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I am fascinated by the idea of keeping an old fashioned naturalist journal. There is a romance to keeping and drawing in such a book. I already do such a thing with my astronomy journal. And while for most astronomers the object is to keep an objective record of their observations, there is an undeniable truth that the process of recording what you see makes you see more of what there is. That more than simply peering through the eyepiece, the cogitating and pondering leads to an undeniable personal understanding
I'm not quite sure how such a book would appear. It would be more than wrtiting,m and more than just drawing. Would it be large? Pocket sized? Reflective? Objective? Does it strive for a conclusion or say "Here is how I see it."
I suppose that the very nature of it means that it will be reflective - well it will for me as it seems to be part and parcel of my nature. My most memorable and profound monments at the telescope are just that: that I could not have eyes enough to seenor grey-matter enough to understand what I am looking at.
I could not deny that for me such a journal would represent a path to personal understanding. as much as an understanding of the world around me. Maybe at the end of it (The journal? Me?) I might truely understand that we are a reflection of the world, and the world is a reflection of us.
The first star of the twilight is always a singular event for me. It is a sentinel that whispers of the Universe about us - if only we dare to look up. So imagine catching sight of the half full moon, luminescent in the sky, and next to it Jupiter, shining so strongly in the pale sky that your first glance tells you right away that the evening that follows will not be an ordinary one.
The time comes to set up the telescope. As I step out I notice that the wind has come up from the south. Sirius flutters in the sky and I feel the cool bite of the southerly through my jersey. The gawky aluminium legs of the refractor's tripod are cold and suck the warmth from my fingers as I fold it up and lug it around the side of the house. Straggling branches from the apple tree snag the tripod and myself as I squeeze past it. I set up the tripod on the puggy lawn and look up, past the apple branches and the criss-crossing of power and phone lines to see Jupiter and the moon. Such a brilliant and unlikely combination that it startles a part of me that expects the ordinary. For an instant I understand how alien and strange this would have appeared to my ancestors - how the magic of the stars would have clouded their minds.
I return with the refractor and set it up on the tripod. A preliminary glimpse reveals that even though the cool wind is gusting from the south a high altitude stream of air is coming from the north. The moon shimmers with constant blurring, fuzzing and then settles, only to flare up again. On occasions you can see the boundary between the jetstream racing south and the general mess of turbulent air: it's like watching a swirling eddy in a slow moving river. The previous night I watched the setting moon through a slower stream of air. It shimmered as though being watched through a simmering vat of molten glass.
I turn the telescope towards Jupiter and it becomes evident that the poor seeing will play havoc here. The tiny star-like moons tremble. A gust comes along and the moons blow up into pale shivering blobs of light before settling back into quivering stars. The two equatorial belts on Jupiter are just plain dark bands. On a good night the 4" hints at the swirled details in Jupiter's cloud belts - but not this night.
As Jupiter and the Moon draw closer the contrast between the two worlds shows starkly. The cragged yellow features of the moon; the flattened elliptical, pastel world of Jupiter. One, a world of sun baked rocks and peaks broken from without and within, the other a cryogenic slush of gasses and metallic hydrogen, flattened out by it's own rotational spin. The tiny Galilean Moons, almost large enough to be worlds in their own right, reduced to inscrutable shimmering specks in the sky.
At one time in our history, an observing an occultation like this would have been a vital scientific endeavor, as it was the only way to gauge the distances and geometry of the solar system. To miss an event like this either because of bad weather or mishap wasn't just an inconvenience. It would have been a loss of a chance to add to the store of human knowledge about the universe around us. But nowadays, the importance of such events to science has diminished and their rarity means they are valued for their aesthetic appeal, and the occasional chance to get the rest of Humanity to look up at the sky and wonder about something larger.
The seeing does not improve for the rest of the evening - the perennial frustrations of astronomers in a temperate sea-side climate, so I decide to spend some time indoors making spot checks on the occultation's progress and watch it's simulated view on my planitarium softsware.
My final peek through the eyepiece shows Jupiter and it's entourage of moons are drifting away from the Moon. The image ripples and churns in the fast moving air.
The night was cooling far too soon. Summer's reach into the evening was fading. Fingers that had previously touched the land leaving lasting warmth were slipping away. Out in the garden, the telescope reaches skywards into the fading twilight, silhouetted against the apple tree. The few remaining apples on it draw its whip-like branches to the ground. The evening skies, once crisp blue, seem washed out now and smudged with a wintering opaqueness that makes the stars seem further away from me than the vivid skies of summer nights. My attention falters and falls back unwillingly to the ground and the sweet decaying scent from the apples that have slipped from the tree.
The telescope has been outside for some time now, cooling to the ambient temperature. Condensation forms on it's tube, making it clammy to touch. I look up into the sky again. Again? I'm always gazing upwards, searching the blueness that promises stars.
Scanning and sweeping the sky, it takes me some time. The starchart that I have made is too detailed and I realise that I am uncertain about the scale. The patch of sky I seem to come back to is curiously empty of the "dim fuzzies". Is that a barely resolved globular cluster - who knows!
Again I check the starchart. Again I sweep.
There!
Faintly, in the darkness the comet is a smudge of light that scintillates on the edge of vision. The nucleus is almost star like, the coma a circular haze around it. No tail sweeping across the sky. Far out in the solar system, the coma is a mist that clings to the icy core. Later, as the comet sweeps closer to the sun on it's perihelion dash, will the tail expand out and fan across the sky. Possibly bright enough to be seen from within the city lights.
I draw back to the eyepiece, and look at the minute smudge again. At the moment all is latent, potential. How or if it will blossom is still unpredictable, fickle. The stars drift across the field of view, carrying the comet with them. There is no sound, no breeze as it disappears from view.
This site last revised October 2011
