Posts Tagged ‘science’
Chaos overhead – the littlest owl, a life lesson and more
The first constellation that every child learns to recognize is the big dipper or Ursa Major (Saptrishi Mandal). Month of May, Ursa Major is overhead. Did you know that you can’t see Ursa Major from either of the poles? It is one of those things that I was theoretically supposed to know, but I didn’t know until someone said it out aloud. Life lesson – even the most commonplace can become the most elusive.
When I was in Antarctica, I did look up at the sky. I was there in the Antarctic summer, when the days are so long that one didn’t have nightfall. But here in Bay Area, when I look up, the Ursa Major is one of the few constellations I can still see with my naked eye. Hidden amongst its stars, is the littlest of gems – the Owl nebula, the small blue ball of fuzz. The Surfboard Galaxy, the little elliptical red fuzz comes with the Owl. This galaxy and its partner nebula are really really far away for our widefield 300mm lens. Even M81 (Bode’s Galaxy) and M82 (Cigar Galaxy), the brightest of the deep sky objects near Ursa Major (link) are far away, these are even further away.
Chaos overhead, the heart nebula
Cosmic loneliness
Today’s story is not about philosophical loneliness, it is about the practical one, the one at cosmic scale.
“Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a distance of over 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), as part of Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System.” –Wikipedia
In the Pale Blue Dot photo, a medium size 666 x 659 pixels, Earth is less than a pixel (0.12 pixels), suspended in a beam of sunlight. This photo was taken at the request of Carl Sagan, who wanted the Voyager to turn around as it passed Neptune’s orbit and picture earth. He went on to speak about this photo, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” Thirty four minutes after that photo in 1990, the Voyager I camera was permanently turned off. Carl Sagan wrote his book Pale Blue Dot in 1994 and he died in 1996 at 62, battling a rare bone marrow disease.
It has taken me 30 years to truly understand what Carl Sagan meant when he said “That’s home”. And that only happened when we found our passion to capture photons from these far off light sources.
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Locomotoring 