‘Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known’
Carl Sagan In Memoriam

Stone circle and midwinter sunset light

Neolithic farming communities in Scotland between the 56th and 57th parallel dragged massive 50-ton blocks of stone over the snow to form windows on the sky.

Recumbent stone circle at winter solstice

Fire festivals reenacted fire of the dying sun in stone circles

It must have seemed like a miracle at solar standstill when, after disappearing for seventeen hours, the sunlight returned and days began to lengthen once more. Seventeen hours of darkness is a long time if you live in a cave, an earth dugout or a stone mound.

The human subconscious appears to retain partial memory of this primordial condition which animals have, because in northern latitudes midwinter is often celebrated to an irrational degree. It is as if at a cellular level we remember that after galactic stillpoint is reached, the Earth starts to awaken once more and we realize that the Universe is going to keep on turning. What a blessing. What a miracle. What better reason to rejoice?

It is said our biological form is quintessentially-adapted for language: that the Word has created in our brain’s motor centers a highly developed auditory discrimination, with rapid muscular response in tongue, lips and palate; but we were not its makers. It was a gift from Creation which we have evolved to a remarkable sophistry. Fire, on the other hand was Man’s ultimate discovery.

At the forty-fifth parallel of latitude, in the cave vaults of Choukoutien near Beijing, a heavy-browed paleoanthropic form of Man with a cranial capacity as low as 860cc gnawed marrow bones and chipped stone implements. His time lies 500,000 years remote from this and yet in those years of the second Ice Age, this Man, with scarcely two-thirds of our modern cranial capacity, used fire.

Is it any wonder, then, that world mythology is filled with tales of sorcerer-priests who conjure light, the hero-giant stealer of fire from the gods? In discovering fire, were we not amazed at our ability to do as the gods themselves, to create Light?

In that dark cave half a million years ago ‘Peking Man’ created a spark which dispelled the darkness. His was the crucible which contained our entire human future. Have we not ever since – at a cellular level – been searching to return to that same realm of Light?

Round Zodiac of Dendera, from 50BC during Roman rule of Upper Egypt

In Babylonian legend, the redeemer of the world, Celestial Man, is expected to rise from the heart of the (cosmic) Ocean.

Ancient Man looked to the heavens for inspiration. Medieval Man was convinced heaven was right out there among the stars. It is only we, modern homo (so-called) sapiens who forgets to do that kind of communing with the Universe.

On the other hand select niches in our society still seek: within the scientific establishment the search for extra-terrestrial life (SETI) continues apace. Carl Sagan, exobiologist, astronomer and visionary, along with his colleagues at Cornell, created a fashion in the early ’70s for that kind of exploration.

He said:

‘We are starfolk, but we live in the galactic boondocks where the action isn’t’

and took steps, aided by NASA, to communicate with any advanced civilizations out there which might deign to reply. In sending the Pioneer 10’s message plaque of gold-plated aluminum to a star region in the vicinity of Taurus/Orion, they hoped to trigger a response from any listening/receiving civilization.

Pioneer 10 gold-plated plaque continues to travel for 80,000 years

Shortly after launching interstellar spacecraft Pioneer in March 1972, SETI directed efforts to beaming radio telescope transmissions to the stars. The latest of these was sent from Arecibo, Puerto Rico towards the Vega-Altair-Deneb triangle in 1999. By that time radio frequency was a speedier means of transmission than the fuel-propelled Pioneer space vehicle where a destination of even the nearest star (four light years distant) would not be reached for 80,000 years.

Besides they reasoned that if any civilizations were listening in/eavesdropping on us the Arecibo message was joining a century of transmissions from our planet, starting with Marconi’s first wireless communication in 1897.

It is thirteen years since Carl Sagan’s premature death on winter solstice 1996. He would be intrigued to learn of the massing body of evidence in favour of extra-terrestrial communication. The crop circle archive alone is superb. Not only does it communicate in the languages of science he advocated (mathematics, physics, astronomy), but, based on his premise that a more advanced civilization would find a more sophisticated means of communicating with us than we had with them, their graphics succeed in touching us at a cellular and emotional level, as well as pointing us to the stars.

Ancient World religions like the Judaic, Arabic, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek and Vedic faiths have frequent admonitions to look to the stars, to ‘observe in the east’, to watch the heavens for signs.

Our society is on the cusp of the year 2010. We have a Space Station partially operational; Hubble and SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) are in orbit; CERN has just collided atoms at an unprecedented rate in the tunnels below Geneva in Switzerland. We are technically advanced.

What about our spirit?

Neale Donald Walsch says:

Individuals — if their thought (prayer, hope, wish, dream, fear) is amazingly strong — can, in and of themselves, produce such results. Jesus did this regularly. He understood how to manipulate energy and matter, how to rearrange it, how to redistribute it, how to utterly control it. Many Masters have known this. Many know it now.
Neale Donald Walsch Conversations with God

If our heads were not so clouded by traffic jams and mind jams and living in a race for security and success, we might pause for this moment of solstice – the last in a single digit year for a century – and look to the heavens with awe. Two of our neighbours in the solar system, the crescent moon and Jupiter, shine brilliantly together shortly after sunset in the night sky. We have just experienced a multi-colour array of Geminid meteors emanating from the constellation which follows Orion through the night, with our brightest star, Sirius, stella maris, hovering below. It is the season for aurora borealis, which has already peaked over the Canadian Arctic. These are ‘commonplace’ wonders. However, we have also been treated to some unusual cosmic ’signs’.

Spiral of light over Tromsö, Norway on eve of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance

Great Eye of Sauron in Fomalhaut

‘We ask you once again to keep your eyes on the skies. These are the days when the signs have become talking points, that will awaken people’s awareness, not just to our presence but our methods of contact with you. For many years we have made crop circles as one means of getting your attention. As you will have noticed in more recent times, they have become more sophisticated. The messages they send have been interpreted, and their symbolism correctly understood. They have carried energy with them, and even although everyone has not understood them, it has connected with them sub-consciously.’

If Carl Sagan were still with us, I think he might consider this form of transmission equally valid from an advanced stellar civilization. After all his criteria suggested that those who had survived a post-nuclear age without exterminating either themselves or their habitat would be in a better frame of consciousness to extend the vibration of ascension and assistance to help another up the ladder of evolution.

If you’re listening, Carl. We miss you. Happy Solstice.

Mission Objectives: Bright Stars, Constellation, Open Cluster, Nebula

Equipment: Free star map, Naked eye, Binoculars, Telescope

Required Time: 10 minutes

Related Missions: Cassiopeia and the Double Cluster

Introduction: I’m in Oklahoma for the holidays. My best observation here so far didn’t require any optical aid at all. Remember last month when I was skunked in my quest to view the young crescent moon within 40 hours of new? On Thursday, December 17, the night after I got into town, I saw the 38-hour-old crescent moon in the western twilight over Oklahoma City, thus fulfilling the last requirement I had left for the Astronomical League’s Lunar Club. I e-mailed in my completed log sheets on Saturday.

Instead of bringing a little scope with me, I borrowed back the one I had loaned to my brother. It’s a Synta MC90, another 90mm Maksutov-Cassegrain, but unlike my other little Mak it’s a short focal length, widefield scope. I got it out last night to show my nieces the waxing crescent moon, Jupiter, and the Pleiades.

Instructions: Speaking of the Pleiades, they’re one of the best astronomical treats for a clear winter evening. Finding them is easy: look to the east after dark, and find a little knot of stars that looks a bit like a cooking pan. This is not the Little Dipper, although you’d be surprised at how many people think so on first spotting it. If you have a hard time finding the Pleiades, look for the 3/M/W of Cassiopeia, head past the Double Cluster to Perseus, and follow the lower of the two sweeping lines of stars that make up that constellation; the cluster is just off the end of the line. The Pleiades are pretty to the naked eye and probably best in binoculars. All but the widest-field scopes will have a hard time putting the whole cluster in the eyepiece, and even if you manage it, it’s prettier if you can see the cluster as a cluster, with a little open space around it. So this is one of those times that–in my opinion–binoculars trump a telescope.

If you have found the Pleiades, drop straight down (east) to find a V-shaped association of stars. These are the Hyades, another open cluster, in the constellation Taurus. One leg of the V is anchored by a big red giant star, Aldebaran, whose color is obvious even to the naked eye. You can pan around the Hyades with a scope if you like, but the cluster is so big that it really demands binoculars; binos fall right into the sweet spot of putting a lot more stars in your eyes without overly narrowing the view or getting you lost.

From the Pleiades, on to the Hyades, and farther on east you come to Orion, the most magnificent constellation in the sky. Find the three bright stars in a line that form his belt, and then three dimmer stars in another line that form the sword hanging from the belt. The middle of the three stars in the sword is not a single star at all. Rather it is M42,  the Great Nebula in Orion, a vast cloud of gas and dust, dozens of light years across, which is illuminated by the bright young stars burning within.

M42 is what I call a total object: like the moon, it looks good no matter what you use to look at it, and the more you look, the better it gets. With the naked eye, the nebula it is a faintly fuzzy star at the heart of a striking and majestic constellation. With binoculars, you’ll see a bit of nebulosity set amidst the rich starfields of Orion’s sword. In a small telescope, the full glory of the nebula starts to unfold, with glowing streamers of gas and dust spread out like an eagle’s wings. The central star will split apart into a group of four, called the Trapezium. Pour on more aperture and magnification and the view just keeps getting better. If the skies are clear and steady you may pick up a couple more stars in the Trapezium, and the surrounding clouds of gas and dust will start to look like clouds, with delicate knots and swirls.

And on it goes. You are not going to exhaust M42, not in a lifetime of observing. People with telescopes that require large trailers for transport, who have seen M42 literally thousands of times in their observing careers, still gaze into the heart of the nebula for minutes and even hours at a time. The bigger the scope, the darker the skies, the longer you look, the more there is to see.

But, hey, don’t think that if you don’t have a monster scope it’s not worth looking. Remember, M42 is a total object; it looks good at any scale. If the thought of setting up a scope in the cold and dark does not appeal, at least pop outside for a five minute session with binoculars. Make it a present to yourself.

Happy holidays!

A report by the blog ScienceInsider quotes sources as saying that Obama last week decided, in a meeting with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, on his immediate direction for NASA: an additional $1 Billion in budget, a new heavy lift launcher to replace the Ares 1, and potentially a shift in mission destinations away from the Moon (!).

The Augustine Report (PDF) recommended as an option a manned flight to an asteroid instead of the Moon—as soon as the early 2020s–an option that, according to this new ScienceInsider report, has the White House “more intrigued” than a return to the Moon (which, with a scrapping of the Ares 1 rocket, would be delayed until at least the mid 2020s…much later than the potential manned asteroid landing, or even a landing on a moon of Mars).

With the Moon well within the sights of private space and numerous other nations, it would be perhaps redundant for NASA to have it’s own full-fledged lunar program. NASA skipping the moon, then, is not a death knell to moon colonization, and could be a shrewd choice with many major private space firms (SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, etc.) being American anyways.

Check out the ScienceInsider blog’s report for the full details. An announcement reportedly could come as soon as this week and as late as February, so stay tuned…

In the beverage alcohol market it is wine which is the primary growth driver, while at the same time the wine industry’s low margins and commodity market dynamics have made it the toughest sector of drinks for packaging innovation.

Although the majority of wines is still bottled in glass, the larger format sector for wine, targeting the mainstream wine consumer, is dominated by the Bag-in-Box (BiB), worth some USD 500m in retail sales in the UK and over USD 1,5bn across the Scandinavian markets.

In the Scandinavian markets penetration has risen to between 30 and 50% as wine consumers have become increasingly attracted to the convenience and price benefits of the larger BiB format. Wine in Bag-in-Box might not have the classy reputation of glass bottles, but it can be a great choice for a large number of reasons, which has led to the situation that in the past few years more wine consumers have started to look for more premium wine in the larger format.

Constellation Europe, a division of the largest wine producer in the world, launched the BiB packaging format specifically for premium quality wines, believing it can extend the market for larger formats by providing premium wine to consumers, who currently do not regularly purchase wine in BiB, i.e. the typically young professionals with high disposable income and an expressed interest in wine.

Constellation’s Hardys Nottage Hill Cabernet Shiraz 2007 and Chardonnay 2008 are now sold in stylish blue, grey and silver 2.25 litre FreshCase packs. The 2.25 litre bag-in-box container holds the equivalent of three bottles of wine while taking the shelf space of approximately one bottle. The square-sided packaging consists of four parts. The middle section is made of decorated composite paperboard, enclosed by top and bottom plastic ends. Inside the container is a one-piece bag-and-tap system that contains and dispenses the wine.

To enjoy the wine in the FreshCase , the  consumer turns the canister on its side and depresses the unlocking mechanism on the underneath side of the bottom plastic end. Next, he pulls the tap forward until it clicks into place. The taps are easy to get out providing the consumer follows the instructions. Finally, he turns the canister to its side and pulls out the carry handle on the top plastic end. It adjusts into place on a countertop or the refrigerator as a stand that angles the entire package to help the last drops of (white) wine flow out through the dispenser. The red wine packaging can stand upright on the table top.
FreshCase is stylish enough to grace any kitchen or house bar.

No air gets into the FreshCase after a glass have been poured, so the wine stays fresh for up to 6 weeks after opening.

Compared to 3 glass bottles, a FreshCase has a lower carbon footprint as the pack is 70% lighter and takes up 30% less space, making a huge reduction in the energy needed to transport the wine. The components of the packaging are recyclable. To recycle FreshCase, the consumer separates the cardboard from the plastic by pulling the end caps off and removing the bag as shown in the picture.

The external component parts of Freshcase are supplied by 1st Packaging in Leighton Buzzard, a division of Postal Packaging Ltd., to Constellation Europe’s new manufacturing and distribution site Constellation Park, based in Avonmouth Bristol, where they are assembled.
Constellation’s in-house design team worked with London-based design agency Drink Works to develop the FreshCase pack.

Constellation sees the FreshCase as a significant innovation to move the category on, aiming squarely at high-end consumers who are knowledgeable about wine and prepared to spend a bit more. They are perceived as strongly ABC1, with 62% being between 18 and 34, representing about 24% of the wine drinkers.

The recycle photo I took from Richard Mackney.

Want to read more about wine in bag-in-box, go to: Evolution of Wine in Bag-in-Box – Wine always had the areola of belonging to people with a sophisticated life style, a little snobbish maybe. Certainly snobbish, when you read the lyrical descriptions of the so-called wine connoisseurs, putting you (the simpleton) off because you have little interest in the either critical or lyrical, fancy-full, high-flying words for the wine which flavour …. continue reading

91140

By Stewart Bailey, curator

If you ask any aviation enthusiast to rank the top ten most beautiful aircraft ever built, chances are the Lockheed Constellation will appear on that list. 

Developed by Lockheed just before World War II, the Constellation owed much of its early capabilities to its lead customer, TWA, and the airline’s major stock-holder, Howard Hughes. With the outbreak of World War II, the Constellation first flew as a military transport and served as the C-69, but after the war it returned to its roots as an airliner. Because the Constellation was designed to have intercontinental range, many were built for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy as early warning radar aircraft.  They served for more than 20 years, keeping track of targets in the air and on the surface of the ocean during the Cold War.

While most Constellations long ago had a meeting with the scrapper’s torch, a few survived and today are prized pieces in the collections of museums or private individuals.  In May 2009, the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum joined those ranks when it was awarded a Lockheed EC-121T early warning Constellation by the Government Services Administration (GSA) Federal Surplus Program. The aircraft, serial number 52-3417, served as a maintenance trainer for the University of Montana’s aviation mechanics school at Helena, Montana for the last 28 years. Excess to the college’s needs, it was offered up for disposal through the GSA, and of the several proposals, Evergreen’s was declared the winner.

Because of the excellent condition of the aircraft, a decision was made to make it flyable for a one-time ferry flight to its new home in McMinnville. Despite its condition, there is still plenty of maintenance to do, and starting in October, properties director Terry Naig along with volunteers from the Museum began the work. 

Their first task involved cleaning out 28 years of debris from birds nesting in the aircraft, and after two weeks, the “Connie” is reported to have smelled much better. The crew is also installing material to keep the birds from getting back in, as well as cleaning the years of grime and oil off the aircraft so its structure could be inspected. The next step will involve moving the old veteran to the Helena Airport, where further maintenance can be performed and the engines can be tested.

For more information about this project, check out this article on the Helena Independent Record web site.

Together with Henk Borgdorff, Sher Doruff, Scott deLahunta, Marijke Hogenboom, Evodie Koolstra, Sanne Kersten, Karen Lancel, Jan-Phillipp Possman, Pim van den Wijngaard, David Weber-Krebs.

]

A few days ago a cloudless night-sky invited me to shoot some stars. Here is a partial picture of Orion. This time it’s the real constellation and not the sketch I did a while ago.

This is Orion’s belt, being formed of three stars in the middle of the constellation. They are known by their beautiful Arabic-derived names Alnitak (‘girdle’), Alnilam (’string of pearls’) and Mintaka (‘area or region’). Click on the names to visit their Wikipedia pages (from where I have the translations).

The last picture shows Messier object M43. If you want to see all its magnificence click on the link.

Mission Objectives: Constellation, Galaxy

Equipment: Sky map, Naked eye, Binoculars, Telescope

Required Time: 5 minutes

Related Missions: Cassiopeia and the Double Cluster

Instructions: Go outside after dark, look up high in the east, and find a big square of stars surrounding a whole lot of nuthin’. That’s the Great Square of Pegasus. If it doesn’t jump out at you, punch it up in Stellarium, print out  a free sky map, or follow the other middle leg of the Cassiopeia W, the one that doesn’t point to the Double Cluster.

The Great Square of Pegasus isn’t all in Pegasus; the star at the northeast corner actually belongs to the neighboring constellation of Andromeda. But the square is such a handy signpost that most people ignore the official constellation boundaries as set out by the International Astronomical Union.

That northeast corner star is the anchor for two almost identical chains of stars, one of which looks like a fainter copy of the other. Go from the second star in the brighter chain to the second star in the dimmer one, and then on in the same direction for an equal distance, and you’ll come to M31,  the Great Nebula in Andromeda.

M31 was named Back In The Day when the term “nebula” was used for any hazy patch in the sky. These days “nebula” means an interstellar cloud of gas and dust, any one of the many that litter the arms of spiral galaxies. They come in lots of flavors, which I won’t cover here; the important thing is that nebulae are comparatively tiny parts of galaxies.

M31, or the Andromeda Galaxy, is not just a galaxy; for stargazers in the northern hemisphere, it’s THE galaxy. From a dark site you can see it with the naked eye, and in fact at two million light years away, it is the most distant object that can be easily observed without optical aid (I qualified that with “easily” because there are a handful of more distant galaxies that can also be seen with the Mark 1 eyeball; pick up the current issue of Astronomy magazine and check out Stephen O’Meara’s column to learn more).

In binoculars, the Andromeda Galaxy looks like a pretty oval haze with a bright core. As you go from binoculars to small telescope to big telescopes, the amount of visible detail increases but the field of view usually decreases, and it can be hard or impossible to fit the whole thing into the field of view of a long focal-length telescope. Think of that, a galaxy so big and so close you can’t see it all with most scopes! It’s so close that people with monster Dobs regularly amuse themselves by picking out its globular clusters, whereas small-scope folks like me find the globs in our own galaxy to be plenty challenging.

The very, very small version of Rob Gendlers' very, very large M31 mosaic.

If you want to see M31 in all its glory, you must get over to Rob Gendler’s site and check out the stupendously huge mosaics on his galaxies page. One of his images has a resolution of 21,904 x 14,454 pixels and at least as of 2009 was the highest resolution image ever made of a spiral galaxy, period.

You may also know that the Andromeda Galaxy is destined to collide with our own Milky Way in a few billion years, setting off massive bouts of star formation as the two repeatedly pass through each other and eventually merge into something bigger and stranger, probably an elliptical but possibly a super-spiral or even a ring galaxy. Should be a pretty good show for whoever is around to see it.

Don’t wait up though. M31 is high overhead in the early evening and pretty good viewing until the wee hours. Go check it out.

Well, after much craziness, wedding plans seem to be falling into place (knock on wood, please don’t let saying that jinx anything). We have our date, our venue, our photographer, and a good lead on the caterer. Things on our checklist are eliminating themselves, one by one.

The next big conversations to have are wedding party and clothing. As far as wedding party clothing goes, the primary goal is to put everyone into something that they look awesome in and will wear again. In that vein, we would like to put each of the bridesmaids in a different color, then have the bouquet she carries in the main color of her dress with accents to match the other three dresses. Groomsmen will be in the same four colors (probably vest & tie in color, black pants, white shirt or something like that). We decided that the most flattering assortment of colors that will also look rocking on the boat would be jewel tones.

Because I’m a complete and total dork, I went to Home Despot and picked up some paint chips in the colors we’re looking at. Obviously, in fabric the colors will look different, so it’s really a moot point and was just an exercise in “keep Megan busy so she doesn’t slaughter the caterers”.

By the way, I have a theory about the “bridezilla” phenomenon. These are not women who are crazy and demanding and don’t care about their husband-to-be. Oh no. These are women who have been pushed RIGHT over the edge by the wedding industry. After the um-teenth admonishment that I really ought to be dieting already to cram myself into the dress that I should have bought months ago. After the caterers who refused to listen to a word I said (yes, we would like it non-dairy. No, I would not like a special plate so I can avoid all the real food.) or wouldn’t call us back (oh, we’re so glad you called us back! your message cut off just as you left your phone number and we just couldn’t reach you! Email? What email?). After the photography company who called four times, emailed twice, and sent me a text message, just to make sure that I knew about the Really Important Event Tuesday night!!! After the caterer who promised a quote next tuesday. I mean Friday. I mean definitely Monday or Tuesday. Tomorrow, no really.

Can you blame a girl for wanting to get a little bit violent?

Legos return to the Moon! I built the following Lego models of NASA’s Project Constellation spacecraft and lunar lander when I would take breaks from my PhD exam reading schedule. The Orion spacecraft includes a detachable solid rocket booster, and it can be mated to the Altair lunar lander craft. Orion carries three minifig astronauts, and the Altair has room for one minifig astronaut. I based my Lego models on some of the computer generated mockups shown on NASA’s Constellation program website here.

There is a very interesting post over at Planomenology which asks, ‘What is a constellation?’ Along with its complementary motifs of the ‘dialectical image’ and the ‘dialectics at a standstill’, I suspect that the constellation is one of the most misused, or at least overdetermined, concepts that non-philosophers like myself take from Benjamin.

Planomenology’s understanding of the term doesn’t seem to clash with my own, but it certainly places emphases in different places. Planomenology treats the constellation as something of a process, or an active relation, which can affect the constellated materials in different ways. For me, the constellation is primarily a conceptual aesthetic, a darstellung perhaps, used by Benjamin and Adorno to comprehend the reification of socio-historical objects in an autonomously determined form. So instead of ‘allegory’, I would talk about ‘analogy’: the constellation groups things together, rather than asserting their separation.

Another slight difference, I suspect, between Planomenology’s reading and my own, is when Planomenology states that, ‘The constellation treats the constellated material much in the way the present may regard ancient ruins: now deprived of everything that furnished them with relevance and meaning, we are free to read into these ruins whatever fabulous and romantic significance we care to’. On the contrary, I feel that the constellation is constructed from what is alive within history but has been somehow smothered. Benjamin tells us that, ‘every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’, and thus the constellation is the arrangement of these images in a gesture towards the ‘realization of dream elements [which], in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking’. The constellated materials are not so much ancient ruins, irrelevant and meaningless to the present, but stars, which we are told may well now be extinct, but whose light we can still recognise.

I’ve included below a couple of passages from my thesis where I too ask, ‘what is a constellation?’, in relation to Andre Breton’s various prehistories of Surrealism, the crappiness of the English Surrealists’ attempts at recognising their own dialectical origins, and in mind of the communications between Benjamin and Adorno.

Adorno begins from a position whereby the dialectic has already been brought to a standstill: the stasis of the present is not the necessary condition for conscious use of the dialectic, but the result of an anti-dialectical suppression of historical progress; the dialectic of history has already been suppressed by a false, capitalist, conception of progress. The degraded, static and reified present, for Adorno, is not in the first instance a point of departure but the end result of a process of the entrenchment of capitalism. The constellation is thus the arrangement and juxtaposition of historical objects so as to expose this condition. Adorno describes his conception of the constellation in Negative Dialectics as follows:

“Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object. As a constellation theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it will fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers.”

Read in isolation, this passage casts light on Breton’s Surrealist prehistories: not as demonstrations of Surrealism’s authenticity through its embeddedness within history (as if its repeated occurrence were evidence enough of its essential integrity), but as a negative image of Surrealism, marking not its content but its boundaries and co-ordinates. A deeper reading, however, will reveal that unlike Breton’s Surrealist prehistories which ‘express what is strange and surprising in terms of what is already familiar’, Adorno’s constellations do not mark out the social space for something as yet unrecognised or for something to be added to social interaction. Instead, they demonstrate the falseness and inherent conflicts of a society which projects itself as complete, whole and unified. Adorno sees narrative as having been collapsed and history as having solidified and congealed into the eternally invariant present of capitalism.

…

Benjamin’s sixteenth and seventeenth ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ offer his interpretation of the task of the historical materialist. In the sixteenth, he explains that the historical materialist must ‘blast open the continuum of history’; in the seventeenth, arguing against ‘universal history’, he adds that historical materialism is based upon a ‘constructive principle’ whereby ‘thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well’.

The Surrealists too believed that the stasis and reification of the present could be catalysed into movement, but through a more instrumental praxis of presenting empirical reality with its antithesis, the dream-state. Benjamin’s method diverged from this position in that he did not seek a synthesis of waking and dreamt life in surreality, but attempted to use the dream-state (now the dream-image) to reawaken from sleep the historical dialectic: ‘whereas Aragon persistently remains in the realm of dreams, here it is a question of finding the constellation of awakening’. In ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, the exposé of 1935 that prefigured his Arcades Project, Benjamin proposes that society dreams the image of its own succession, and then that ‘the realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking’.

…

The difference between Adorno’s constellation and Benjamin’s constellations is that, within the former, the dialectical image must be interpreted. The danger of presenting socio-historical objects as they are, however juxtaposed, is that their prior reification may risk not being exposed. This difference was the basis for Adorno rejecting Benjamin’s submission of excerpts of the Arcades Project to the Frankfurt School’s journal: ‘Unless I am very much mistaken, your dialectic lacks one thing: mediation’. With the systematically arranged and mediated constellation, Adorno hoped to catalyse forms of dialectical self-consciousness that would not shy from the negative, the contradictory or the antithetical. Adorno’s method is to expose antinomies and resist capitalism’s totalising and reifying drives not through forcing syntheses but by constellating incommensurable social objects to demonstrate the totality’s own structural faults and ‘false harmony’. Surrealism’s failure to transcend its own reification is demonstrated in its imagining that such a linear and intentional praxis could challenge a culture industry that is actually strengthened by superficial demonstrations of resistance. In contrast to Surrealism’s rigidly dialectical approach, the constellation offers a means of comprehending the reification of socio-historical objects in an autonomously determined aesthetic form.

A slideshow of an evening of my astrophotography of the Pleiades, Taurus, Auriga, Cygnus, Lyra, Orion, the Milky Way set to a famous waltz… … astrophotography Pleiades Orion Taurus astronomy stars constellations

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyE-cZsI3NA&hl=en

My Links : canon dslr

Today in class we reached the fourth basic principle of Latour’s ontology in Irreductions as depicted by Graham in the first chapter of Prince of Networks. As I formulate it:

The degree of reality possessed by an actant or object is a function of the number of its alliances with other actants.

Latour’s proposed object-oriented ontology differs from both my own and Harman’s in that under his conception objects or actants are defined by their relations. This is evident from this fourth ontological principle. For Latour, the more alliances an actant has the more real it is. Reciprocally, the less alliances an actant has, the less real it is. It seems to me that there are three senses of the term “reality” Latour is evoking:

1) An actant is real insofar as it is resistant to other actants.

2) An actant is real to the degree that it persists and endures through time and space.

3) The reality of an actant is a function of the magnitude and extensiveness of the effects it has on other actants.

According to the first sense of reality, a rock is real insofar as it resists another rock bumping into it. The second sense of reality coincides closely with intuitions we have about existence going all the way back to Plato where, as can be clearly seen in Plato’s divided line, the more fleeting something is the less real it is and the more enduring something is the more real it is. Consequently if simulacra or things like images in ponds are less real than objects, then this is because they cease to exist the minute clouds pass in front of the sun. If mathematical entities and forms are more real for Plato than objects, then this is because objects come-to-be and pass-away, whereas triangles always remain triangles and the Just or the Identical always remains the identical.

read on!

The third sense in which Latour thinks about reality can be illustrated with reference to President Obama. If President Obama is more real than me, then this is because he impacts other actants in a far more extensive way than I do. He impacts other nations, the citizens of other nations, the economy, the media, other state officials, American citizens, industries, etc., etc., etc.. If the sun is more real than Obama, then this is because it impacts all the other planets and objects populating the solar system through its charged solar particles and gravity, because it impacts each and every thing on the planet, and because it impacts many things outside the solar system besides.

For Latour then, reality is not a binary, but rather a matter of degrees ranging from the least real to the most real. Where for Harman and I reality or existence is a binary in the sense that something either is or is not regardless of the relations that it enters into– with the important caveat that something can cease to exist or pass out of existence –for Latour something is less real insofar as it possesses fewer alliances with other actants and impacts fewer actants, while something becomes more real insofar as it forms more alliances with other actants and impacts a more extensive range of actants. Here it is important to note that the reality of an actant is not a fixed essence. Rather, objects can become more real by entering into additional alliances and extending the range of their effects on other actants. Thus, since relations among actants are perpetually shifting, the degree of reality possessed by any actant fluctuates.

Now, when Latour’s fourth principle is taken from the realm of meta-theory or ontology and put into practice examining the world, things become difficult. If it is difficult to practice actor-network-theory or object-oriented ontology, then this is because so many of the actants that contribute to the reality or existence of any actant are “black boxes”. As Harman puts it,

What actants do is act, as the words themselves immediately suggest. In negative terms, this means that actants are not ready-made essences that happen to stumble into relations every now and then. An actant is always born from crisis and controversy; only when it succeeds in establishing a foothold in the world do we forget the tribulations of its birth and eventually treat it as a seamless black box… To speak of objects in action is to convert objects from black boxes into withering trials of strength, re-enacting the torrid events that gave birth to the most obvious facts in the world. (PN, 36)

The sense of reality that Harman is here working off of in his discussion of black boxes would be that of endurance and persistence. A black box is an object that has managed to secure its endurance or existence or that, as it were, is well put together such that its internal works disappear from view or become unobtrusive. The world all about us is populated by black boxes. And if this ubiquity of black boxes make actor-network-theory or alien phenomenology (Bogost’s nice term) so difficult, then this is because black boxes are above all unobtrusive and largely invisible. This essential invisibility or unobtrusiveness insures that many actants that are crucial to the existences of some actant will go unnoticed or passed over in analysis. I think this is part of what accounts for the superficiality of so much philosophy and social and political theory when compared to analyses undertaken by actor-network theorists. So many actants are “black boxed”, so many actants require that we actually know something about the world (rather than speaking in trite generalities), so many actants are so familiar that they become invisible, that philosophers and social and political theorists simply pass over them altogether, not recognizing how crucial they are to understanding the phenomenon in question. It seems that a number of philosophers and theorists suffer from the nasty habit of confusing superficiality with rigor and profundity, believing that because they can set up a series of entailments among propositions in a deduction they’ve really gotten at the essence of things. Yet that chain of entails, that phenomenological description, that ideology critique is only possible by making the vast majority of the world and its actants disappear. This is somewhat equivalent to treating a single type of fish as if it were representative of all life in the oceans.

To illustrate the imbrication of reality and alliances as understood by Latour I select a student from class, draw a stick picture of her on the board, and we collectively proceed to analyze the student’s alliances with other actants. We start with very basic and obvious things pertaining to the students bodies. The first actants that come up are, of course, food and water. However, even here things are not as simple as they might first appear, for as we already know by the principle of translation, actants relate to one another by translating one another and when one actant translates another actant it produces something new. We can adopt the slogan “no translation without transformation!” or, alternatively, “no relation without the production of something new!” Much of concrete actor-network and OOO analyses are devoted to the investigation of these translations and what they produce. Consequently, the types of food and liquids we digest make a difference. Food effects psychological states, health, vitality, etc. All of this must be taken into account.

The next things that inevitably come up are the earth’s gravity, air, the earth’s electro-magnetic field, etc. The gravity of the earth interacts with the genetics of our body playing an important role in how our bodies develop. Were we born on Mars it is likely we would grow much taller because Mars is a little over half the size of the earth. Moreover, as we’ve learned from space travel, the absence of gravity leads to muscle degeneration and bone deterioration. The situation is similar with the earth’s gases. It is not simply that we require oxygen and other gases to breath, but the pressure of the earth’s gases pressing down upon us prevents our bodies from exploding as depicted in Total Recall or Event Horizon when the characters are exposed to depressuration. Additionally, the amount of oxygen present in the atmosphere makes a difference in our lung development and the functioning of our blood as can be seen in the bodily differences between Peruvians that live in the Andes and those of us that don’t live at such high altitudes. The absence of sunshine wrecks havoc on moods and has all sorts of negative health benefits, while the earth’s electro-magnetic field diminishes the rate of genetic mutations and cancers by deflecting highly charged cosmic particles. All of these actors to which we’re related are so persistent that they go almost entirely unnoticed. To notice them at all you actually have to know something about the earth.

Having discussed these very basic actants we now move on to the more diffuse yet no less important actants. The first series of actants that is inevitably brought up consists of other people. Here I draw attention to family, friends, co-workers and a class of persons I refer to as “the anonymous”. The anonymous are all the black boxed people that make up the furniture of our everyday life while being almost completely invisible. These are folks like the janitors that keep classrooms clean and well organized, cooks that prepare food, the folks at plant operations and in the tech department that keep the electricity, heat, and communications networks running, etc. All sorts of affordances and constraints are dependent upon the anonymous such that our power of acting or not acting is increased or diminished as a result of the material infrastructure laid down by the anonymous.

The next series of actants that come up revolve around transportation. The student inevitably arrived at school in a car and will depart from school to work by car. In the absence of the automobile it is unlikely that the student would be able to attend school or maintain the job and job hours that they do. However, the automobile now leads to considerations of energy and infrastructure. Roads all but disappeared following the collapse of the Roman Empire such that travel became, if Braudel is to be believed, overland. In the absence of roads travel was far more difficult and perilous. Consequently the distribution of goods and communication between cities, villages, and farms was severely inhibited leading to much slower rates of change. The simple presence of roads and road signs significantly increases the reality of an actant, allowing it to form more extensive alliances with other actants and to impact far more actants.

The case is similar, of course, with energy. Energy comes in a variety of forms ranging from human power to animal power, and extending to wind, water, wood, nuclear, thermal, solar, and fossil fuels. Where the primary form of energy consists of wood, wind, and water the size that a city can attain and the forms of organization it can possess are significantly diminished. This is because the availability of wood needed to warm houses, cook, and build equipment and homes is limited. Very quickly we find resources being depleted and wars breaking out over valuable timberlands. To make matters worse, these wars themselves require all sorts of wood, thereby eating up the very resource that contributed to the conflict in the first place. The situation is the same with fossil fuels. Suddenly the student discovers that the simple act of driving a car has implicated her in global conflicts over resources. The situation here is a catch-22. She needs the car and the fuels to form an alliance we her education and job– not to mention, to maintain her important personal relationships –yet in driving the car all sorts of rather noxious geo-political conflicts are promoted (coupled with the damage to the environment).

There is, in addition to all this, the entire system of production and distribution. We eat better today than the emperors of Rome, enjoying foods that are out of season in our own locality and a wide range of goods that we would never be able to experience in other social settings as they come from far off lands. This system of production and distribution now embroils the student in all of the sweat shops throughout the world where people are more or less enslaved so that certain goods may be readily available and so that the price of production might be kept down to increase profit and offset costs of transport.

Then there are the technologies. Most of my students are in their late teens and early twenties so they can hardly discern the revolution that they are living through. At the age of 35 I lived prior to the personal computer and the invention of the internet and thus– following a line of thought Jameson explores somewhere in relation to Adorno and Benjamin and the changing circumstances through which they lived –have had the privilege (and culture shock) of living between two entirely distinct temporalities. The impact of internet communication, cable, cell phones, satellite communications, etc., has fundamentally changed the nature of our world, collectively increasing our reality as actors. When I first started studying philosophy around the age of 14 or 15, we only had B. Dalton’s and Walden Books which were little holes in the wall that carried crap. I had to scour the vintage and used book stores for miles around to find anthropology, history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literature texts. And I was forced to read whatever I happened to find, which partially accounts for my eclectic background. Now, however, I can link to the internet on my iPhone while hiking in a wooded park and order the newly released copy of Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence from France. I can acquire bootleg transcriptions of all of Lacan’s seminars, and online for free, no less! Additionally, SR and OOO would not have been possible without the intertubes or back in 1991. For SR/OOO to come into existence all sorts of relationships had to be forged among eclectic and diverse thinkers in a variety of fields and this simply would not have taken place in the conference format that traditionally brought thinkers together. The nature of research and interaction changes significantly as a result of these new network links, allowing for new forms of organization and resistance.

Floating amidst all this are the semiotic actants or all those signs, legal relations, partially semiotic entities like nations or the Elks, catch phrases (“you’re for us or against us!”), fads, and so on. These too are closely tied to infrastructure as, like highways, these entities must circulate through zero’s and one’s, radio waves, texts, etc. As Bogost is quick to remind us, it makes a big difference whether this infrastructure consists of copper wires, fiber optic cables, soup cans hooked together by taught string, illuminated texts as in the Middle Ages, satellites, etc. For most of us this infrastructure is invisible. Yet the difference between phone signals sent by copper wires and phone signals sent by fiber optic cables is a quantum leap. The former is deeply limited in the number of signals that can be transported across the line at any point in time, while the latter can carry a tremendous amount of signals. In my lifetime it used to be a fairly common occurrence for phone lines to get overloaded. The last time this occurred that I can recall was on September 11th in 2001. When my blog used to be over at Blogger I had a tracker in the html code that showed a map of the globe indicating where all of the visits I was receiving were originating.

One of the most striking things I recall about this map was that there was a narrow band of high traffic visits just north of the equator across the entire globe, from whence the majority of my traffic came. In the United States the majority of the traffic was along the coasts, whereas the center of the country was largely dark. I had hits throughout Europe (especially Great Britain, Northern Europe, and regions of Eastern Europe), while traffic began to drop off further into Eastern Europe and Russia. There was lots of traffic from regions of Australia and New Zealand, traffic from a few cities in Mexico, South and Central America, and cities in Africa. China was entirely blank. These are infrastructural issues pertaining to how the taught strings between all those soup cans are connected up with one another. I find the darkness or lack of visits in the middle regions of the United States particularly interested as this indicates a lack of well developed infrastructure and this lack of communications infrastructure correlates strongly with political party affiliation. If you want a revolution a good start would not be protests in the streets or critiques of ideology or even Badiouian truth-procedures, but quietly making internet, satellite, cable, and cell phone reception readily available in regions where these things aren’t available.

All of these actants and many more both afford and constrain my student, increasing her degree of reality by both connecting her in all sorts of ways that assist in her ability to endure and persist through time and space, but also by increasing the effects she can have on other actants in the world around her. Yet what I’ve outlined here is only the barest sketch of what an object-oriented analysis looks like. It’s still too vague and general, gesturing at relations with other actants without looking at the concrete actants involved and how these networks are organized, their history, their evolution, their dominant tendencies and directions, their interdependencies and how these constrain the possibility of certain forms of change, where “lines of flight” or tendencies of change are breaking free, how those might be assisted, accelerated, and enhanced, and so much more. In his magnificent three volumes entitled Capitalism & Civilization, Braudel seeks to investigate what he calls “material history”. Material history is the organization of these actants. Braudel’s seeks to determine why, despite the present of certain revolutionary semiotic actants in a historical epoch (semiotic actants), change is nonetheless so slow to come. Why does everything remain largely the same at the level of material life after Hume, Spinoza’s Theologico-Politico Treatise, Voltaire, Diderot, etc? This question seems pessimistic, as if one were claiming that change is impossible, but it’s precisely the opposite. Only through knowing how networks of actants are actually put together, what actants are involved, how these interactions among actants are organized, etc., does it become possible to locate the bottlenecks or inhibitors of change and devise strategies for undoing these bottlenecks and releasing transformative potentials. Just opening the black box and seeing the networks already imperiles the organization of the network by opening the possibility to think and enact other possibilities.

A constellation is an imaginary, invisible and immaterial relation drawn between real, visible, material things. It is something seen into the world, but not itself in the world; between things, amongst them, but not of them. It is not a property ascribed to them, but an improper way of treating them, not endorsed or induced by them, supported by them without permission. It is an improper use of the elements of the world, using them for a purpose they could not have anticipated and toward which they are indifferent.

The constellation is a mode of allegory, perhaps its purest mode, in that it makes use of some material such that the actual context and character of that material is totally abstracted, only retained insofar as it serves to illustrate something totally and essentially unrelated. The constellation treats the constellated material much in the way the present may regard ancient ruins: now deprived of everything that furnished them with relevance and meaning, we are free to read into these ruins whatever fabulous and romantic significance we care to, even if this takes the form of meticulous and scientific reconstruction of the original context. In the latter case, we do not struggle against the manifest effect of historical corrosion, but only resurrect the past in a form now deprived of its original aura, a new and barely recognizable form that nonetheless faithful repeats the original (just as Christ was unrecognizable to his disciples after his resurrection). Even the truth becomes allegorically transcribed when bestowed upon the ruin.

The constellation treats everything it touches as ruined, as deprived of any proper meaning or context. This is not to say that it ever had such a meaning, but only that it has none, and that this poverty is its only essence. The improper use of worldly material evinced in allegory and constellation is not a violation or transgression of proper use, but demonstrates the absence of any such propriety; in approaching its material as ruined, any use would have to be improper, even the scientific use of archaeology.

The constellation may be imaginary, imputed to things that have no need of it and remain blind to it, but this is not to say it is unreal. Yet the reality of the constellation does not take a literal form, as lines really traced in the void between stars. The reality of the constellation is manifest in their power of orientation, to give direction to travelers, especially at sea. The constellation exists not between stars, but between stars and sailors as the orienting force which is a condition of navigation. The lines of the constellation are traced in the movements of ships at sea, even if these lines bear no resemblance to those imagined in the heavens.

The relation between a constellation and its navigational manifestation is one of non-resemblance, as much as that between the constellation and the myth it supposedly transfigures. The constellation is a figure of both the myth and the journey, which is not to say it depicts or predicts them. Rather, it constitutes a graphic that, without resemblance, nonetheless traces or outlines elements as incomparable as a myth, a navigational course, or a divination. The astrological divination in particular is paradigmatic: its predictions have no ’scientific’ value, they have no necessary relation to the future, they may in no way resemble it; yet they nonetheless are fully real and amount to a tangible influence upon that future, however negligible.

The stars are indifferent to the myth they are imagined to figure, the course assist in charting, and the future they seem to reveal. As the material of a constellation, they are treated allegorically, as support wholly enveloped in an improper use, but nonetheless remaining essentially unassimilable, necessarily inappropriable and hence rendering every use improper, marked as improper. This relation, between the materiality of the ruin as indifferent support, and the misuse value manifest in allegorical ex-appropriation, is that of constellation.

This relation is what is at stake in myth; not myth in the sense of fabulous pseudo-histories, but myth as the effacement of the inappropriable support of every use (this is precisely the sense of mythic violence described by Benjamin). It is no coincidence that our constellations are carved up according to mythology. The mythic assimilation of origin to that which originates with it, of condition to that which it conditions, of creation to the created, is precisely what is opposed by materialism, which is the attestation of the essential inappropriability of the material support of myth, or any self-validating use. Myth, in claiming propriety over its material support, in claiming the authoritative account of its own origin (or more abstractly, that there is such an account, as in the case of Lacanian fantasy), attempts to erase every trace of impropriety. Benjamin’s historical materialism begins precisely from the revelation of this impropriety as the very materiality of history itself, and on the basis of which every sovereignty (mythic effacement of impropriety and inclusion of origin) establishes itself, while also being essentially doomed to ruin.

Mission Objectives: Bright Stars, Constellation, Nova

Equipment: Binoculars, Telescope

Required Time: 10 minutes

Introduction: One of the cool things about this hobby is that the sky is not unchanging. Although we can’t predict when new goodies like bright comets and novae will occur, they do come around with fair regularity. Two years ago, when I was just getting into amateur astronomy, comet 17P/Holmes suddenly blew up to naked eye visibility. I just got an AstroAlert from Sky & Telescope about a nova in the constellation Eridanus, close to the bright star Rigel in Orion.

Introduction: This is one you can’t do immediately after dark. But neither will you have to stay up obscenely late or get up obscenely early. By 9:00 or 10:00 PM, Orion should be far enough above the horizon to make this a cinch.

The first step is to locate the constellation Orion. Orion is the most striking and instantly recognizable of all constellations, so it’s just a matter of looking southeast at the right time. Find the straight line of three stars between bright red Betelgeuse and even brighter Rigel, and you’ve got it. Lots of good deep sky targets in Orion, including the incomparable Great Nebula, M42, but those are missions for other evenings.

Once you’ve located Orion, you’ll have to star-hop to the nova. From Rigel, you can follow the arc of bright stars that marks the eastern end of the constellation Eridanus (green arrow). From the third star in the chain, drop down (south) to two close stars that mark the head of the stick figure shown on these charts. Alternatively, look south of Orion to find the stars that form the outline of Lepus, the Hare, and line up the stars forming the bunny’s shoulder and the top of its head to get to the stick figure’s left foot (orange arrow).

A word about these charts: they were generated by the AAVSO, or American Association of Variable Star Observers, which has a gizmo for generating finder charts for practically all of the variable stars one might want to hunt down visually. I added the colored arrows, and the stick figure is just an asterism–a chance alignment of star–that I noticed and found useful. Star hopping is subject to individual preference, so if this way of getting there doens’t work for you, generate your own finder charts and find your own way. I don’t say that to be flip or callous; sitting down with a red flashlight, some blank finder charts, and a telescope and finding (and drawing) your own asterisms is very satisfying and a great way to learn your way around the sky.

Another thing about the charts: many stars have a two or three digit number next to them. These are not identification numbers but magnitudes, so that variable star observers can determine the brightness of their target star by comparing it to other stars in the same field. Following standard practice, the decimal points are eliminated on the charts so they can’t be confused with stars. A star with the number 81 next to it shines with a magnitude of 8.1, too faint for the naked eye but within easy reach of binoculars.

Back to the stick figure. Note that stars marking the head, heart, left hand, and left foot all have close companions, which should help you distinguish them from all the other stars out there. Once you’re sure you’ve got it, find a chain of three fainter stars trending southeast from the stick figure’s left hand. Nova Eridani 2009 forms a triangle with the outermost stars in that chain. Right now it’s shining around magnitude 8.4, so it should be almost identical in brightness to the star just below it marked 81. Don’t confuse them!

Also notice that the charts are all shown with north to the top and east to the left, just as this part of the sky looks to the naked eye, binoculars, and right angle correct image (RACI) finderscopes. Straight-through finderscopes, straight-through refractors, and Newtonian reflectors will show the sky rotated by 180 degrees. No problem, just rotate the chart upside down and keep on truckin’. Refractors and cassegrain scopes using a star diagonal will show the sky rightside up, but flipped left to right. You can either flip the image ahead of time in an image-processing program, or do it mentally in your head, or–the oldest and easiest method–turn the chart over and shine a flashlight through from the other side.

So what’s going on out there? Novae are giant thermonuclear explosions that occur when a white dwarf star accumulates enough hydrogen on its surface to undergo a chain reaction. Usually the hydrogen is slurped off the surface of a companion star, perhaps a red giant. This can happen over and over again; most novae probably “go off” once every 1000 to 100,000 years, and a few like RS Ophiuchi go off every few decades.

This explosion of hydrogen on the surface of the star is in stark contrast to a Type 1a supernova, which also involves a white dwarf accreting matter from a companion. In those supernovae, the white dwarfs accumulate enough matter to approach the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.38 solar masses, at which point carbon fusion starts in their cores, followed by oxygen fusion, followed by total destabilization of the star. The star detonates in an explosion 5 billion times as bright as the sun, with a shock wave that travels at 3% of the speed of light. Neat trick, but needless to say, one that a star can only pull off once.

Fortunately for us, Nova Eridani 2009 isn’t going anywhere. However, it will dim over the coming months, so get out there and see something new.

For more info, see the Sky & Tel writeup and the AAVSO updates here, here, and here.

Assyrian tablet depicting Phoenix rising from its own ashes

Nobody wants to be bogged down by deadlines, traffic jams, daily pressures which business imposes on our lives, but they are a reality. The gift is not to allow those pressures to impinge on our conscious-ness ALL of the time: to set aside some moment, daily, for what’s going on INSIDE, not outside in our lives. The trick to maintaining a healthy mind within a body that’s built to withstand some stresses is simple: it’s called switching off.

Everyone needs to switch off, to become unglued, to take a Holiday. That’s why Thanksgiving is such a huge celebration in the American continent: the international home of Big Bizness. This time of gratitude covers every race, creed, religious sect and subgroup: everybody celebrates. A timeout that takes us away from the increasing world pressure to ‘take care of business’. It gives us an overview of life; if only for one weekend in the year.

With a feeling of joy for what we are grateful for in our lives comes a per-spective on how our lives have turned out; from where we started. We look at the last year and give thanks: for our home, our family and our friends. Sometimes we give thanks for a lot of years: and see how our past has become our present.

They say it’s not good to dwell in the past. However there are some lessons from the past that we, with the miracle of technology, may use. They teach us to hold an overview.

Yes. Crop circles, among others, point the way.

Over the last decade we’ve been treated to a deluge of them: now more than a mere curiosity: they are perhaps showing us how to ‘be’.

Using techniques as diverse as pictograms, mathematics, animal and nature symbolism and digital ‘language’, these crop glyphs have become increasingly sophisticated and, like our own society and consciousness, their influence is expanding.

Last summer alone brought eye-witness reports from unbiased observers who believe personally and irrevocably in their ‘power’ to convert. Visitors to crop circles have experienced a ‘transformation’, feeling of ‘oneness’, a change in conscious-ness, a sensation of love for their fellow beings. These human emotions are backed up by changes and fluctuations in on-the-ground readings monitored by digital and electronic equipment used to measure the electromagnetic flow.

Even for those of us not conversant in the language of mathematics, the evidence has already brought the scientific community on board. Carl Sagan, astrophysicist and author of ‘Cosmos’, said before he died in 1996 at the age of 62: ‘Mathematics is the Rosetta Stone of the Universe’. This interpretive Rosetta Stone is evident in enough crop circles to satisfy the most skeptic mathematician.

Euclidean sacred geometry in pyramid crop circle July 2009

Optical Pyramid at Chesterton, Harbury Warwickshire July 2009

Take another form of Kornkreis symbolism: images depicting birds, insects: the dragonfly, the human butterfly, the honeybee and bumblebee; swallows: all symbolic of flying, reaching beyond ourselves into the stratosphere of consciousness, beyond our mortal coil: suggesting our need to connect with our higher selves, superconscious, looking perhaps to encourage Mankind to connect as one, as a collective conscioiusness; holy, whole.

Hummingbird crop circle of July 2009 at Milk Hill, Wiltshire

Nazca line Hummingbird, created between AD300-600 in Peruvian High Desert

Stretching for hundreds of miles through the Altiplano Peruvian high desert, the lines form geoglyphs cleared in the land surface. Made by Nazca laborers, they follow riverbeds that flow from the Andes. This high desert terrain stretches for over 1400 miles along the Pacific coast and the Pampa Colorada, or Red Plain of deep red sandstone where Nazca art was created, runs 15 miles inland and for 37 miles alongside the Andes. Nazca workers cleared the surface of stones, revealing lines of lighter clay underneath. Because of its dry climate (humidity quotient almost zero), these imprints have remained in the landscape for the last millennium and a half.

Nazca Monkey line drawing in the Peruvian Altiplano AD300-600

Because of our programming as a society, taught for millennia to believe what we see in our three-dimensional world, it has taken us all of the last hundred years even to agree with Einstein that the possibility of a fourth dimension is conceivable. Only now are we beginning to realize that the suggestion, taught for centuries by esoteric spiritual disciplines, that we are part of an even-greater Whole of seven, nay, twelve, perhaps infinite dimensional realities, may have validity: that we may indeed be sending ourselves messages to trigger our soul memory that it is time to wake up and become the spiritual beings we were intended to be.

We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For. It has a ring to it.

Yatesbury Phoenix appeared June 2009

Looking to and from the stars: are we indeed beginning to see the stellar perspective?

620 // November 25, 2009

Here in the mountains, I can see the stars so much more clearly than down in the city. Aren’t they beautiful?

Dans la constellation du Pégase, 4 étoiles forment un carré presque parfait

Markab, Algenib, Scheat et Sirrah

Hors en gaélique irlandais ces 4 étoiles possédent chacune un nom bien particulier :

Markab est Falias

Algenib est Gorias

Shceat est Murias

Sirrah est Findias

Ceci nous ramène a un texte mythique et fondateur :

Cath Maige Tured (français)

§ 1. Les Tùatha Dé Dànann étaient dans les îles au Nord du Monde, apprenant la science et la magie, le druidisme, la sagesse et l’art. Et ils surpassèrent tous les sages des arts du paganisme.

§ 2. Il y avait quatre villes dans lesquelles ils apprenaient la science, la connaissance et les arts diaboliques, à savoir Falias et Gorias, Murias et Findias.

§ 3. C’est de Falias que fut apportée la Pierre de Fal qui était à Tara. Elle criait sous chaque roi qui prenait l’Irlande.

§ 4. C’est de Gorias que fut apportée la lance qu’avait Lug. Aucune bataille n’était gagnée contre elle ou contre celui qui l’avait à la main.

§ 5. C’est de Findias que fut apportée l’épée de Nuada. Personne ne lui échappait quand elle était tirée du fourreau de la Bodb et on ne lui résistait pas.

§ 6. C’est de Murias que fut apporté le chaudron du Dagda. Aucune troupe ne le quittait insatisfaite.

§ 7. Il y avait quatre druides dans ces quatre villes. Morfesae était à Falias. Esras était à Gorias. Uiscias était à Findias. Semias était à Murias. Ce sont les quatre poètes de qui les Tùatha Dé apprirent la science et la connaissance.

Corwynn

Fantasy of Flight Aircraft Collection

28º 10’ 52” N / 81º 48’ 33” W

Polk City Florida USA lies between the Tampa and Orlando. Kermit Weeks chose property there to not only house his extensive airplane collection but to build an entire experience. A wealthy man, he built an airfield to resemble a WW II era air base. The visitor observes a retro water tower with its checkered livery, a grass air strip (underlain by an engineered surface to enhance draining) and a lake for landings by aquatic aircraft. Inside there is a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress one walks through and around — as it sits as if being serviced in the field. And then one walks into the first of two hangers. There are more aircraft here, by far, than in most museums. Only national museums rival the scale of this collection. The range of airplanes on exhibit spans aviation history from its earliest times through WW II — no jets here — notably, the majority are kept in flying condition.

Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina and retro water tower of the Fantasy of Flight Aircraft Collection — photo by Joe May

There is one aircraft here that drew me like iron to a magnet, the Short Brothers Sunderland Mk V — a four engine flying boat flown by the RAF in WW II. As a bonus one is allowed to walk through the main deck to see the aircraft as used when it was an airliner, not a military maritime patrol aircraft. The aircraft is immense and one can see it as it sits on beaching gear in one of the hangers. What it must have been like to tow the Sunderland to the water, float her and then remove the unwieldy beaching gear? There is not only a Ford Trimotor but one of its contemporary aircraft, a Stinson Trimotor.

Fantasy of Flight Aircraft Collection North Hangar with Short Bros. Sunderland Mk V — photo by Joe May

Stinson Trimotor — photo by Joe May

There are too many aircraft to list here but there are about four dozen housed in both hangers. Three of the especially historic aircraft are a Grumman F3F (nicknamed Flying Barrel), a Cierva C.30-A Autigiro* and a replica of a Bachem Ba-349 Natter (Viper). There are many more, to be sure, including a Curtiss TF-40  Kittyhawk, Supermarine Spitfire Mk XVI, Lockheed Constellation, Grumman J2F Duck, North American P-51C Mustang and Fieseler Fi-156 Storch (Stork).

North American P-51C Mustang — photo by Joe May

Getting there is easily done by driving along interstate I-4 to Polk City. The nearest major airports are Tampa International Airport and Orlando International Airport. Entry is about $20, there is an excellent diner/café and modern restrooms. Extras are also on hand … a tour of a third hangar used for restoration work, a tour of the restoration wood shop, a daily flying demonstration and biplane for-hire rides.

Martin B-26 Marauder — photo by Joe May

The post scheduled to be published on 2 December 2009 will describe the Fieseler Fi-156 Storch flying demonstration I thoroughly enjoyed watching.

* For more on the Cierva C.30-A Autigiro please see 007! He knows what to fly! — Little Nellie and other autogiros, which published on 7 October 2009.

Mix To Go Magazine Presents

DANCE AFTER DARK | The Mix Show

The theme: “At A Classic Pitch”

Dance After Dark

Mix by DJ FREEDOM

Live at 632 Studios in Brooklyn, New York City

Monday, November 23, 2009

(DOWNLOAD LINK AT BOTTOM OF SONG LIST)

SONG LIST:

(1) Razamatazz (Free*Mix) – Quincy Jones

(2) Portuguese Love (Free*Mix) – Phil Asher’s Miami Samba Vs DJ Freedom’s Tribal

(3) You’re My Latest, My Greatest Inspiration (Quentin Harris Remix) – Teddy Pendergrass

(4) Make Sure Your Sure (Quentin Harris & Timmy Regisford Remix) – Stevie Wonder

(5) Baby I’m Scared of You (Free*Mix) – Womack & Womack

(6) Still In Love With You (Masters At Work Dub) – Melisa Morgan

(7) Forget Me Nots (DJ Freedom’s Back To Basics Mix) – Patrice Rushen

(8) Club Lonely (Original Vocal Mix) – Lil Louis

(9) Everybody Dance – Chic

(10) Encore (Freedom’s Classic Club Vocal Remix) – Cheryl Lynn

(11) In The AM (Quentin’s Remix Vs DJ Freedom’s Remix) – Mary J Blige…dedicated to cousin Ann Douglas!

(12) Horizons (Freedom’s Classic House Remix) – The Sylvers

(13) Nights Over Egypt (Freedom’s Nights Over Ibiza Remix) – The Jones Girls

(14) Super Constellation 2009 (Freedom’s Disco Pitch Remix) – Sousa & Mad

(15) Ecstasy (Freedom’s Classic Pitch Remix) – Barry White

(16) Ready 4 More – International Featuring Miss Lynsey

(17) The Night The Lights Went Out (The Black Science Orchestra Remix) – The Trammps

(18) Don’t Talk Just Dance _Free*Mix Project Featuring Jon B

(19) No One – Maxwell

(20) Bad Times (I Can’t Stand It) -Captain Rapp

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=FIWPVCN4

Mission Objectives: Constellation, Open Cluster, Bright Star

Equipment: Naked eye, Binoculars, Telescope

Required Time: 3 minutes

Instructions: Go outside after dark, face northeast, and look for the sideways W. If you’re not sure which W is which, take a free sky map. The W is Cassiopeia, which lies right smack in the middle of the winter Milky Way.

Cassiopeia is a deep sky wonderland in binoculars and telescopes. There are more star clusters than you can shake a stick at–a decent portable sky atlas will show a dozen or more. Even without an atlas, it’s an awesome area to scan around in with optics of any size.

I have a confession, though. Almost every time I go out to observe in the winter, I give Cassiopeia a quick once-over and then leave. Why? Because there’s an even better pair of clusters lurking over the border of the neighboring constellation, Perseus, and Cassiopeia is such a good pointer that you might think it was put there for that purpose. Follow the inner leg of the shallow half of the W about 2/3 of the way to the next bright star, and you’ll find the Double Cluster, NGC 869 and 884. Keep in mind the effect of sky rotation–by 8:30 PM, Cassiopeia is an M centered over the North Star, and by midnight it’s a sigma to the northwest. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

The Double Cluster is one of the finest objects in the night sky, and almost always makes it onto lists with names like “Top 10 Telescopic Targets”. I’m not going to show you any pictures of the clusters themselves, because this is one place where pictures simply don’t do justice. You’ll have to get out under the night sky and see for yourself.

Once you’ve had your mind blown by the Double Cluster, keep on cruising in the same direction and follow the chain of bright stars to Mirphak, or Alpha Persei, the brightest star in the constellation Perseus. Mirphak is surrounded by a broad field of stars called the Alpha Persei association; it is too big to fit in the field of view of most telescopes (except possibly fast focal ratio, widefield scopes like the Astroscan), but is instead one of the best binocular targets in the entire sky. Have a look and let me know what you think.