Playfully en route to Jupiter

The Juno spacecraft, designed to peer through the cloud layers of Jupiter just as the mythical Juno saw through her husband's high jinks, launched last Friday from Cape Canaveral. In addition to its suite of scientific instruments, Juno bears a plaque honoring Galileo, the discoverer of the giant planet's four largest moons. Also aboard the solar-powered spacecraft -- and causing much e-mail controversy among the members of HASTRO-L (the history of astronomy discussion group) -- is a trio of Lego figurines: a bearded and telescope-toting Galileo, a longer-bearded Jupiter (Zeus in the Greek pantheon) with a thunderbolt in hand, and a child-like female carrying an oversized magnifying glass to represent the investigative Juno (Hera), who was both sister and wife to the king of the gods.

"Unbelievable!" a physics and astronomy professor exclaimed in disgust as soon as the news and photo hit the HASTRO list. Another concurred in finding the Lego group aesthetically distasteful: "Of all the representations of Jupiter and Juno that are available..."

However, for every subscriber who questioned the threesome's right to passage ("I wonder how much Lego is contributing to the cost of this mission for all this free advertising?"), another spoke in the toys' defense: "I credit most of my software-designing skills to playing with Lego." "As an undergrad engineering student, I anecdotally recall that Lego was a pretty common experience for those who entered many engineering fields."

A historian of science reported that she had shared the news story with her 37-year-old son, asking how he thought "sentient Jovians" might respond to the Lego people. He replied, "They'll probably wonder why we didn't send more sets along for them to play with."

A couple of older discussants opined that the more senior Meccano "provided much better education in engineering."

The first scoffer rejoined the conversation at this point to lament, "Seriously, this is another indication that the great vision and sense of wonder which once surrounded our space program is gone....instead of having a truly inspirational educational program for the next generation of space scientists and engineers...maybe a student-run experiment from Jupiter...NASA has decided to send Lego blocks...what a disgrace!" But a foreign correspondent told him to lighten up, pointing out that in fact Juno carries a color camera, "Junocam," for the specific purpose of wow-ing students and the public at large with the first-ever photos of Jupiter's aurora-rich north and south poles.

Just before the debate detoured into the psychological motivations for sending "little keep-sakes into space," a retired pastor recalled the gold-anodized recording of Earth sights and sounds adorning the two Voyager spacecraft. He asked fellow list subscribers to "imagine the perplexity of an alien race that found both the Lego and the golden record!"

Colors of the Moon

My friend Sally James (aka Dr. Sara James, Professor of Art History at Mary Baldwin College) visited me this past weekend, fresh from a week-long seminar in New York about scientific techniques for analyzing and dating works of art. I had been Sally's house guest in Staunton, Virginia, for most of May, when I taught a short course in "Writing Creatively about Science" for Mary Baldwin students. The planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter were clustering in attractive dawn patterns during much of my stay, but every time we set our alarms early to observe them, the weather foiled us. As consolation, I suggested Sally fan her interest in astronomy by starting a Moon journal: She would look for the Moon every day and night; write down where and when she found it, and describe how it looked in those moments.

The following month, while on vacation at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, Sally got two of her granddaughters to keep Moon journals, too. On the evening of June 15, while a lunar eclipse unfolded over parts of Africa, the Middle East, central Asia, and western Australia, Sally saw the full Moon rise out of the Atlantic looking as red and gold as autumn leaves. She took several photos of it.

Having heard that the Moon turns red when submerged in the Earth's shadow, she wondered whether the color she'd captured with her camera had anything to do with the night's big event on the other side of the world.

In fact the Moon as viewed from North Carolina owed its redness to effects entirely unrelated to the eclipse. Just as the Sun glows reddish near the horizon at sunrise or sunset, the Moon, too, may blush while rising or setting, as its light (the sunlight reflected by the Moon's surface) travels through the thick, dust-laden lower atmosphere. The ocean mists may also contribute a reddening effect. Sally's later photos showed how the Moon whitened when it climbed higher into the sky.

We had a "new Moon," meaning "no Moon visible," for Sally's brief stay here. We sat outside till late on her last night, watching the Milky Way, counting occasional meteors even as lightning flashed in the west.

Cultural Exchange

On a cruise to the mid-Pacific to view the total solar eclipse of April 8, 2005, I sat at dinner one evening near Tomasz Mazur, a young mining engineer from Poland. I told him about my Copernicus project and said I would soon be visiting his country. Without hesitation, he asked for the dates of my trip, offering to take time off work to serve as my translator and guide. Copernicus was his hero, Tom volunteered, and it would be his pleasure to accompany me to the cities where the astronomer had lived.

Tom fulfilled his promise that summer, and again two years later, when I returned for a second round of research. We enjoyed our finest hour in Krakow, being treated to a rare, private glimpse of Copernicus's hand-written manuscript for De revolutionibus. The curator held the volume in gloved hands and opened it to several interesting pages -- the iconic diagram of the Sun-centered cosmos, the author's ink-smudged fingerprint in a margin. She told Tom (in Polish) how unusual it was for the priceless document to come out of its temperature- and humidity-controlled safe. As we left the building, Tom compared the viewing to the eclipse we'd seen together: difficult to achieve, over too soon, but stunning and unforgettable in its impact.

Staying in touch with Tom by e-mail, I knew he wanted to visit the States, most of all to see a Shuttle launch. Last February, thanks to another friend's good luck in winning a lottery for launch-watching privileges in the Kennedy Space Center's Rocket Garden, I invited Tom to Florida. Finally, I thought, I might return one of his countless favors.

The launch experience proved as addictive as eclipses for Tom. He returned to Cape Canaveral with his brother earlier this month, to witness Atlantis's last lift-off. Since I couldn't join him this time, he sent me a report:

We came to Miami 7th of July in the afternoon, drove several hours north to our booked hostel in Kissimmee, and were quite tired and sleepy at 11 p.m. when we finally arrived. I was especially afraid about my brother who was driving whole time after long, tiring flight from Europe (with overnight in Madrid airport), so the news about poor weather prospects and 70 percent chance for postponing the launch didn't make me very happy.

At 3 a.m. we learned that fueling was underway, and we left for Jetty Park, our chosen place of observation. We got there at 4 a.m. and found really great spot on small mound. We put our tripods there immediately and pointed our cameras on the small white point on the horizon (about 16 miles away), which appeared in the viewfinders as beautifully lighted with powerful beams. In that chilly  night it was the only moment when the Shuttle was clearly visible and we could take pictures of it on the launch pad.

After sunrise haze rose from the lakes and canals, and one could see no more than a gloomy irregular shape in the distance. As the hours passed, the weather got better, mocking all forecasts for heavy rain. About one hour before the launch we knew we were on the way to see the take-off. Now only technical problems could stop it. Everything was going smooth even in that area, and for a few minutes my heartbeat quickened and this special kind of excitement I always have before the eclipse arose in me. I started to believe that we will be presented with that wonderful experience against all odds and grim foresights, but when I was gluing my eye to the camera and placing sweaty hands on the remote release at T minus 31 seconds, we heard on the NASA radio that some failure occurred. All the people around us stopped their breath and froze. We knew only a few minutes remained to solve the problem before the start window will close. Voices in the radio started quick and tense information exchange, and even though I couldn't understand everything, I felt tremendous tension and nervousness in those short sentences. No, not at the very end! I thought to myself. And then with great peak of hope I caught a sense of relief in the next communications, and, with cheerful applause of all people gathered around, the countdown resumed and we saw the flames of main engines and solid rocket boosters a few seconds later.

The column of plume rose to the sky and pierced the first layer of clouds. A glimpse of fire appeared one or two times more in the scatterings. The sound reached us long after the last visual contact with the climbing spaceship.

That was the end. We abandoned the Moon and our aspirations for Mars, as well as other ambitious goals in space conquest. Now we canceled the most advanced and versatile spacecraft. Next years will bring us slow degradation and finally sad end of Hubble telescope and ISS unavoidable retirement. No one really believes in loud but empty words about return to Moon and building the base there.

To finish this letter less grimly I want to tell you that in the days after the launch we had great time exploring the main nerve of America and American Dream, as Hunter S. Thompson described it, visiting all theme parks around: SeaWorld, Universal Studios and Disney. We also toured Key West, but the thing I will remember the most (excluding the launch itself, of course) from that short sequel to my holidays will be the night before my birthday spent jogging on the beach with full Moon above and silent ocean silvered by its light below.

Micro-moments in Time

This week I received an invitation to a conference considering the future of the leap second. An extra dose of moment, a leap second is occasionally introduced into modern time reckoning to keep the rotation of our planet in synch with the march of time. Because the Earth's turning has been deemed erratic compared to the atom's vibrations, the definition of a second changed several decades ago from a minuscule fraction of a 24-hour day (1/86,400) to the time it takes a cesium atom under certain specified conditions to execute a great many vibrations (9,192,631,770).

Time was, the Earth itself served as the only timekeeper people used or needed. Before anyone conceived of the planet's ceaseless motion, the spinning of the Earth on its axis changed day to night reliably enough. And the Earth's tilted orbit about the Sun brought each season round in predictable order. Not until the 18th century did scientists suspect that the Earth clock was gradually winding down, retarded by the pull of the Moon. The Moon's tidal force brakes the Earth's rotation. As a result, over the course of a long human lifetime, the length of the average Earth day may grow by as much as one-thosandth of a second.

Although atomic time is far more precise and accountable than the clockwork universe, we naturally cling to our time-honored dependence on the heavens to define the length of days, months, and years. Astronomers especially, for the pointing of telescopes and other reasons, want to keep the Earth's position in space a factor in the accepted notion of time.

The parties responsible for global time-keeping include the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and the International Earth Rotation Service. Since June 1972, these bodies have melded the two systems -- atomic and astronomical -- by adding a total of 24 leap seconds. The last such addition occurred as 2008 came to a close with a minute of 61 seconds' duration. That particular leap second may have been the last of its kind.

Next January, an organization affiliated with the United Nations, the Radiocommunication Sector of the International Telecommunications Union, will vote in Geneva on the wisdom of doing away with leap seconds once and for all. The question has been debated among professional clock-watchers in various fields for at least ten years, and the debate will no doubt intensify in the coming months. The abolition of leap seconds would eliminate the elaborate, expensive protocols for deciding upon and distributing them, but it would also disconnect our clocks from any connection with the universe at large.

Small Nemesis

Living as I do in a tick-infested region, I've contracted my share of tick-borne diseases. Three bouts of successfully treated Lyme disease inured me to the danger, and over the years I grew cavalier in my attitude toward ticks. Before saying another word I want to assure you there will be no pictures of ticks accompanying this post. It's not as though you could avoid a tick encounter by positive identification, since they're so tiny. You can see one on the Centers for Disease Control site, crawling among the letters of a Lincoln penny. I considered including a schematic diagram of the tick's life cycle on its various animal hosts -- the white-tailed deer and white-footed mice that also live in my neighborhood -- but the complex of connecting circles would not fit here.

It's possible I picked up the latest tick that bit me while I walked through the grass, or petted a cat or dog, though I really can't recall. As I said, I've grown careless and don't bother tucking trouser legs into sock tops or applying tick repellent. I started to feel sick about four weeks ago. At first the fatigue and headache didn't derail my normal activities, but other symptoms accrued while I awaited a positive diagnosis. By the time the words babesiosis and ehrlichiosis came back from the lab, I had anemia severe enough to land me in the hospital for blood transfusions.

When I get home again, maybe later today or tomorrow, I'll be more careful.

The Long Hello

My friend Jane Allen is visiting this week, and we've been reminiscing about our part -- her part, really -- in the first intentional radio message broadcast into space, on 16 November 1974, from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico to whatever extraterrestrial intelligence might lie in the direction of the constellation Hercules. Both of us worked then at Cornell University, which operated the Arecibo Observatory for the National Science Foundation. The big telescope had just come through years-long, major renovations that made it a much more powerful instrument, and Jane wanted to celebrate its re-opening with a grand gesture.

"Can this telescope send radio waves as well as receive them?" she asked her boss, Frank Drake, a pioneer in the effort to discover life elsewhere in the universe. When he answered in the affirmative, she encouraged him and his colleagues, including the late Carl Sagan, to conceive a message to mark the re-dedication ceremony.

Drake and Sagan had developed a previous pictogram message, etched onto plaques that adorned the twin Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, both launched in the 1970s. Those plaques were intended as messages to the citizens of Earth as well as from them. While neither Drake nor Sagan expected any alien being ever to retrieve the spacecraft, let alone decipher the information on the plaques, the intellectual exercise of conceptualizing such communications fostered an extraterrestrial perspective: How do humans see themselves in the context of the wider galaxy? How will we account for our stewardship of our planet? Consideration of the large questions, however, blew up in a fracas over the fact that the Pioneer plaques depicted a nude man and woman, standing amidst schematic illustrations of the spacecraft, the Solar System, and various bits of technical data. The Arecibo message would not be accused of indecency.

I still remember the bright, hot day of the 1974 Arecibo ceremony, and the way the sound of the message -- which was transposed into eerie alternating tones for those present at its transmission -- filled up the air over the site. I remember seeing women in sleeveless dresses rub chills from their arms as we all looked at the telescope and thought about the conversation it might be initiating at that moment, across a distance of 25,000 lightyears.

"It's all about relationships," Jane said when I asked what had given her the idea. Others oppose her optimistic confidence in reaching out. Scientist Stephen Hawking recently warned that announcing our whereabouts could invite a hostile invasion. But the Drake Equation, which Frank devised in 1961 to estimate the number of technologically advanced civilizations in the Milky Way, reminds us that our greatest enemies are still likely found among our fellow Earthlings.

Peer Review

I'm writing a review now of a new work of nonfiction for a British monthly. It's a good book, which is a good thing, because I forgot to stipulate my usual conditions when I took this assignment: If I don't enjoy the read, I'll return the book with the suggestion that it not be reviewed. Better to devote my time and the periodical's column-inches to some more deserving title among the many vying for reviewers' attention. Better to say nothing than to savage a fellow author with a bad review. "Why are writers expected to critique our own kind in public?" laments my friend M. G. Lord, author of Forever Barbie and AstroTurf, along with numerous contributions to the New York Times Book Review. "We're like some species that eats its young."

Even favorable reviews can work against an author--sometimes by saying too much. If an appreciative assessment carries on for five or six three-column pages in my favorite magazine, I might decide by the end of it that I've absorbed as much of that book as I care to.

As for reviewers who divulge the plots of novels, well, they should find another line of work.

The book I have at hand is a hardcover, jacketed, published volume--a true anomaly, given that reviewers usually receive a paperbound "advance reading copy" printed on poor quality paper, full of typos and other errors. In fact, such error-ridden "uncorrected proofs" come with a warning: "Do not quote for review without comparing text to finished book."

The warnings no doubt address the editors of reviews, since reviewers tend not to see finished books--unless they buy their own copies later.

Reviewers' galleys also advertise they are "Not for sale," though they do show up at library fund-raisers and used-books stores. Unsaleable and inferior, with blurred illustrations the size of postage stamps, they presume the cachet of "banned" or contraband.

The hefty stock and attractive cover of the book I'm reviewing do not--must not--stop me from scribbling in it (in pencil), underlining this or that, marking whole paragraphs "Q" for "quotable," drawing big question marks in the margins next to claims that jar me, and creating my own index, on the flyleaf, of pages to return to and write about. The actual index--an item missing from any advance reading copy--is of course included here, and stands as a paragon of the genre.

The problem with reviewing the finished book is that I have found a few mistakes in it. If this were a galley, I would send a note to the author, who could then make the small corrections before the book went to press. Instead, I'll have to point out the errors in my review, to demonstrate I've done my job and know something of the subject, as well as to sound a balanced note of criticism in an otherwise enthusiastic endorsement.

On the Index

Recently I had a chance to review the professional index that Walker/Bloomsbury commissioned for my new book about Copernicus. The index arrived by e-mail on a Thursday afternoon, with instructions to look it over and return it with any suggestions for additions or subtractions by Monday morning.

Friends and family members were surprised to hear how I was spending the weekend.

“I thought it was done electronically,” one said. I wonder how many people think that? I mean, think about it. What would an electronically produced index look like, assuming a computer program could create such a thing? I’m picturing the name Copernicus followed by a long string of page numbers. And now I’m picturing a reader with a specific question in mind being thrown off the scent in frustration.

“I’ve always wondered who’s responsible for it,” my neighbor mused, “and how it’s put together, since there are so many different ways to look up things.”

Exactly.

Whenever I evaluate a work of nonfiction I look at the index to see how detailed it is. Indices speak to me.

Imagine my delight, then, at opening the document to find the entry for “Copernicus, Nicolaus” divided into more than thirty sub-categories, such as “birthplace of” and “death of,” plus a note to “See also On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.” There was even a cross-reference for: “Koppernigk, Niklas. See Copernicus, Nicolaus.”

Indexing struck some of my family members as “the most tedious job” they could conceive. I countered that an indexer doesn’t merely compile a list of topics, but rises to an understanding of a book that must rival the author’s own. I didn’t think I could categorize the material nearly as well. Given a template, however, I tampered with it.

The draft index ran to 19 pages, double-spaced. My additions stretched it to 21, with at least one major judgment call for each letter of the alphabet. Starting with “A” for “astronomy,” I feared the indexer and I had already come to a philosophical divide. How could she offer only a handful of page references for this subject, when it pervaded the entire text? I was tempted to delete “astronomy,” until I noticed she’d allotted separate listings to “astrology,” “astronomical instruments,” “astronomical tables,” as well as a “Copernicus” sub-head labeled “observation of the sky by,” and I softened.

The first index entry under “I” naturally went to the Index—the Index of Prohibited Books, that is, where On the Revolutions held a place for two hundred years. That Index did not exist when Copernicus wrote his masterpiece, which he dedicated to the reigning religious authority of his time, “Paul III (pope), 179, 180, 181, 192, 216-17.”

Dark Night in the Big City

It appears I gave up too quickly on the idea of re-introducing stars as night-lights in New York City. My neighbor Susan Harder, founder of Long Island's Dark Sky Society, informs me that establishing an enlightened lighting code and upgrading all the poorly designed, inefficient street lights in the metropolis would restore some measure of the heavens to the skyline.

Most street lamps in midtown, she says, emit the bulk of their glare sideways and straight up. In order to also shed sufficient light on the ground for pedestrians, these fixtures waste great quantities of wattage--drawing as much as 800 watts each, as opposed to the 150 required by properly shielded luminaires. "Any good lighting that you see in New York City," she laments, "is almost accidental."

Susan also alerted me to a new film, The City Dark, which offers "a search for night on a planet that never sleeps." Watching the trailer on-line, I recognized several of the interview subjects, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York's Hayden Planetarium.

Inside the glass house of the Planetarium, model planets and digital stars are visible any time on demand, but the night's true luminaries still make city appearances to those who know where to look. The Amateur Astronomers Association of New York (yes, there really is one) hosts frequent observing nights at various sites in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island. Amateur astronomers count among the most enthusiastic, generous individuals I know, standing ever-ready to share the views through their telescopes with just about anyone who happens by. Many professional astronomers, too, display those same positive traits, though they are less likely to drop in at a public star party: Only about 10,000 astronomers worldwide find employment in their field as teachers and researchers.

Galileo, the original amateur telescope maker (or ATM, as his latter-day confreres now call themselves), achieved major discoveries from backyards and balconies on city streets in Padua and Florence. He lived in a bygone astronomer's paradise, described by author William Manchester as A World Lit Only by Fire. But the dark nights of those times sometimes saw an original thinker consumed by fire.

Conserving the Dark Sky

Neighbors of mine here on the eastern end of Long Island are making a film about local efforts to defend yet another threatened element of our ecosystem—the great vanishing wilderness of the night sky. This image of the Earth from space (once an Astronomy Picture of the Day) captures the global scope of the problem.  

Zooming in on the continental United States, Long Island appears as a bright tongue of flame extending from the nexus of nocturnal illumination that is Washington-Philadelphia-New York-Boston.

As a card-carrying, lifetime member of  the International Dark Sky Association, I am on record (and soon voice-over in the new film by the Accabonac Protection Committee) for complaining to anyone who will listen: The blight of urban sky glow stops children from wishing on stars, and lovers from counting them. Light pollution—meaning house lights and street lights that spill their illumination up to the sky, instead of directing it down on the ground where needed for safety—can sever our human connection to the beautiful celestial creatures of the night.

Whenever I talk to school groups, I ask the students , “How many of you have seen the Milky Way?” The number of hands varies from city to country setting, naturally, but the numbers get smaller all the time as we relinquish our live view of the universe.

Professional astronomers flee light pollution by decamping to observatories in remote mountain settings, as well as by sending telescopes into space. But people in other walks of life, not to mention other forms of life that share the planet, suffer from the disappearance of darkness at night.

Having grown up in New York City, I can hardly advocate dimming the lights on the late-night metropolitan habitat. Where I live now, however—and perhaps where you live?—it is still possible to reduce energy costs, protect animal habitats, and possibly even reap health benefits by adjusting outdoor lighting according to measures recommended by regional and state dark sky societies.

Revisiting Galileo

Recently I’ve been revisiting Galileo—in Italy. The American Academy in Rome invited me to participate in its 400^th anniversary celebration of the night, April 14, 1611, when he demonstrated his telescope to important patrons atop the Roman hill called the Gianicolo, on an estate now belonging to the Academy. Most of the 2011 event took place outdoors, in imitation of the original banquet, although the weather proved not as cooperative. I hadn’t spoken two words into the microphone before a fine drizzle began falling, and several of the late-night activities—including, alas, the star-gazing—were heavily rained out. You can see highlights of the evening here.  

My brother Steve, who had never before been to Italy, accompanied me. Naturally I wanted to show him as many Galileo sights as possible. As we stood before Galileo’s tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce, in Florence, it occurred to me that I’d visited this grave site more often than the one where our own parents are buried. But then, I don’t need to go any particular place to feel connected to them.

Steve and I spent a day at Galileo’s other Florentine shrine, the newly renovated and re-named Museo Galileo (formerly the Institute and Museum of the History of Science) near the Uffizi Gallery. Two early telescopes and related representations of his handiwork are on display there, along with several new-found relics: A tooth, thumb, and forefinger now stand beside the more famous bone fragments from the middle finger of his right hand.

From Florence we took a train to Padua, where Galileo claimed to have spent the happiest years of his life, and where more bones awaited us. While visiting the university, “Il Bo,” we learned how a bit of a genuine Galilean vertebra, owned by the School of Medicine, almost gained passage aboard the Juno spacecraft, bound for Jupiter from Cape Canaveral this August. The mission will study the giant planet’s four largest moons, first discovered by Galileo in 1610 and now called the Galilean satellites.

The request from Juno’s principal investigator led to a thorough analysis of the bone, to make certain a tiny piece could be excised without damage to the rest. Although medical examiners approved the operation, astronomers ultimately shied away from the prospect of sending any part of the real Galileo into space. A plaque honoring his name will likely board Juno in his stead, and perhaps also a toy-sized replica of his person.