THIS AND THAT

            Where were you ten years ago tomorrow? Tim and I had just arrived at the site we meant to prepare for sod when we heard surreal reports on the radio about planes flying into the Trade Towers. My man of action restarted the truck’s engine, and hurried to the bank to withdraw some cash—a State Department veteran, Tim has a good grounding in worst-case scenarios. After topping off the gas tanks in both our vehicles, we settled in at home to watch those horrifying images on TV, and wait.

            Sunday, September 10, 2011, is the tenth anniversary of the day the world changed for complacent America. Never again would war be thought of as something that only happens in other places.

            We have kind and generous friends who let Tim and me use their apartment in Battery Park City in New York. The door is difficult to open because of the rattling the building endured as the Towers fell. The front window overlooks what was at first a debris-filled hole from which the memorial gradually rose. I remember staring out that window at those poignant twin spotlight beams.

We haven’t visited the city for a few years. I’m ready to go back now. My son, Sean, will graduate from art school there this coming May. Maybe they’ll have finished working on the downtown portion of West Street by then. It’ll be good to see a building and a park where that ugly, sad hole used to be. It’ll be good to remember, and good to remember it’s good to keep moving forward.

Take a minute to think of all the people who died that day ten years ago, and the families whose lives were instantly, irrevocably, eternally altered. Never forget them, and never stop moving forward.

*****



Shine on, shine on Harvest Moon...

             The Harvest Moon goes full at 5:27 am EDT on September 12^th. How do I know it’s the Harvest Moon? Traditionally, the name goes to the full moon falling closest to the autumnal equinox. At this time of year in the northern Hemisphere, the moon’s trajectory forms a shallow angle to the eastern horizon. The result is that, on the evenings around the moon going full, it appears to rise only a few minutes later than it came up the night before.

So what? you ask. Doesn’t it do that anyway?

Well, not exactly. It probably will not surprise you to learn that I track moon cycles as part of my weather fixation. Here are graphs plotting the curve of the difference in minutes between rise and set on consecutive days for September of 2010 and March of this year. I’m not entirely sure what they mean, but there are more dots closer together at the top of the curve during last year’s Harvest Moon (September 23) than during March 19th’s “Super” Moon. The farther north you go, the differences get smaller, until, when you get above the Arctic Circle, the Harvest Moon actually appears to rise earlier on successive evenings. At any rate, all this “extra” light is a boon to farmers laboring far into the night to get the last of the crops in before frost. Or that’s the story, anyway.



Moon cycle graph March 2011



Moon cycle graph September 2010



Some planting-by-the-moon folklore: I put in pole beans last weekend, because planting during a waxing moon is supposed to help crops that grow up; contrariwise, I’ll wait until Monday to set out my potatoes, because waning moons traditionally aid in the establishment of root crops. I don’t really think it makes any difference one way or the other, but I’ll try anything once.

*****



Comet Garradd

            In other celestial news, two cool events should be visible to casual viewers for most of September. The first is the continued presence of Comet Garradd, easily visible with binoculars. That’s not a typo: the comet is named for Australian amateur astronomer Gordon Garradd. A Google search turned up many listings for Comet “Garrard,” which is just wrong. Easier to say, but wrong. Do the right thing and pronounce Mr. Garradd’s name correctly.



Supernova 2011fe
in a galaxy far, far away

            The other skylight, for which you’ll need a telescope, is the supernova occurring in Galaxy M101, good ol’ SN2011fe. Astrophysicists are wetting their pants over this one because it’s a Type I supernova. That means it reliably produces “standard candles” of light by which interstellar and intergalactic distances are measured. The current estimate is that Galaxy M101 lies about 21 million light-years away from us—SN2011fe should help refine that calculation.

*****



Azalea caterpillar
calmly defoliating an azalea

            From the celestial to the terrestrial: keep an eye out for azalea caterpillars. Tim found a pair of them on a client’s Azalea indica on Thursday. You wouldn’t think it, looking at the picture here, but they blend very nicely into the foliage until there are so many of them that there’s no foliage left. If you find any, hand-pick them off the plant and squish them. The caterpillar’s spines are soft and not toxic in any way. (I remove them barehanded, but recommend gloves for the squeamish among you. I’m one of the squeamish about the smushing part, so that’s Tim’s job.) Keep in mind that, if you find one, more than likely there are others. I’ve never known a moth to lay a solitary egg. That’s inefficient.

*****



Centipede grass seedhead

            Finally, for those of you with centipede grass lawns, it would behoove you to allow the seedheads to ripen before mowing at this time of year. It’s nature’s way of increasing the density of your stand, and absolutely free.

Speaking of mowing, I am happy to report that Tim has made it through the worst of the hot weather without having to cut our grass once. If our water bills were not zooming through the stratosphere, he might even have thanked the fiscal idiots who run our town.

Thanks for dropping by, and please spare a minute for remembrance tomorrow.

                                                      Kathy

THINGS ARE LOOKING UP

Christopher Reeve as Superman

            Look!

           Up in the sky!

            It’s a bird!

            It’s a plane! It’s… 

No, not him.

            Because August is kind of a blah time on the ground, let’s raise our perspective. So… Look! Up in the sky!  It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s the Full Sturgeon Moon!

Full Sturgeon Moon rising
over Fishers Island, NY,
August 17, 2008
as taken by Sky-Guy 

            In Hindi, it’s called Narali Poornima or Raksha Bandhan. The Buddhists know it as Nikini Poya. Also known to Native Americans as the Green Corn, Grain, Red, Lightning and/or Dog Moon, the Sturgeon Moon is so called because Algonquian tribes found sturgeon in the Great Lakes easiest to catch at this time, presumably because they (the fish, not the Indians) were spawning. Regardless of what you call it, August’s full moon rose at 2:57 pm EDT today (August 13), just in time to spoil viewing of one of the best meteor showers of the year.

              

The Perseids over Stonehenge  

            The Perseid meteor shower brings back fond memories for Tim and me: we spent the end of our first date counting streaks of light raining down over Cascade Lake in the Adirondacks. Emanating from Earth’s annual pass through the debris stream of the Swift-Tuttle comet—which, in case you’re interested, orbits the sun every 133 years—the radiants (astronomer-speak for meteor “heads”) seem to originate from the constellation Perseus; hence the name. While probably the best-known of all recurring meteor shower events, the Perseids are only one of nine shows each year. I spent a good bit of this morning lost in the Science section of the online Christian Science Monitor. Follow the link to discover fascinating meteor shower lore.

            A factoid I just learned: a meteor shower becomes a meteor storm when the flaming projectiles blaze into view at more than 1000 per hour. Pretty cool, huh? If you’re not a satellite or in an orbiting spacecraft, obviously.



Comet Elenin

            Turns out comets are not the rare things I assumed them to be. Apparently inner space is chockablock with them. Why, in August alone, Comet Garrard was visible on the 2^nd; Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova (say that three times, fast) streaks past on the 16^th; and Comet Elenin, supposedly the agent of Earth’s destruction, will be visible to the naked eye by the end of the month as it passes three million miles wide of us. Too bad for all of you Mayan-calendar end-times conspiracy buffs out there.



The Celtic Wheel of the Seasons

            August always stirs my interest in the heavens because it’s a busy time, astronomically speaking. The month starts off with the cross-quarter holiday of Lammas. Cross-quarters are the celestial mid-points between the solstices and the equinoxes. The druids call it Lughnasadh (lew-NAH-sah), when pagans (and farmers) celebrate the first harvests of the growing season. “Dancing at Lughnasa,” a lovely slice-of-life movie of a rural family in 1930s Ireland, gives a flavor of the modern festival.

(For your edification, August 1 is the only cross-quarter day not co-opted by the Christian religion. The other three are:

·         February 1, pagan Imbolc (IM-bolk), the festival of fire. It became Candlemas, the feast of the presentation of the Christ-child at the Temple;

·         May 1, Beltane or May Day, a celebration of fertility and spring planting. This one morphed into Mary’s Day; and

·        November 1, Samhain (sew-EEN), the end-of-harvest party. The church celebrates All Hallows and All Souls instead, the days of the dead.       




Where to look for Jupiter

             Lest you worry that the crisp days and cool nights of autumn are upon us, fear not: the dead middle of meteorological summer fell on August 7. We have lots more miserable, hot, humid days to enjoy.

Besides the Sturgeon Moon, the Perseids and the comets, the August sky reveals additional celestial wonders to those in the Northern Hemisphere who know where and when to look. For most of August, Saturn sets in the southwest as evening twilight fades. If you have a telescope, you’ll get a good look at its rings and Titan, the planet’s largest moon. Saturn goes down just as the giant planet Jupiter rises in the east. The four largest of its 63 (and counting) moons—Callisto, Europa, Ganymeade and Io, collectively called the Galilean moons for Galileo, who first spotted them—should be visible with binoculars. On the 22^nd, take your binocs with you to some dark venue for a shot at actually seeing Neptune, just winding up its first solar orbit since its discovery in 1846. It’ll appear only as a tiny blue dot, but think of the bragging rights! And Sky-Guy urges everyone not to miss the summertime Milky Way, running from northeast to southwest around midnight. Best viewing is after the moon’s last quarter on the 21^st. “In particular,” he writes, “look for the ‘Great Rift’ that cleaves the galaxy in two from the center of the Summer Triangle down to the southern constellations of Scorpius and Sagittarius… I can’t think of a more relaxing way to spend a clear summer evening than being lost in that immensity.”



The summertime Milky Way
with the Great Rift visible
(photo by Mike Hankey)

 

Where to look for Neptune











While taking in the celestial sights this month, consider this: in analyzing the composition of meteorites found in Australia and Antarctica, scientists found adenine and guanine, two of the nucleobases that make up terrestrial DNA. While they didn’t isolate any thymine or cytosine (the other pair of bases), they did discover two “nucleobase analogs” new to science. Read the linked Christian Science Monitor article, “Are We All Extraterrestrials? Scientists Discover Traces of DNA in Space” and ponder the immensity of that.

As the late Jack Horkheimer used to say, “Keep looking up!”

And thanks for dropping by.

        Kathy, Mr. Spock, and the Squeeze Toy Aliens from "Toy Story"  

"You have saved our lives.
We are eternally grateful."


 

"Live long and prosper."







P.S.--For more information, go to http://www.skymaps.com/ and www.Space.com/12576-skywatching-events-august-2011.html.