Mon Sep 21, 2020 HG WELLS, GUSTAV HOLST
Herbert George Wells was born on September 21st, 1866. Besides “The Invisible Man,” and “The Time Machine,” he wrote “The War of the Worlds,” which was published at the end of the 19th century, at a time when there was a really big “Mars mania” sweeping the planet. The American astronomer Percival Lowell had recently announced his discovery of canals on Mars (Lowell was mistaken by the way; his telescope allowed him to see natural features on Mars like the Mariner Valley, but didn’t give him enough resolution to see them as anything but vague lines which he interpreted to be canals.) But at the time it was thought that life must exist on the red planet. Wells shares his birthday with the composer Gustav Holst, born on September 21st, 1874. He was a musician, not an astronomer, but in 1915 he wrote a piece of music that you often hear on this radio station, and also quite a bit in planetariums. It's called, "The Planets", and in it Holst wrote music to describe each of the seven known planets.
Tue Sep 22, 2020 STAR CHARTS
With computers, ipads and smartphones, there are all kinds of star charts available to anyone who wants to look up at the heavens. I’m old-fashioned, and still like to look at star charts that are drawn on paper, with black dots on a white background, which gives the best contrast. Most star charts show the bright stars as big dots and the fainter stars as smaller dots. The brightest stars have Arabic, Greek, Latin or English names. When we run out of names, we use the Greek and Roman alphabets to designate stars from bright to dim: Antares in the southwest this evening is the brightest star in Scorpius and so is designated as Alpha Scorpii. The fourth brightest star, Dschubba, is Delta Scorpii, and so on until you run out of letters. We can also use Flamsteed numbers, named in honor of John Flamsteed, the first director of the Greenwich Observatory. The numbers go up as you move eastwards. Antares becomes 21 Scorpii, and Dschubba, near the west end of the constellation, is designated 7 Scorpii.
Wed Sep 23, 2020 NEPTUNE’S DISCOVERY
Neptune was discovered by Johanne Galle on September 23rd, 1846. Working at the Berlin Observatory, Galle used the observatory’s nine inch refracting telescope to search for a possible eighth planet. Galle had been asked to search a particular spot in the sky by a French mathematician, Urbain Leverrier, where he’d calculated it to be. Through the eyepiece, Galle saw a tiny, faint blue dot – was it just another star? Galle and his assistant Heinrich d’Arrest opened up their book of star maps, something called, the Berliner Akademischen Sternkarte, (I think I said that right,) and found that his star was “not on the map!” The next night they found that the tiny dot had moved against the background of fixed stars - it was a wanderer, a planet. Neptune is still in our sky, over in the constellation Aquarius in the southeast after sunset tonight, and yes, even though our planet just passed it and it’s less than 2.7 billion miles away, you’ll still need a pretty good-sized telescope to see it.
Thu Sep 24, 2020 EGYPTIAN CONSTELLATIONS
Many of the constellations we see now were also recognized by ancient Egyptians, but there were also many star patterns which were theirs alone. The Big Dipper, part of the larger constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, was seen by the Egyptians as the leg of a great bull, a dismembered piece of the god Set. At the end of the handle of the Little Dipper, the star Polaris represented the coffin of Osiris, that diabolical death-trap, created by his brother Set for the express purpose of killing Osiris. The rest of the Little Dipper was sometimes a scorpion, or sometimes a jackal, the “dark and loathsome creature of Set.” Between the dippers is the long, straggling constellation of Draco the Dragon, seen in Babylonia as the frightful Tiamat, whose body was divided to make heaven and earth. But to the pharaohs of Egypt these stars also represented Taweret the Hippopotamus and Sobek the Alligator.
Fri Sep 25, 2019 MARDUK BRINGS ORDER OUT OF CHAOS
A very old story about how the Universe got its start comes from ancient Babylonia. It began with the watery chaos, known as Mammu. Out of Mammu came a monstrous dragon named Tiamat. Tiamat then spawned the Babylonian gods, but in time she came to hate them and decided to destroy them. But her grandson Marduk fought and defeated her. He used her body to serve as a framework for the cosmos. Half of her became the sky, where Marduk set the god Anu; the other half was made into the foundations of the earth, and Marduk made Ea its god. Marduk became the principle sky god, like Zeus in ancient Greece, and gave other gods responsibilities for the southern and northern skies and their constellations, while Marduk reserved the planets and stars of the zodiac for himself. And old Tiamat? You can see a vestige of her in the constellation Draco the Dragon, winding between the Big and Little Dippers tonight.
