Category: Space

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Venus and Mercury

At the age of 34, I’ve finally seen the planet Mercury.* It’s notoriously difficult to spot, but when I read that it was going to be very close to Venus for the next few days, I had to try.

As it turns out, I was able to see it from a local grocery store parking lot. I left the car just as Venus was becoming visible, concerned by the clouds starting to drift past, and left the store to a clear twilight sky and a “star” below and to the right of Venus…exactly where Mercury should be!

*Of course I’ve seen photos, but I’d never seen the planet directly with my own eyes — or if I have, I didn’t recognize it.

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Do you believe there is other intelligent life in distant galaxies? If no, why not? If yes, do you believe this is something to be feared and avoided or actively sought out?

Could there be? Certainly. Have we seen any sign of it, or any reason to believe that it is there? Not yet.

I remember seeing a poster in one of my high school science classrooms that said something like, “Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both possibilities are overwhelming.” A quick Google search determines that it’s a paraphrase of Arthur C. Clarke, though there seems to be some disagreement as to his original phrasing, and whether the two ideas were overwhelming, staggering, terrifying, etc. However it was phrased, I think it’s a fitting summary.

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One evening last week I looked to the west and saw a bright light above the horizon. I couldn’t tell whether it was moving or not, and wondered: was it an airplane, or Venus?

I couldn’t remember whether Venus was visible in the evening or morning (or at all) right now. It was roughly in the direction of an airport, so it could easily have been a helicopter or an airplane traveling at an angle roughly in line with my line of sight. By the time I got home, buildings and trees blocked the horizon, so I didn’t think much more of it.

I’m in California. Interestingly enough, thousands of miles away in Ohio, people have been seeing a bright light in the west every night for the past week and making UFO reports.

Last night I decided to see how early I could spot Venus, and caught it fairly high in the sky just after sunset. It was hard to see without really looking for it because the sky was still light, but it became a lot easier as the sky darkened. Not surprisingly, as it set and brightened in the dimming sky, it passed through roughly the area I remembered seeing the unidentified light last week. Mystery solved.

I don’t understand why, in a world full of airplanes, helicopters and the occasional blimp — not to mention a world where we see stars and planets every night (barring clouds and light pollution) — people jump past these mundane explanations when they see a light in the night sky and decide it must be an alien spacecraft.

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NeptuneThis morning I saw some wavy clouds that reminded me of the patterns you see in pictures of Jupiter. I started thinking about gas giant planets, and had an odd moment of realization: when I was a kid, astronomy books didn’t have actual photos of Uranus or Neptune. They couldn’t have — there weren’t any! There were nice photos of Jupiter and Saturn from the Voyager missions, but Voyager 2 didn’t reach Uranus until 1986, or Neptune until 1989.

The really weird thing, though: modern astronomy books do have photos of Neptune — but the ones for general audiences probably all use the same picture I got as a framed poster when I was in high school. We haven’t been back in 20 years. Jupiter and Saturn have gotten a lot of attention, partly because they’re a lot closer and partly because their ring and moon systems are so fascinating. So we have a more continuous view of those planets and how they change over time.

Neptune? One snapshot (metaphorically speaking) of the planet from 20 years ago. Everything before and everything since then has been done with telescopes. Even the Hubble barely has the resolution to tell that the Great Dark Spot broke up sometime between 1989 and 1994. That’s something that maybe shouldn’t have surprised anyone, given how quickly storms form and dissipate on Earth, but back in 1989 it seemed so much like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (going on 400 years or longer) that it was easy to think it too would be persistent.

It’s a good reminder that the universe beyond Earth does change with the passage of time…even on a human scale.

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The Station Fire burning through the Angeles National Forest north of Los Angeles is expected to reach the summit of Mt. Wilson sometime tonight. In all likelihood it will damage or destroy the communications towers and the observatory complex. The Mount Wilson Observatory is an active observatory, and is also of historical importance because of discoveries made there over its 105-year history. In particular: Edwin Hubble’s* observations with the 100-inch Hooker telescope (shown at right) indicated that universe is much larger than was previously thought, and that it was expanding — observations that revolutionized astronomy and led to the current Big Bang theory.

People listening to a talk, lots of pictures of the sun printed out on the wall.I’ve been to the observatory once, on a tour my family took on August 8, 1992. We’d just come back from a trip to Florida where we visited Disney World and Cape Canaveral during the summer I was 16. I really wish I could remember more about the trip…but I took pictures and labeled them (though not in much detail). With the observatory threatened, I thought I’d dig them out and scan them**. You can see all eight on my Mt. Wilson Observatory Tour 1992 photoset on Flickr.

Forested mountain valley with a hazy white sky.The Observatory’s website is apparently hosted on the grounds, so the fact that its fire status page is still responding indicates it’s still there and has power. The latest update says that they’re setting up a backup info page, but it’s showing a 404 error right now.

*As in the Hubble Space Telescope.

**Scanning them was not a problem. Digging them out? That was a problem. I knew exactly which photo album they were in, and thought I knew where the album was. As it turned out, it wasn’t there. It was in an unopened box shoved at the very back of the long,narrow hall closet, such that I had to move 3 other boxes, several bags, and an unused CD rack just to see that it was labeled “photo albums” on top. Edit: And, oh yeah, the trail of ants along the wall, going after the long-forgotten bag of Halloween candy. The wall I kept brushing up against. How did I forget that part?

That’s the missing piece that makes the classic phrase more than a simple tautology. It’s not just that it’s in the last place you look. It’s that it’s in the last place you want to look.