THE USM SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
207-780-4249     www.usm.maine.edu/planet
70 Falmouth Street     Portland, Maine  04103
43.6667° N                   70.2667° W 
Altitude:   10 feet below sea level
Founded January 1970
Julian date:  2458630.5
                          "Are you Sirius?"

THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Monday, May 27, 2019
"NO!"

Professor MacGregor shouted -and I mean shouted- as he held the piece of paper up to the class and with what can only be described as a tempestuous fury, ripped in to halves, then quarters, then eighths and then I lost track of the fractions because the once rectangular sheet was rapidly transmuted into a scattering of fragments that fell to the floor like shards of a pulverized fighter jet.

"NO!"
He shouted again, for unneeded emphasis.
I nodded to acknowledge that, yes, well, perhaps I was in err.   You see, it was my piece of paper that he sent careening to its eternal reward in front of the astonished and -to my shame- amused class.       Now that I am about 103 years old and have had decades to reflect on the matter, my resentment at this most public humiliation has waned enough so that I only reflect on it bitterly about four times an hour.

He moved, then, Galileo.   He had been standing in front of me, glowering at me to make sure that I knew the extent of his displeasure.   (The shower of ceiling tile material and the echoes of excited shouts from the seismologists as they eagerly ran outside to investigate the two tremors wasn't enough of indication, apparently.)   That he started pacing was a relief for I felt the urge to inhale oxygen again.

"I asked you all to tell me what astronomy meant to you," MacGregor said in a measurably quieter, but still hardly calm voice.  "And, while I am not enough of an optimist to have expected profound insights or captivating commentaries, I was, at least, hoping that you would exert at least a modicum of thought to provide an answer.   Well, imagine my delight at having had this gentleman's answer at the top of the stack:  compelling evidence that not only do the mischievous old Nordic gods still exist, but they have also retrained a sharp sense of humour despite the ignominy of their status decline. 'What astronomy means to me?!' in bold print, of course.   'It means the study of the Universe above Earth's atmosphere.'  Period.  Stop. The thesis slams to an crashing end."

Well, in my defense, that is exactly how the dictionary described it.

"Sir, I am going to entertain the outlandish hypothesis that you merely copied that from the dictionary."

"No, I didn't!"

"I am also going to suggest that you shall not find posthumous fame as a member of astronomy's grand Pantheon a century hence."

I would have balked had I been certain that statement was meant as an insult.

"Ladies and gentlemen, and here the irony of that description is not lost on me, this is the second day of your astronomy course.    For most, perhaps all, this is day two of an experience that will lapse into an irretrievable oblivion in your memory.  Many of my colleagues aspire to leave indelible impressions in their students' minds as they fear death and therefore yearn for immortality and also seek affirmation of their worth from external sources.   Such is the nature of things: frailty, thy name is human.      My aspirations are far less egocentric, though much grander, for my aim is to teach you astronomy; or, perhaps more accurately, to teach you what it will mean to you to learn astronomy, for I cannot teach astronomy anymore than I can instill affection in an antagonist or empathy in a psychopath."

Incidentally, that last word was his secret nickname until the ravages of old age slowed him so much he became  known merely as the "Tasmanian Devil."

He evidently noticed our puzzlement, for he raised finger and said, "Oh, certainly, I can teach you about the orbits of planets ensnared by the Sun's space time indentation, the determination of stellar distances, or the motions of galaxies.  That's not what it means to teach astronomy, though.   To teach astronomy is to introduce the beleaguered soul to the ultimate reality:   to the utterly indescribable, exquisitely beautiful and unrelentingly painful experience of being about thirty degrees north of room temperature.

"Go back 100 years to the late 19th century,* when none of us had yet set a single footfall on this four billion year old Earth.  We hadn't yet ascertained the existence of other galaxies or even fathomed the mechanisms responsible for sunny days.  Were we to materialize back to that time period, the sky would scarcely look different;  the same phasing moon silently maneuvering through the unbounded field of mythological figments: the mystifying wilderness exposed by the crystalline spheres that human inquiry had long since pulverized.   For most, it was of little consequence, for life's drudgery could not be ignored on this messy Earth. Your recent ancestors were milling about in that maelstrom, young, anxious, unsure of everything except their immortality.

"Go back about 230 years: to Tahiti, the Acadia on Earth, that is, of course, an Arcadia no longer in most places.  There find Captain Cook and his cohorts preparing to observe a transit of Venus.   The aim, of course, was to determine the measurement of the astronomical unit, or the distance to the Sun.  Your boring as hell book has that figure imprinted in it: the figure that was determined through the arduous treks of the most intrepid.  Of course, those tired, malnourished, intimacy-starved sailors were naturally more interested in the scantily-clad Venus-like women who greeted them warmly rather than the Venus destined to traverse the Sun.    What Cook would later deride as 'dissolute sensuality' was ultimately punished, of course, as many of the sailors contracted sexual diseases.   A common -and not particularly effective or tasty- remedy for such afflictions was a concoction of arsenic and mercury.   From this came the saying, 'A night with Venus, three months with Mercury.'   The human, the all too human stories behind every single discovery.

"Go back 500: a world awakening into a dreary time period that for most was remarkably similar to that they were leaving.  In fact, life seemed devoid of ascents:   a long, continuous, unrelenting drudge to fend off starvation and disease in what for most was a pitiless planet.    We were still occupants of the cosmic center. All orbs dutifully revolved about us.   The crystalline shells were firmly set against stars about which we knew precious little: the incandescent adornments of a timeless sphere so displaced from physical reality that precious few cared to know about it.  The elegant curves within the Ptolemaic contrivances of epicycles, were as foreign to most as the most closely guarded government secrets are to us today."

"Go back 108 million years..."

Quite a leap...

"...an asteroid gouged a 86 kilometer wide crater onto the lunar surface.   The explosion was so powerful it emitted an incandescent flame that flicked across Earth's skies.  It would be named  'Tycho' by the remote descendants of the little creatures that scurried in the underbrush below the legs of the dominant."

"Go back more than five billion, when the massive star exploded with such force and power that it generated the heaviest possible natural elements and gave them and their lighter elements a means of dissipation:  the carbon comprising the smallest ancient mammals; the silicon in medieval soil; the oxygen on a chilled Victorian evening as well as they filtering through this classroom; the mercury that aided the sailors susceptible to the same fiercely potent creative instinct that impels us all.

At this, the professor became curiously soft spoken.   He sat on this desk's edge and regarded us not unkindly.  "Go forward five hours to a time period not yet realized. Then, as now, at each blink the cosmos will add 20,000 stars to its impressive stores.     Then, as now, humans will be beholding mysterious skies through unfathomably large ground based telescopes and, if they ever fix it, through the currently defunct Hubble Space Telescope.*     They're engaged in this enterprise to know about us....where we're going, where we've been while being fully cognizant of the lamentable limitations that will prevent us from perhaps ever understanding why we're here."

"Ladies and gentlemen, it matters little if you ever know Saturn's mass or Alpha Centauri's distance.    What astronomy is trying to teach you is that your fleeting microsecond on this Earth matters:  if you let THAT in...if you face the disquietude and even fear of it, you'll be as fiercely, breathlessly and feverishly alive as the cosmos wants you to be."









*This class was conducted in the early nineties.