Usefully Useless

Isn’t that some pagan thing those new-age folks make a bunch of noise about?

Well, no. It’s not. There are two meanings to it, one civil, one astronomical. I’ll do the astronomical one first. The summer solstice is simply when the sun reaches its highest in the sky, the tilt of Earth’s axis pointing directly to the sun. For this year, that time will be 05:45 UTC, June 21st. It’s the year’s longest day and, in places where the seasons aren’t lagged by seas or oceans, represents the height of summer. Of course here in Britain, the seasons are lagged by the Atlantic Ocean and we get the height of summer about a month later.

The sun will rise in the north east and set in the north west. Overnight it will never get truly dark, the northern horizon will glow as though the early stages of dawn constantly all night long because the sun just isn’t far enough below the horizon.

In civil use, it’s Fathers’ Day. It’s absolutely no coincidence that this is the longest day of the year! Fathers’ Day is held on the third Sunday in June, this being a much later Christian addition (early 20th century Unted States) which held that festivals could only be held on Sundays. This is merely the modern adaptation of the numerous summer solstice celebrations.

Not too coincidentally, Mothers’ Day, the third Sunday in some peculiar Christian festival called Lent, is almost on the Vernal Equinox and before the Christians ruined it, it was on the Vernal Equinox.

So if we start at the first equinox and run through the solstices, we have Mothers’ Day on the Vernal Equinox, Fathers’ Day on the Summer Solstice, various Harvest Festivals on the Autumnal Equinox and finally Christmas on the Winter Solstice.

Or you can just think of it as some pagan thing, that’s good too.

So being the local astronomy type, I’m often asked what I think of NASA’s Ares project. The aim is to put men back on the Moon and eventually to Mars. It’s the same as Apollo, a complete joke that we’ll fly and forget. Strong words, I’ll have to justify those.

In the early stages of Apollo, many within NASA strongly believed that the eventual aim was to build a lunar residency, a full time base on the Moon. Automated versions of the Lunar Module (LM) were kicked around and a smaller rocket to launch it, a step down from the Saturn V, since the Command and Service Modules wouldn’t be required to support human habitation for a week, just to be big cargo containers. After President Kennedy’s vision was realised, when Armstrong stepped out of the Tranquility Base LM, the political climate had shifted remarkably.

The support for Apollo petered off, even a few voices in NASA said “Okay, we’ve done it, let’s not tempt fate until someone gets killed.” Even Congressmen asked why it cost 40 million dollars to design and build a “golf cart”, grossly misunderstanding that said “golf cart” had to be built from scratch to operate in an airless environment with absolute reliability, it had to be tested, astronauts trained with it and by then, that 40 million was looking to be a very good deal; The Ford Mustang of the same vintage cost twice that to develop and design while modern cars cost even more, even if adjusted for inflation.

What started as a bold plan for long term lunar habitation became ten missions and finally only seven were flown, three of them fully built and ready but without the political support and national bravery to send them into the unknown.

Ares will be exactly the same thing. A few training and testing missions to the Moon, maybe two or three to Mars, then it’ll all be nudged under the carpet and referenced only in history books, paradoxically mentioning ‘national pride’ when the lack of that pride condemned the programme to history.

Ares might not even happen at all. While the military could afford quite easily to spend two billion dollars every ten hours in killing Iraqis, the budget for NASA just isn’t there. We’re still at the stage Apollo was at when they were picturing that automated LM and long term lunar bases, the stage where great things will happen, the stage before financial commitments are cut and political support evaporates.

People should really stop trying to apply reality where reality shouldn’t be applied. It’s Christmas after all and numerous kooks are trying to find some astronomical explanation for the star of Bethlehem as told in the Nativity story.

There is none. There can be none. The story doesn’t even make sense.

As told in the Bible, and I’ll quote “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.”

They saw a star in the east, but they are from the east, so they went east. If you’re to the east of Jerusalem and you walk east, you go away from Jerusalem. A star in the east would have led the three astrologers to the east, which would take them away from Jerusalem. So what are they doing there?

It’s self contradictory, it doesn’t make sense and trying to apply reality to fiction will result in failure.

The King James Bible, from which I took that quote, is translated from Greek, which was in turn translated from Hebrew. The Greek word used is “aster” which literally means “star” but not as we consider a star. Aster could have described the moon, a planet, a comet or a star. Simply put, “aster” was anything in the sky at night. The Greeks knew about comets and had a specific term for them. Also they named the planets and the Moon. The Arabs also did, and were the time’s most prolific and accurate astronomers; Most stars have Arabic names as testament to their meticulous cataloging. The Greeks were also somewhat interested in “new stars”, as they called transient phenomena that weren’t comets. We also have the Chinese who were notorious for recording any celestial phenomenon, they have records of Comet Halley well into antiquity, three supernovae, several novae and records of other comets so accurate that orbits can be determined from them. The ancients were certainly interested in what went on over their heads, they didn’t know what they were as we do, but they sure recorded them. Where are those records for this particular star?

The Arabs and Chinese had nothing to say about some magnificent star suddenly appearing. Yes, the Arabs, who the Hebrews were did not record anything out of the ordinary. The American natives make no record. The Chinese don’t. Neither do the Indians or the Japanese or the Europeans… The likelyhood of a bright star that had no right to be there being missed by everyone on Earth except three astrologers is somewhat remote.

An additional problem is that stars and indeed anything else in the night sky will move over the course of a night. A star in the east at sunset would be in the south at midnight and in the west at sunrise. Following it would lead one in a circle.

If you’re a religious type, you shouldn’t need an explanation. If you’re not, why would you be trying to explain a fictitious account anyway? Exactly who are these people pandering to?