. The student will use the library to find data on sediment deposition in lakes and coastal areas around the Indian Ocean. The student will also search for, order, and look at maps of Holocene coastal dune deposits in Madagascar and southeastern Africa. The student will spend one day a week at Lamont looking for impact ejecta in deposits from continental and deep sea cores. SKY EVENT 10 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith

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