Baby Planet

Bede sent me a link to this news: Hawaii astronomer captures image of forming planet

However, the picture you will see is an artist's rendering.

The newly forming planet's name is LkCa 15 b, and it's 450 light years away. "LkCa 15 b" is no name for a newborn. How about Luka Callista?

Alice's Celestial Globe

The Bainbridge Island library has a copy of Alice's Celestial Globe made by Greaves and Thomas. John Tenniel's illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Thought the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There are matched with many of the known constellations. The link has photos that are much better than the ones I took last Friday plus explanations of the constellations.



The Orrery Cafe in the Isle of Wight is a planetarium that depicts Alice's celestial globe. When the House of Glee finally visits England, we must also visit the Isle of Wight for the Orrery Cafe alone.

Five Year Celebration and a Giveaway

[Note to those reading this in RSS readers: this is the real blog post.]

Five years ago, I started a storytelling blog. My daughter was not yet two years old and I was still working as a children's librarian on a substitute basis. I had as a goal for that year to learn guitar or sewing, and surprised everyone (most of all myself) when I started lessons for both. Throughout the years, I've learned to know new people through blogging and have even got to meet some of them. Relationships with old friends with whom I'd been out of touch as well as acquaintances who've became good friends have been possible because of blogging.

I'm thankful for all of you. Today's celebration is in thanks for your friendship. I am hosting a giveaway of a doll I made especially for this day: an Astronomy Magus to aid you in storytelling or inspire you as you work.

The doll is made with hand-dyed dark blue wool felt and embroidered with blue and white stitches. To enter the giveaway, please leave a comment on this post with a reflection on one or more of the following items:

1. A description of a beloved story from your childhood that you have not yet located. Be as specific as possible, and someone might be able to find the information to reunite you with that story.

2. A song you really enjoy that you don't think a lot of people know. Please provide a verse or two.

3. A scenario of a book you would love to read that to the best of your knowledge has not been written. Only share the story idea if you're not planning to write it yourself!

4. Explain quantum theory as if it were a story.

I will need to be able to contact the recipient of the Astronomy Magus, either through an email address found on your blog/website profile or through a private email you sent directly to me at: saintsandspinners [at] gmail [dot] com. If you send me a private email, please be assured that I will not use your address for any purpose but this giveaway.

"Why an Astronomy Magus?" you might ask. Some of you know how much I love outer space. The science-fiction I enjoy most has to do with interplanetary travel. You might not have been aware that when Carl Sagan says, "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be," my soul leaps with joy, but you've probably suspected that I watched every episode of the new Battlestar Galactica series. It is my hope that when I bring my first book-length story to completion, it will incorporate stories, songs and textiles into a science-fiction genre. That is why the Astronomy Magus is my gift.

The drawing for the Astronomy Magus ends Friday, February 26, at 6 P.M. Pacific Standard Time. You may comment multiple times, but each name will be entered only once. Parents and siblings of the House of Glee plus Brad the Gorilla are welcome to comment but will not be eligible for the drawing.

"Once In a Blue Moon"

I just found out that today is a blue moon day. According to an article in Sky and Telescope magazine, What's a Blue Moon?, by by Roger W. Sinnott, Donald W. Olson, and Richard Tresch Fienberg, the popular definition of a blue moon as a full moon that occurs twice in one month is inaccurate, as it originally refers to a third full moon in a season of four. However, as the article points out, the term "blue moon" as used to refer to two full moons in a month has been in use for over two decades. Far from causing any harm, it actually encourages interest in astronomy.

The year 2009 has been a hard one for a lot of people, my family included. Sometimes I've forgotten the blessings when the difficulties pressed down upon my spirits. It's been helpful to do the "Seven Kicks" Sunday check-in at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast as an exercise in gratitude. In brief, here are seven astronomy-based items for which I am glad:

1. A newly discovered exoplanet is made mostly of boiling water. As a friend said, "Now, we need to figure out how to send the Earth's biggest teabag to that planet."

2. At this time, I can see all of Carl Sagan's Cosmos online.

3. There are only 4 1/2 years to go before New Horizons reaches Pluto.

4. I'm glad for every time Jupiter's gravitational pull deflects an asteroid or comet from heading toward Earth a la Deep Impact.

5. I appreciate seeing the Orion constellation in the sky of the northern hemisphere during the winter season. (One of the reasons I want to visit the southern hemisphere someday is to be able to see a completely different array of constellations.)

6. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity are still functioning, though it appears that Spirit is still stuck.

7. This year, I got to see Jupiter through a telescope for the first time. The telescope wasn't very strong, but I did see the bands!

Reaching for Exoplanets

Exoplanet photo from the Enersec website

Bede's current fascination is with exoplanets, also known as extrasolar planets. I've always been excited by the possibility of planets outside our solar system and life on those planets. Now that the scientists of planet Earth have actually discovered over 300 exoplanets with an estimated hundred billion just in the Milky Way galaxy, I don't feel elated. I'm actually a little depressed about them. Expense and duration of space-travel aside, the radiation from solar-flares make human space-travel so far out of reach.

Speaking of the duration of space-travel, is there anyway we could hurry up the wormhole technology or whatever it's going to take in order to travel great distances? We won't see proper photos of Pluto for another 5 1/2 years, but at least there's a good chance I'll see them in my lifetime.

I'm not much of a traveler here on Earth. I'd always dreamed of visiting different places, but I don't even like to drive the car over the bridge to Puget Sound's East Side. Still, there is something within that is akin to an ache for humans to travel through space. The premise of Sylvia Louise Engdahl's early books was that every civilization reached a critical point where they would choose either to focus their energies on space travel or on destroying each other. On some level, I still believe that as well.

I remember the first time I heard Carl Sagan utter the words, "The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be." I was eight or nine years old. At the time, I had no idea that Sagan was an atheist, and I would have been incredulous had you told me. It gave me shivers that were part expectation, part longing. When I looked at the night sky, and rather than feeling insignificant, I had a glimpse of Albert Einstein's "sensation of the mystical":

The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

Since this is Poetry Friday, it is fitting to end with the two most vivid lines from the poem about the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, The Old Astronomer to His Pupil, by Sarah Williams:

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

Science to Science-Fiction to Silliness

New York Times article: Vatican’s Celestial Eye, Seeking Not Angels but Data, by George Johnson:

Last year, in an opening address at a conference in Rome, called “Science 400 Years After Galileo Galilei,” Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state of the Vatican, praised the church’s old antagonist as “a man of faith who saw nature as a book written by God.” In May, as part of the International Year of Astronomy, a Jesuit cultural center in Florence conducted “a historical, philosophical and theological re-examination” of the Galileo affair. But in the effort to rehabilitate the church’s image, nothing speaks louder than a paper by a Vatican astronomer in, say, The Astrophysical Journal or The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

While we're on the subject of outer space, let me call attention to a poem about the astronomer Tycho Brahe that my mom reintroduced to me during my Santa Fe visit: The Old Astronomer, by Sarah Williams. I suspect my first exposure to the poem might have come through Madeleine L'Engle in one of her Crosswicks journals, but I'm not sure. (Those of you with fresher memories, do you know?) The lines that resonate:

Though my soul may set in darkness,
it will rise in perfect light.
I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night.

When we were in Santa Fe, Bede and I went out one night to look at the stars. We could see them clearly as we were far away from the city lights. Like so many others, we wished we could go out to the stars. We're convinced we're not alone in the universe, but think it's probably no mistake that we're all so far apart. Look what we do on our own planet.

Speaking of our own planet, I just picked up The Many Colored Land, by Julian May. It's a science-fiction novel published in the early 1980's about people in the future who decide to travel back in time on a one-way ticket to the Pliocene epoch in the hopes of living out the rest of their lives without being pestered. Instead, they encounter enslavement by an alien race that landed on Earth as part of their own exile. It's up to our intrepid heroes to save Earth from those dastardly aliens so they don't ruin it for the humans millions of years later.

I'm surprised that no one has yet made a television series out of this concept. I suspect that if they did, they'd change the epoch so they could fit in dinosaurs somehow a la Land of the Lost.