THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
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70 Falmouth Street   Portland, Maine 04103
43.6667° N                   70.2667° W
Altitude:  10 feet below sea level
Founded January 1970
Julian Date: 2458829.16
2019-2020:  LXIX
                "Hey, why did the surrealist cross the road?"
                "Why?"
                "Lemon."


THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
At the Tip of the Sagittarius Stream

...a solitary creature looks expectantly  toward its eastern horizon  From
our perspective he appears quite monstrous:  a bulging eye forming an
equilateral triangle with two recessed eyes below.   Protruding from its
curved back a self-luminescent dorsal fin points spire like toward a sky
black as pitch.   The glow he exudes allows us to barely see swirls of his
exhalation vapors that resemble smoke billowing around a neon green light.
   He doesn't cut a particularly appealing figure.    Of course -no
offense- he would be similarly repulsed by us.   Not that he'll ever see
us.   He's thousands of light years away and, besides, from his time frame,
we've all been dead for about 170,000 years..

He jerks his head up as a meteor slices across the unbunded abyss above:
one in which stars are few, faint and far between.   His mood, at first
dour owing to the early hour, becomes hopeful.    He scans the landscape
dappled by many other luminescent figures scattered in all directions.
The glowing figures are showing sudden pulsations: unmistakable signs of
building excitement.    Another brilliant meteor, one with a persistent
train that leaves a slowly dissolving phantom trail in its wave, heightens
the tension.    The three that quickly follow within the next few moments
are greeted with a blaze of blinking lights stretching apparently ad
infinitum.     The crowds are growing rapidly.

_______________________________________________________
*Now the stupid DA is going to interrupt:*
Hello!  My apologies.    You've been listening (or reading) a transmission
from the Pantheitkeran mechanism.  We've installed it around the perimeter
of our  star dome.   Imagine the frequency spectrum as found on your radio,
except we have 17 of them: each one wrapped around the dome circumference,
one atop another.   Each spectrum consists of  196611 settings.    (I
gather that both 17 and 196611 represent
two of the 31 known odd-sided constructible polygons and for some reason
that matters with this mechanism.)  Each setting offers a different view on
some point in space-time that appears in full dome clarity on our dome.
For instance -yes, I know you've fallen asleep- imagine that on strip Alpha
I aligned point 10,235 with point 8,345 on strip Beta while the other
strips remain in the neutral position. (Of course we pretentious twerps
used Greek lettering.) That would show me a certain space-time point. (a
dazzling cityscape on a sultry desert world somewhere in the galaxy NGC
3982 about 1.7 million years ago.)   Now, if I maintained the two upper
positions and shifted the Zeta spectrum so that the point 1,893 aligned
with the points in strip one and two, I would watch another ST point (That
time it was just a convex eye glowering furiously back at me somewhere in
one of the 509 globular clusters surrounding the Andromeda  Galaxy 310
years from now, so, yippie, I've made a new friend.)*
If I weren't such a mathematical fool, I could tell you how many possible
settings exist.

[image: Sig07-008.jpg]

At the beginning of this article, you were reading about a bio-luminescent
species living on a planet revolving around a star at the very tip of the
Sagittarius Star Stream. See the image above.  Our friends are perched
literally at the "top" of this stream.  It was produced by the tidal forces
the Milky Way Galaxy exerted on the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy.
These polar loops consist of stars stripped away from this dwarf galaxy.
Over the course of more than a billion years, these stars will eventually
become incorporated into our galaxy.  Now, they are moving rapidly like
chairs on a ferris wheel up and around the Milky Way.

We've been watching them marking the "Arrival of the Lights."   (We can't
hear them, of course, and wouldn't have the faintest idea about their
language anyway.  So the "Arrival of the Lights" is our description of this
event.)     Their planet revolves around a wide orbit centred on an F-type
star that is more luminous than the Sun.  Consequently, its distance is
greater and year correspondingly longer than ours.   At a certain point in
its orbit, the dark side of the planet is directed toward the unbounded
black void of intergalactic space.   However, as it moves toward its
equinox point, the planet maneuvers around toward the clusters of stars
comprising the stream arc.       The night sky, which is very dark apart
from a smattering of renegade stars** hurling away from the stream, becomes
a spectacle of brilliant lights as the planet moves toward the stream.

In their late winter, the creatures watch for the first of these stars to
emerge above the eastern horizon before the dawn twilight obscures them.
  (As they are at a high latitude, the rise of their parent star is slow,
affording them the opportunity to watch the stars for many moments before
morning)   In their summer, the night side of the planet is fully immersed
in the nearly pervasive radiance of the star stream:  enough to cast a
luster onto the nightscapes comparable to that we see here under full
moonlight.)    We here in the Orion Cygnus Arm can't imagine seeing by
starlight.

Sorry for this interruption.    Let's go back.
_______________________________________________________

The landscape seems as though it is being swept with a wild fire of
flickering emerald as the throngs of creatures exult in the appearance of
two brilliant stars above the slowly intensifying twilight.  They are
joined by a veritable fireworks display of meteors from their most
prominent shower, which just happens to correspond to the arrival of the
lights.

Within a minute the festivities reach a climax as a fire opal star peeks
above the horizon.   In response, all the creatures gathered in their
hundreds along the landscape arc their faces skyward and welcome the star
with furious belches of flame.        The new season has begun.

Please don't judge them too harshly.  Imagine their reaction if they could
see how we behave....or how we did behave more than a hundred thousand
years in their past.



*Yes, you're right.   Considering the size of our dome, the width of each
spectrum is small and the numbers so ludicrously small that we need special
high powered microscope spectacles to see them.     And, no, we actually
don't go to these places (That would be impossible.)  We merely look onto
them.

**At the setting  Alpha   3,988   Beta 112,183,   Gamma 668   Eta  14,365
Theta 111 one can see the first beast drawn wagons in a prairie town on a
world around one of these flying stars in 96,014 AD



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