Trending
If the sky isn't densely overcast this afternoon, Honey and I will take grandson Lamppost Head and drive an hour north to see the total solar eclipse. Hancock schools thoughtfully scheduled an early dismissal for the day. Shark's other son, The 747, goes to a different school and will miss out, as it now stands.
Seed is taking his family north on Route 11, too.
The next total solar eclipse won't be until 2044. I'll be 94 then and probably not in my right mind, so I'd better go see this one.
The Earth has only one moon, but it uniquely suits our planet. There are, at last count, 293 moons orbiting the planets (including Pluto, which was first called a planet, then demoted to non-planet, and now is referred to as a "dwarf planet.")
As the newspaper comic strip character Arlo of "Arlo and Janis" pointed out this week, all the planetary moons except ours has a name. Ours is the only moon called simply "the Moon." Arlo's practical-minded wife Janis asks what would he suggest doing about it? Give it a name like "Gerald?"
"It would take some getting used to," he replies.
Many planetary moons are named for mythical gods. Uranus' moons are named for characters in Shakespeare's plays, including Desdemona, Oberon and Puck.
With all those moons whirling around, and the sun appearing much smaller in the skies of distant giant planets, you might guess that there would be a few more solar eclipses out there. Sure enough, space probes and the Hubble telescope have photographed the shadows of moons, as many as four at a time, crossing the gaseous atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. Neither Mercury nor Venus have moons. (Venus does have a small satellite of less than moon status, named Zoozve.) Mars has two small moons, neither of which is large enough to totally eclipse the sun.
No one knows how our moon was created. Was excess matter spun off from the rapidly spinning Earth during its creation, or was the moon captured in orbit by passing too close to Earth's gravitational field? The current theory is that a Mars-sized body collided with the earth 4.5 billion years ago, spinning off material which coalesced into the moon.
The moon obits the Earth every 27.3 days. It is moving away from the Earth, we are told, at the rate of one and a half inches per year. When I gaze vacantly up at the next total eclipse in 2044, the moon will be 30 inches farther away.
As one post stated, "At the height of totality, the fit of sun and moon is so perfect that beads of sunlight can only penetrate to us through the rugged valleys on the lunar surface, creating the stunning 'diamond ring' effect." The moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, but it is 400 times farther away, an infinitesimally unlikely occurrence. . . but then, it's a big universe.
Perhaps the best outcome of all this eclipse hubbub is it causes us to pause and consider the miracle of the Earth and all that is in it, considering our microscopically tiny presence in the universe.
I loved reading the syndicated column of essayist and political writer Charles Krauthammer, who left us in 2018. He was adept at getting to the heart of events and issues. In his book "The Point of it All," in an essay titled, "What Sputnik Launched," he said that America was fortunate that Russia got into space first because it propelled us to the massive national effort which put men on the moon a mere 12 years later. Even more amazing, he said, after a few more trips we abandoned the moon. The astronauts who walked on the moon saw a beautiful but cold and desolate place, offering little to make them wish to return.
Instead, what tugged at their emotions was that beautiful blue marble they saw in the moon's inky black sky: Earth, our home. Along with moon dust and rocks, they brought back a photograph, titled "Earthrise." Krauthammer said the iconic picture helped spur the environmental movement, and with "surpassing irony, it created at the very dawn of the space age a longing not for space, but for home."
Writing that in 2007, he predicted that a new generation would eventually turn its eyes to space exploration once more, a forecast we have seen come to pass. . . perhaps now, though, with more awareness of the need to protect our home planet.
Fred Miller's third book of stories, "A Dead Carp on Shadyside Ave." is $10 (cheap!) and available locally at Calcutta Giant Eagle, Pottery City Antique Mall, Museum of Ceramics, Frank's Pastries, Davis Bros. pharmacies, and the Old Ft. Steuben gift shop.