Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100-170 AD), painted by Justus van Gent (fl. 1460–1480) and Pedro Berruguete (1450–1504). Public Domain.
For the first time in a very long memory, the meteorological season has coincided with the astronomical season.
Our weather here in Madison, Wisconsin, does not often change on the dates fixed by Ptolemy and other stargazers.
But this year we got our first fall chill smack dab on Sunday, September 22, the autumnal equinox. On the very day when the plane of Earth’s equator passed through the geometric center of the Sun’s disk, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, from 87 to 67.
(We Americans still use Daniel Fahrenheit’s old-fashioned degrees. The Celsius scale, which we used to call Centigrade, is more logical. But what are the chances we’d do something that makes sense?)
Raspberries coming ripe.
Highs are expected to stay below 80 for the next ten days at least. Nighttime lows, for now, should remain well above 32 degrees, the freezing point of water. That’s good, because the fall raspberries are coming on strong. I’m picking two or three cups each day. I eat them on my breakfast oatmeal. My wife has already made some of them into freezer jam.
Accusatory wood.
I’d hate to see these raspberries cut short by Jack Frost, the silent assassin.
Other signs of fall are in the air. The geese, not yet in full flight southward, are assembling into fairly large vees and making test flights. They’ll be off soon.
Pumpkins, still frost-free.
Some logs I acquired in midsummer now sit on our wood rack, uttering silent reproach for my not having split them yet. Time to hone the axe.
I think the fall is the finest season here. The weather may be warm, sparkling, and sunny; or it may be cool, misty, arboreal. In any case it’s always beautiful until the hammer comes down in late October or early November. Then the winds will pick up, slicing icily through everyone and everything. Winter will not be far behind.
Kale, a real team player.
Soon, the frost will be on the pumpkins. It’s comforting to know the kale in our garden will still be producing fresh leaves when snow is on the ground. It’ll be good in soup.
Since March 11, we have lived in a hodgepodge of COVID precautions, COVID hysteria, COVID counter-reactions, and COVID exhaustion.
The coronavirus got upstaged, but did not go away, when the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis touched off a new round of racial justice riots.
Absorbed as we have been in feeding these sorrows into our national appetite for angst, we gave scant notice to a new light in the heavens.
Comet NEOWISE near its closest approach to Earth. Photographed from Joshua Tree National Park, California, 21 July 2020 by Kalpa Semasinghe. Photo licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The comet popped out of the void on March 27. Since then, it has waxed through almost four months of dawns. Now, in July, after sunset, it is on the wane.
Soon, it will return whence it came, leaving us . . . here.
Last Monday I bought a pair of Nikon 8×30 binoculars. I wanted something my wife, daughter, grandchildren, and I could use in the future. Comets come and go, but birds are perennial. Still, it was the comet that spurred my purchase.
I wanted to see NEOWISE.
What if it was a harbinger?
Back in 1961, the Wilson-Hubbard Comet appeared for a few days in late July.
As I trekked through a cattail marsh to my sleeping cabin at Scout camp, its pale cone of light hung in the sky over my right shoulder. The haunting evanescence, seen by naked eye, has dwelt with me near sixty years.
Night Sky
Even longer ago than that, we lived in a small town in Illinois. We were many miles from Chicago, or even Peoria; light pollution was unknown. Every cloudless night, the black empyrean glinted with a billion gems.
You could—and I did—lie on the grass and stare at Orion, the Dippers, Cassiopeia, the Seven Sisters, and the teeming brilliance of the Milky Way.
One summer night I lay on the lawn for hours and saw with my own eyes—as if it had not already been taught in school—that our Earth rotates beneath not only the sun and the moon, but beneath the whole firmament. One by one the constellations sink beyond the west while others creep out from under the east.
Beyond that simple truth, I had no grasp of the thing. Intuition failed me as a natural philosopher.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
—Walt Whitman
Astronomy
In days of yore, the farmers, shepherds, and sailors kept company with the night sky. They looked up to fathom its meaning. They gave its regions fanciful names out of folklore and national myths.
Ptolemy scans the heavens, guided by Urania, the muse of astronomy. 1508 engraving by Gregor Reisch. Pubic Domain.
They relied on heavenly bodies to guide their ways on Earth.
They saw that the stars hold fixed relations with one another, all but a recalcitrant few that wander as if by whimsy through the celestial field. These few they called “planets”—a name that means “wanderer.”
Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100-170) worked out a math to map the planets’ paths. This was a feat.
The challenge was that the planets, as viewed from Earth, seem to halt and go backwards from time to time, apparently at irregular intervals. Unavoidably, Ptolemy’s geometry to account for this oddity was complicated.
In the Middle Ages, Ptolemy’s complex model of planetary motion coexisted with Aristotle’s simple construct of the sky as a sphere of crystal in which the stars were embedded. Aristotle’s notion addressed the changeless reaches of space, while Ptolemy’s pinned down the meanderings of the planets against that space.
Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God, 1873, by Jan Matejko. Public Domain.
Come the Renaissance: The sky, like all things else, got re-examined. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) wrote a book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium—On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. He hesitated to publish his theory, so controversial was it. When, on his deathbed, he set loose his manuscript, it knocked over Ptolemy’s applecart, placing the sun at the center of the universe and making of Earth a mere planet—just like the tiny ones that blundered about the nocturnal sky, only closer.
Kepler in 1610. Unknown artist. Public Domain.
The Copernican view—which took almost a century to become accepted science—required a new model for the motions of planets. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), a human calculating machine, figured the true orbits of the planets, which turned out to be elliptical, not circular as had always been assumed.
Comets
The permanent stars were fixed in crystal and the desultory planets ranged along an elliptical racetrack.
Comets were something else again.
Noble stargazer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) observed the Great Comet of 1577 and recorded thousands of position fixes as it passed by. The comet’s trajectory did not fit his system, nor Kepler’s, nor Copernicus’s, nor Ptolemy’s.
It turns out that comets are adventitious travelers from the far reaches of our solar system.
They arrive all of a sudden and make a big splash. Then they depart, leaving us none the wiser.
Still, they have been taken as portents.
“I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”
Mark Twain, 1909
Harbinger
On Wednesday, with my new binoculars, I drove west out of Madison. On a curve of County Highway F between Mount Horeb and Blue Mounds, parked cars lined the road. People sat on the roadside bank in lawn chairs, facing northwest, waiting for the show.
I tucked my Toyota into the parking lot of Brigham County Park and walked back down the hill to the curve where the comet-seekers sat. Without a lawn chair, I lowered myself heavily to the grassy slope and gazed northwest.
As the sunset faded, the stars came out. Once the sky darkened enough, it was easy to find the comet at some distance below the Big Dipper.
Looking for a reprise of Comet 1961 V (Wilson-Hubbard), I was disappointed. NEOWISE, even through binoculars, was only a vague streak rising from a pinpoint of light. Once my field glasses had found it, I could also see it without magnification, a mere smudge.
Muttering, I walked back to my car.
And as I trudged uphill to the parking lot, the whole panoply of Heaven arched above me—millions of stars, diamonds on a black velvet sky. It took my breath away. Or maybe it was the hill.
Reaching the parking lot at the top of the hill, I let my breath catch up with me as I scanned the whole sky. Jupiter gleamed above the southern horizon. The binoculars gave me two of its moons, standing off from the planet’s blue-white orb.
#
Dear Reader, we have imprisoned ourselves in city lights. Away from our industrial glow, the cosmos burns as it always did. But it’s over our heads; we must look up.
By what lights do we steer? The halogen vapor haze of shopping malls, or the shy twinkles of the universe?
Back home, I stood in my yard. To the northwest, beyond the man-made glow, hung the same comet we had seen in the country.
You just had to know where to look.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
