A pretty good conjunction

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Here are some photos I took Monday night of a great conjunction. (Saturn and Jupiter haven’t been this close and observable in the night sky for about 800 years.) I did not expect to get them due to the heavy clouds on the horizon, so it was a bit of a solstice miracle.

Asshole clouds

pic.twitter.com/L3BDte1j2h

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) December 22, 2020

I anticipated cloudy skies, so I didn’t bother driving outside the city. Even more incredible is that I actually caught it between the branches of this tree in our backyard:

This is one of the many nice things about Texas in the winter — the leaves are off the trees, the sky is often clear, and the temperature is pretty mild after sunset.

If you didn’t catch it last night, never fear, you still might be able to catch Saturn and Jupiter in the same eyepiece, depending on where you are — I took these photos on Sunday night. (The first time my wife got to see Saturn’s rings with her own eyes — her reaction made my week!)

What’s so special about seeing it with your own eyes?

In Sourdough, Robin Sloan wrote, “It’s always new and astonishing when it’s yours. Infatuation; sex; card tricks.” In his latest newsletter, he says we can add “seeing the pinprick Galilean moons for the first time with your naked eye.”

This is old science, old magic; it remains astonishing.

The key, for me, is the unbroken line of light. If my telescope was some kind of digital device with an image sensor and a high-resolution display, the view would be interesting, but it wouldn’t be astonishing, because the astonishment is: that these photons erupted out of the sun, leapt across the solar system, bounced off those moons—those worlds—then crossed the chasm back to Earth and caromed between two mirrors to strike some cells waiting in the back of my eyeball. A direct link; a silver thread.

And, just as astonishing: there are enough photons for all of us.

Look up!

Drawing to remember

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

“Harlan Pepper, if you don’t stop naming nuts…”

I was putting together a climbing dome for my kids out in the yard a few days ago (it’s December in Texas, you can still get a sunburn outside) and there were two kinds of nuts I had to distinguish between, and I thought, “How many damned kinds of nuts are there, anyways?” Many, it turns out, so I drew a bunch of them in my diary. Now I can name nuts like Harlan Pepper.

I copied those nuts from a diagram I found on the internet, much like I copied this timeline of composers a few years ago. It’s not enough, for me, to just print out a diagram and paste it in my diary. I need to copy it by hand, slowly, to really look at it and let the information sink in. Copying is how I learn, it’s a way to understand what’s really going on, and drawing is a way of slowing down long enough to really look at something. (It’s like I said in Keep Going: “Slow down and draw things out.”)

Here’s a drawing I made when I was trying to understand the moon phases. I thought I had it figured out, until I was playing with the Sundial app on my phone and realized that, duh, when the moon is full, it’s got the full sun shining on it from the other side of the earth, so lunar noon, when it’s at its peak, is at the opposite time of day from solar noon. (I think?) Again, drawing helped me understand:

If you draw something, no matter how mundane the subject, no matter how badly, you really look at the thing, and therefore, you remember it better.

If you want to remember something, try drawing it.

A succession of moons

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

This morning I read Billy Barr’s tips for social distancing, gleaned from 50 years of experience living in an abandoned mine in the Rockies. The first one was “Keep track of something.”

Later, my friend Mark sent me a post referencing book nine of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, in which the emperor reminds himself to take the things in the world and “see them from above” in order to keep them in perspective:

You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind — things that exist only there — and clear out space for yourself:

…by comprehending the scale of the world
…by contemplating infinite time
…by thinking of the speed with which things change — each part of every thing; the narrow space between our birth and death; the infinite time before; the equally unbounded time that follows.

And it hit me that, duh, looking at the moon checks both those boxes.

Paying attention to the moon phases gives me something to keep track of and helps me think in terms of circular time.

And seeing it up on the sky and thinking about how long it’s been up there and how many generations have looked at it always tends to throw my measly problems into perspective. (Although, I always laugh whenever I think about astronaut Michael Collins admitting he mostly never bothers to look at it.)

Here it was last night from our balcony: