The Stars Overhead

I love stargazing. Using telescopes and binocs to look at the stars is great, but something about looking at the stars at night with your own eyes is just magical. It reconnects us with ancient people, who knew the heavens above so very well, even if we have more knowledge now about what those stars really are.

As a communicator of science, I've been slowly building up my set of tools to use to share science in various ways. One things I've been wanting to do for a long time, but just haven't accomplished is producing videos of my field work, videos about science, and videos about the awe and wonder I feel in the presence of thinking about the universe and that I know many others likely share as well. So I've decided to start doing it! I'm going to be producing videos (hopefully one each week or two) to share these things.

The first one to get started with is a video about the stars you can see overhead at night. I'm still finding my voice and my style, but, if you have a moment, give it a watch and, please, let me know what you think. 

Stunning Timelapse Video from the Deck of a Cargo Ship: Night, Day, Stars, Storms

JeffHK has some incredible videos from his maritime adventures (and some awesome photos as well!). The video below is stellar, literally. It's a 4K vid of a 30-day timelapse from the deck of a cargo ship during JeffHK's watch as they make their way along the route from the Red Sea, to the Gulf of Aden, to the Indian Ocean, on to Colombo, then Malacca Strait, hitting Singapore, on to the South East China Sea, and, finally, Hong Kong. During the video, you can see the clouds coming and going, rains falling, thunderstorms raging, the stars and the Milky Way streaking along the heavens as the ship makes its way through the open ocean, and the process of docking and unloading/loading the cargo ship. It's a stunning video and one that you can just sit and watch and let yourself go with. Cheers!

Cosmic Traveler: Photo by A. Garret Evans

Today's APOD is this beautiful composite image of the Milky Way, Saturn, and some of our closest stellar neighbors over a stargazer's head in Maine. Some detail has been added to show where constellations and Saturn are at. Just looking at this picture makes me want to get out and go stargazing as soon as I possibly can. The heavens above have so much to offer, for sights and for thoughts.

Here's some info on the picture from APOD: 

"What if you climbed up on a rock and discovered the Universe? You can. Although others have noted much of it before, you can locate for yourself stars, planets, and even the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. All you need is a dark clear sky -- the rock is optional. If you have a camera, you can further image faint nebulas, galaxies, and long filaments of interstellar dust. If you can process digital images, you can bring out faint features, highlight specific colors, and merge foreground and background images. In fact, an industrious astrophotographer has done all of these to create the presented picture. All of the component images were taken early last month on the same night within a few meters of each other. The picturesque setting was Sand Beach in Stonington, Maine, USA with the camera pointed south over Penobscot Bay."

Depths of Time in a Starry Night Image

Image Credit: Brad Goldpaint

The APOD today is beautiful! The above image, taken by Brad Goldpaint, shows a starry night scene over the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in California, U.S.A. 

The trees in the image are themselves quite old, dating back several thousands of years, with one tree named Methuselah dated to 4,847 years old and another tree (not yet named) dating back to 5,065 years in age (these trees are considered to be the oldest known living non-clonal organisms). Some of those bristlecone pines stood long before Galileo turned his telescopes to the heavens; those trees bathed in starlight generations before Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the circumference of the Earth and developed a science of chronology; and some of those trees opened their branches to the world before people started laying the stones that would become the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

Goldpaint's night scene also shows the planets Saturn and Mars, of which the curators of APOD remark are "seemingly attached to tree branches, but actually much farther in the distance... These planets formed along with the Earth and the early Solar System much earlier -- about 4.5 billion years ago." In my recent talk, "This Thing is Older Than Your Mom" (which I gave for the 3rd Season finale of Famelab USA), I spoke of the oldest solid materials to have formed in our solar system. The calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs) and chondrules that can be found in some of the most primitive meteorites are materials that formed before the planets as we know them. Those materials and others in primitive meteorites have given us insight into the earliest processes in our solar system, including the timing of the formation of our planets. That's how we can say that Saturn and Mars are over 4.5 billion years in age. The lives of the bristlecone pines would seem just a short blink of time relative to the ages of Saturn, Mars, the Earth, and our solar system. 

However, the oldest of the old, the most ancient of the ancient and venerated of the venerable, in this beautiful image are the stars stippling the night's sky and the band of white of our Milky Way Galaxy. At best, a single person may be able to see 2000 or so stars at night, yet we can see the illumination of our sky in a milky white band due to the illumination from hundreds of thousands of millions of other stars in our galaxy (most shining from somewhere near the plane of the galaxy). Some of those stars may be much younger than our own Sun and planets, while most of them are quite older. Sadly, a recent report in Science Advances estimates that at least 80% of the world's population lives under light polluted skies, so that as much as one third of the global human population can no longer see the Milky Way at night (we are truly stealing our history from our children by taking away the night's sky). While we should take a moment of pause and reflection at the fact that most people cannot observe the Milky Way, at least we can look on images like Goldpaint's picture at the top of this post and consider the depths of time that have passed on our planet, in our Solar System, and in the Milky Way Galaxy that surrounds us. 

The Milky Way Over Ural, Russia

This beautiful image shows a picture of the luminous efflorescence of the Milky Way galaxy overhead of the photographer (Sergey Makurin) while he stands with his flashlight amidst the Seven Strong Men rock formation (also known as the Manpupuner rock formations). Located in Ural, Russia, these seven gigantic stone pillars range from 32 to 40 meters in height, and provide for an impressive spectacle, made all the more fantastical by capturing the beauty of the heavens above along with them.

The Shark in the Milky Way: a Hawaiian Legend

The Milky Way as seen through the Hawaiian trees, by active Kīlauea (photographed by Sean King)

There are a great many myths that our ancestors created to explain the white and dark patches of the Milky Way in their night's sky. Looking up to see this band of light in the sky, some of them would liken it to a great river or a walkway, while some others thought it was the remnant flames of a horse-rider or chariot dragging starlight or sunlight across the sky. Many of our ancestors, including the Norse and the Algonquin peoples, thought of the Milky Way as a path, perhaps leading to Valhalla or a great village, which their friends and family could follow once they had died. 

The Polynesian peoples commonly thought of the Milky Way as a great river or sea in the heavens, though many of their legends include mention of a great shark. The people of Tuamotus, for instance, considered the Milky Way the sacred ocean of the god Kiho-tumu, and great dark patch in the Milky Way was formed from his ship, which was known as The-Long-Shark. Indeed, many of the Polynesian peoples of various regions had legends that included a shark or great fish swimming in the Milky Way.

Rena Ekmanis' Canoe at Night

Last night I was reading Vivian L. Thompson's "Hawaiian Myths of Earth, Sea, and Sky" (as some of you know, I'm working on another planetarium talk - this one will deal with mythologies of the heavens and connecting ancient people to our modern pursuits in space exploration). One of the stories Thompson shares is called "The Shark in the Milky Way". It tells of one of the adventures of the trickster god Ka-ulu. Here is a very-brief paraphrasing of that story:

This version holds that Ka-ulu's brother, Ka-ehu, had been abducted by a great king, a chief of Far Island. Ka-ulu becomes Ka-ulu-the-Strong and decides to find his brother. 

The king fears Ka-ulu, so he sends Great-Rolling-Surf to kill the strong man. Ka-ulu uses his strength to break the Great-Rolling-Surf into little waves.

The king then sends Great-Stone-Man-with-Eight-Foreheads, a giant made of stone. When this giant attacks, Ka-ulu grabs him and holds him down until the ground and grass and trees grow over him. The Great-Stone-Man thus becomes a stone mountain with eight rolling hills.

The king send his Great-Barking-Dog to attack Ka-ulu, but the latter uses his strong hands to break the Great-Barking-Dog into pieces, each of which became a little barking dog that ran off in fear.

Ka-ulu approaches the king's mountain home. The king throws Great-Rock at Ka-ulu as he climbs the mountain. Ka-ulu crushes the Great-Rock into many little pebbles.

Ka-ulu then approaches the king and places his strong hands on the king's throat. Threatening the king's life, Ka-ulu asks for the whereabouts of his brother. The king, a weakling and fearful for his life, tells Ka-ulu to go ask the Chief of Sharks about the location of Ka-ehu.

Ka-ulu goes to Chief of Sharks and asks where Ka-ehu can be found. Chief of Sharks tells Ka-ulu that Ka-ehu is inside of his great stomach, but there is room for two if Ka-ulu would like to join him. 

Knowing better than to be eaten by a great shark, Ka-ulu grabs the Chief of Sharks by his jaws and pulls them so wide that Ka-ehu can walk out of the shark's stomach. Before Ka-ulu and Ka-ehu leave, Ka-ulu grabs the Chief of Sharks and throws him into the sky. The great shark's body breaks upon and the heavens and shatters into millions of pieces, forming the great white streak across the sky that we now know as the Milky Way.

What would you think of the heavens above if you were alone on a canoe in the great sea? Would you create your own myths and legends from the patterns in the stars, the wanderings of the planets, or the patches of the Milky Way? (image from Thompson's book)

If you'd like to read a bit more about the legends of Ka-ulu, definitely check out the Asia-Pacific Digital Library's versions of the stories. I'll soon be putting together a post that will outline the talk I'll be giving on the constellations and mythology, so stay tuned for that.