Tag: astronomy

Phone it in Friday XXXVIII: The Rings of Saturn

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Saturn is my favorite planet (after Earth, of course).  Who can resist those beautiful rings, and the clear demarcation of the Cassini Division?  There’s also something otherworldly and mysterious about it.  Just listen to the opening bars of “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets:

Years ago I wrote a song, “The Rings of Saturn,” which has never enjoyed a formal recording.  That’s a shame, because it is one of my better songs (I write with all humility).  It will have to grace an edition of Open Mic Adventures soon.  The header image for my Bandcamp page is the a picture of the planet.

Needless to say, I like Saturn a lot.  I sometimes image what it would be like living on one of its moons, or if we’ll someday have mining colonies on the larger bits of icy space-stuff in its rings.

Well, it seems those beautiful rings are disappearing.  Fortunately, as with all things astronomical, none of us will be around to see them disappear entirely.

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Galaxy Quest

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Our universe is massive—the adverb “unfathomably” usually modifies that descriptor.  It’s an apt adverb—we can’t conceive—fathom—how vast it is.

That said, we manage to possess some picture of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and our neighboring galaxies, even though we will likely never visit them, much less probe them.  So how do we know what the Milky Way looks like, when we’re in it?

Once again, Quora comes to the rescue.  There’s no way to photograph the Milky Way from the outside looking in, because we haven’t put any probes out that far (the pictures of galaxies we see is usually the Andromeda Galaxy, a spiral galaxy like our own).  Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, exited the Solar System in 2011; astronomically speaking, that’s like getting to the end of the block on your way to the edge of the country.

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