Could Have Kept Going to Moon in 1973 but stopped for 53 Years

 Back in late April 1973, Meg, a good friend of my sister Anita, took us on a trip down to central Dade County, in its Coconut Grove section.  There we found their museum of science, along with the Space Transit Planetarium.  On that Sunday Star Trek's Mister Spock, aka Leonard Nimoy, hosted a show there speculating about what direction we're going with our space program.  I need not mention here that then-president Richard Nixon...who would be run out of office August the following year because of Watergate, felt absolutely no desire to move forward with human space exploration...hence he canceled the final scheduled Apollo Moon missions.  Since December 1972 no human has walked on the moon's surface,only briefly flying around it a few days ago. I believe that on April 30th 53 years ago I happily walked into my Nova High School Planetartum in the afternoon, expecting a pleasant chat with the aging director.  He was in an angry state and sounded like he was chewing ME out..no interest in exchanging any ideas or showing any  respect.  I was informed that he was retiring...and if others didn't share his astronomy interests, then screw them.  I felt offended and insulted by his childish attitude...It' like that of a spoiled brat engaged in a temper tantrum: If you don't always let me win, then I'll pick up my toys and go home.. Later in 1973, I tried joining Nova's astronomy club, but felt excluded because Steve Johnson, its president, was too important and preoccupied grinding mirrors for a new telescope.  So when i went there for meetings I spent most of my time trying to stay out of Johnson's way...he was polite but overly dismissive: I didn't quite qualify in his estimation as a legitimate guy interested in the field...or as a human being for that matter.  As it was, the club leaders cared only about Comet Kohoutek, highly hyped but turning out to visually be a monumental dud. When I was admitted to Hollywood Memorial Hospital in mid-October for corrective left inguinal hernia correction surgery, I was relieved to not be attending any more astronomy club meetings, which included some classes that I hated. Well, we're supposedly nowadays "going back" to the moon (Obama is known for flippantly dismissing that option in 2010), so let's see what the schedules reveal... 

Planets on Full Display in Winter Night Sky

On New Year's Eve Melissa and I were invited to our friends' rural farm home to celebrate with them and others the changing of the year with food and good conversation.  We had never been there before and gratefully availed ourselves of the Waze app to know where to turn on the zigzagging way, with dirt roads presenting their own challenges as we approached our destination.  Once there, we enjoyed ourselves while soaking in the ambiance of being way out in the countryside of Gilchrist County.  The sky was cloudless and the stars shone brilliantly...as well as the planets: there were three of them (or four if you looked down and counted the Earth): Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.  I could easily make out red Mars, which was the easternmost, just below the zodiac constellation Gemini (technically it's in Cancer, but no one can make out that faint constellation).  I had to look up later which of the other two was Jupiter and which was Saturn.  Jupiter is in Taurus and Saturn, in the west part of the sky, is in Aquarius...just south of Pegasus.  I liked the fact that I could look all the way down to any horizon and see stars without noticeable interference from city lights.  Of course, out here as well as where I live, there are plenty of trees to block the view.  We enjoyed our visit, which I wouldn't have been able to be a part of had I not retired.  One door closes and many more open.  Speaking of more opportunities, I'm looking forward to seeing more of my local planetarium once its January schedule resumes after the holiday break.  It's the Kika Silva Pla Planetarium at Santa Fe College, directed by James Albury...

A Return Visit with Melissa to Local Planetarium to See Mesmerica

From my own records it had been several years since I'd paid a visit to the Kika Silva Plan Planetarium at Santa Fe College here in Gainesville, but Melissa bought a couple of tickets to their ongoing Saturday afternoon/evening presentation titled Mesmerica, created by and featuring percussionist James Hood.  The show we attended yesterday began at 6:15 but we got there about a half hour earlier to get good seating for this show, which was a series of computer-enhanced light and color patterns as well as a foray into exotic settings.  The idea of it all was to place the viewer into a state of relaxation and suggestion...sounds a little like auto-hypnosis, doesn't it?  We both enjoyed Mesmerica, but truth be told I've seen this sort of thing before and wasn't all that impressed.  There were three scenes there I especially liked in the 45-minute program, but I felt that it could have flowed a little more smoothly than it did.  So this wasn't a typical planetarium show explaining what was going on in the nighttime sky.  Yet director James Albury...who was there for the times that I (sometimes along with Melissa or Will) visited back in 2013, 2014 and 2018...is still in charge and it was a nice feeling to hear his enthusiasm and pick up on his friendly demeanor.  He did slip in that Mars and Jupiter are visible in the far east just before sunrise.  Being actually "of age", my senior discounts there nowadays are merited...unlike previous times years ago when they automatically assumed from appearance that I was an old geezer...

A Return Visit to the Santa Fe College Planetarium

It had been several months since I paid a visit to my local planetarium, located at Santa Fe (formerly "Community") College.  Last night I decided to go and hear what planetarium producer/director (and star of television's Star Hustler sky-gazing show) James Albury has to say about the spring sky.  With tracks from pieces by Isao Tomita, Vangelis, and other artists playing in the background, we were treated to a basic lesson in astronomy, covering  concepts like azimuth and altitude, the spring equinox, planetary motion (including retrograde motion), how one's latitude affects the portion of sky visible to them, and other interesting concepts.  I never tire of Albury going over the same basic material, for his style of speaking is warm and humorous.  Still, from time to time he would pause during his presentation to ask those in the audience still awake to clap...I'm not quite sure others were on the same plane as me. 

I timed my arrival at the planetarium so as not to be too early, and after being once again automatically given the unmerited senior discount at the entrance, one of the three sharply dressed assistants there informed me that I was the first one arriving for the show.  So for a few minutes I was the only one in the "big room", sitting back and enjoying the solitude, darkness, and ambient music.  When others came in eventually, they were always in groups...but with group outings to places like this, you know that some within those groups are coming along for the group's sake and not because they have any abiding interest in what's going on in the night sky.  But it was plain that, being there this time by myself, I was a "true believer"...and as it turns out, for nearly fifty years.

In April of 1964, my father took me aside one evening and showed me his very old Boy Scout handbook where it had maps of the night sky.  He explained that the stars were grouped into things called "constellations" that made it easier to identify them in the sky.  It was very much like the "connect-the-dot" puzzles I had grown up with.  We then went outside in the front yard to observe the night sky.  I don't exactly remember, but I think that Leo the lion was the first constellation I ever saw out there. After this initial experience, my interest in constellations and the night sky took off like a rocket...in the second grade I could reproduce the night sky on paper from memory for any season...

Mr. Albury's show about the springtime evening sky, to me, was a little off the mark as he tended to first heavily focus on traditionally winter constellations like Orion, Taurus, and Gemini while only briefly touching upon Leo and totally ignoring Virgo, the two of them dominating the spring evening sky (along with Bootes).  Then he jumped over to Hercules, which to me has always signified the month of July.  Oh well, at least he did dwell a bit on the asterism of the Big Dipper (within the constellation Ursa Major), which is at its highest in the north during the springtime evening.

If this show were taking place further south, like in Central America or the Caribbean, I would think that Crux, or the "Southern Cross", along with Alpha and Beta Centauri, would be objects of focus.  Of course, with the planetarium projector at his disposal, the director might have mentioned them anyway, in spite of our being too far north in latitude to observe them.

But there was a lot to cover in this show and it was only for a hour...so stuff had to be left out.  I still enjoyed it a lot and plan to return in a few weeks' time.  The planetarium has other shows on its schedule, such as a kid's matinee show about atoms and molecules, a show about eclipses, and two different musically driven graphic/optical presentations, one based on Led Zeppelin's greatest hits and the other on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album.  For me, I'm a little more on the "astronomy" side of the picture and may just stick with those types of programs... 

Vicarious Planetary Thrill Rides in Planetarium

It's been years since I've ridden a roller coaster, or any other theme park ride for that matter.  I miss those experiences, but not the lengthy travel times to and from the parks, not to mention the tedious, long lines for different rides once I manage to finally get inside a park.  But earlier this afternoon, I managed to get back at least of little of those old thrills without the long travel, long lines...or even the expense.  How? I paid a visit to my local Santa Fe College planetarium, where they were presenting a show titled SpacePark360: Geodesium Edition. It consisted of a set of nine imaginary thrill rides, one on each of the major planets (or one of their moons) starting with Mercury and going further out, with an extra one on "the way back" on Jupiter's volcanic moon Io.  Some of the rides were swinging rides, other were "twisters",  and the best were roller coasters.  Nine pretty cool rides set on exotic worlds.  Most of the planets and moons depicted as sites for the rides were interesting, although Venus and Jupiter were mostly a bunch of clouds...while Earth's rocket launch pad setting, coupled with the limited ride, wasn't very impressive.  But the scenes depicted for Mercury, Mars, Saturn (from Titan), Uranus (from its ring system), Neptune, (from Triton), and that finale on Io were vivid and memorable.  James Albury was there at the planetarium again, narrating the show...and he took my money at the entrance as well, automatically giving me the "senior" discount.  Oh well. 

I suppose that this vicarious thrill ride experience is probably going to be the way to go for me in the foreseeable future. The roller coaster on Neptune's moon Triton was a hanging coaster very similar to Montu at Busch Gardens, which incidentally is my favorite roller coaster ride of all time (I've ridden it 26 times, I believe). The others were more like that same park's Kumba coaster, also an old favorite.  I wasn't as happy with the non-coaster rides, although the opening one on Mercury reminded me of Pharaoh's Fury at Valdosta's Wild Adventures (I've ridden that one 27 times).  At the close of the show, Mr. Albury hinted that the company that produced this show is soon coming out with a sequel: I can hardly wait!!!

Visible Nova in Delphinus Detected

Late yesterday afternoon I attended my third planetarium show at the facility in Santa Fe College, here in Gainesville.  Once again James Albury hosted the event, which featured a movie adapted for domed theaters about black holes...narrated by Lian Neeson.  It was O.K., I suppose, although I've gotten more information and enlightenment on the subject from watching Science Channel shows like Wormhole.  Still, I enjoyed the experience of going inside the planetarium, sitting down in a comfortable chair, and digging the surroundings.  And at the conclusion of the program, Mr. Albury once again gave a synopsis of the night sky for this time of year...and with a special addition.

Our host announced that a few days ago, a nova explosion was detected in the constellation Delphinus, located a little northeast of Aquila.  The star, which was originally "seen" at magnitude +17, much too dim for the naked eye, suddenly brightened to where it is, at last report, +4.9...not exactly bright against the background of stars but still visible to the naked eye and certainly detectable to one (like myself) who is very familiar with the normal star patterns of that region of the sky.  Last night I went out to see it, but as luck would have it, the sky was overcast...as it currently is today so far.  Later this evening I'll go check it out, if the clouds have cleared out...

Planetarium and Perseids

Friday afternoon I woke up with a sense of purpose.  This time around I wouldn't forget the weekly planetarium show that Santa Fe College put on Friday evenings.  There were two shows, the first at 7 PM a look at the sky and interesting features and the second, at 9, more or less a light show done to the tune of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album.  I chose the former, going there again with Melissa.  James Albury of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium was there again as well, presenting the show.  He reiterated some things from our visit there three weeks ago and showed where the planets and moon would be seen for the next few days (Venus and Moon were close to each other in the early evening sky Friday tonight).  Albury had also brought in for display a 75-pound meteorite, composed of iron and nickel...and very magnetic...and very dense and heavy.  Melissa got a photo of it, as well as one of the facility's two projectors, this one the simpler non-digital model that Albury used for Friday's show.  The digital projector, he told me after the show, had the ability to show the movements of stars against the sky's background over spans of hundreds and thousands of years.  But for Friday we stuck with the analog one.

I'm going to try to make at least a monthly habit of dropping by the planetarium to see what's going on.  This month, of course...and the reason for the meteorite...was August's Perseid meteor shower, which I was just outside observing (at 3 in the morning).  The peak observing nights would have been tomorrow, but I'll be at work then.  In any event, I stood out there in my freshly mowed back yard under ideal cloudless conditions eyeballing the constellation Perseus for a good twenty-to-twenty-five minutes.  For my trouble I saw one clear meteor, a pretty bright and very brief streak of light left of Perseus in the vacant part of the sky between Perseus and Polaris known as the constellation Camelopardalis.  That was at 3:18.  Well, that's one more meteor than I believe I've ever seen with this, the supposedly biggest meteor shower of  the year...

A Visit to Santa Fe College's Planetarium

Yesterday evening Melissa and I visited Gainesville's Santa Fe College and their planetarium, officially named Kika Silva Pla Planetarium after a late benefactor.  The show, taking place 44 years after the first manned landing on the Moon, was titled "Florida Skies: Around the Moon".  James Albury, himself a co-host on the PBS show Star Gazer (the continuation of the late Jack Horkheimer's show Star Hustler), hosted the event.  It featured live "space" music composed and played by established musician John Serrie in the background as storytellers related old folk tales from various parts of the world relating to the night sky.

Despite the date and the title, the show itself didn't delve into the Apollo landing...or even our space program in general, for that matter.  It was more a primer on nighttime naked eye star gazing, explaining rudiments like altitude, azimuth, the meridian, the zenith, and where the planets are currently standing against the backdrop of the constellations.  If you get up just before sunrise (and it's not cloudy) and look toward the eastern horizon you'll see Jupiter and Mars in "conjunction" (appearing very close to each other).  Also, our next lunar eclipse with be in April, 2014.  For  Gainesville, the next solar eclipse will occur sometime in 2017; if you travel up to Nashville, Tennessee, it will be total.

I haven't been to a planetarium in decades, and this was my first visit to the one at Santa Fe College.  The star projection technology has vastly improved over my last planetarium experience, with it actually resembling a real night sky! Kudos.  Albury was a great host, the storytellers did their presentations well, and Serrie was perfect with his meditative, dreamy music.  The show was for one hour and cost me $5.  Pretty good deal, I think!

Before this past March I was always at work during the weekly Santa Fe Planetariums shows.  Now, though, I may be taking more of them in...

Solar Walk

A few days ago, my local newspaper, The Gainesville Sun, featured a short article about Solar Walk, which is a series of sculptures lining the south side of NW 8th Avenue, going eastward from NW 34th Street and ending at NW 23rd Street. These sculptures comprise a scaled-down outdoors Solar System planetarium starting with the Sun and then progressively arriving at each planet until, approaching NW 23nd Street, the last planet Pluto stands (I still call it a planet). Now Elizabeth Indianos, the artist responsible for this intriguing Gainesville landmark, has added two comets to the sculptures. The one closer to the Sun features a streaming gas tail, while the more remote one doesn’t.

I went out on NW 8th Avenue to get a closer look and some photos. In the process I ran from the Sun all the way past Pluto (about 0.9 mile). Since the objects are scaled according to their orbits' relative distances from each other, it gave me a strong impression of how vast the distances are between the outer planets.

Here are some shots of Solar Walk:

School Planetarium

In past entries, I’ve referred to the school I attended from the fourth through twelfth grades. Actually, this consisted of two schools, both run by the same group but with one as the grammar school (first through sixth grades) and the other the junior high and high school (seventh through twelfth grades), separated from each other (then) by a large field (the site that they were built on was originally an airfield). The high school campus had a small planetarium on it, at the end of one of the science buildings. I vaguely remember at one time in grammar school walking across the field with my class to the high school side to see a show at that planetarium. This was during the Gemini-early Apollo period during the late 1960s before we landed men on the moon. I thought then that it was pretty cool having a planetarium like that. After actually beginning junior high over there, I rarely had any opportunity to see any shows there, though. As a matter of fact, although the planetarium remained there with a faculty member assigned to direct it throughout my tenure at this school, the last show that I (or anyone else, as far as I know) was given an opportunity to attend was during my eighth grade. That means that for a period of about four years, the planetarium just sat there unused. I heard that it had fallen into disrepair as well. The teacher in charge of this place, at least through my junior year, was an elderly gentleman who decided at some point to take the visually impaired students on campus under his wing. That last planetarium show I saw was actually produced by them. From the ninth through almost all of the eleventh grade I neither saw nor heard anything from him or his precious planetarium. Then, in late April 1973 I went down with my sister and a friend of hers to the Miami Space Transit Planetarium, where we saw a show, narrated by Leonard Nimoy (pre-recorded), about the future of the space program now that the Apollo missions had ended. That got me interested in astronomy again, and the next day at school I walked into the planetarium to discuss it with the planetarium’s director. Only he was too angry too discuss anything like astronomy with me. Seems that he was retiring a little earlier than planned, and all he wanted to do was talk about how no one showed any interest in his work and that we students were just too apathetic and unworthy of this fine planetarium with its poor unrecognized director. All I did then was stand there and listen sympathetically to him ranting and raving, and I was angry, too, that all those students out there weren’t pounding down his door to “get involved” somehow. It was only years later when, looking back on things, that I came to the conclusion that this man, whom I hadn’t seen for years at a stretch, could have simply stepped out of his comfortable little “hobbit hole” of a planetarium and engaged in conversation with some of those “apathetic” students out there just sitting around on benches between classes and on their break periods. But he decided early on that he would only devote himself to a few visually-impaired students and ignore the rest! Feeling the way I do now, if I could have relived our final conversation, I would have had a few fine morsels of rebuke to lay on that dude!

Early in my senior year, I went back to the planetarium to see about joining up with the school’s astronomy club. The planetarium had a new director, a science teacher who was only too happy to leave his classrooms to set up shop there as the new “resident hobbit”. And the planetarium was still broken. The last I saw of it, one of the nearly blind students had a giant swath of electrical wires pulled out of the projector’s main component and was switching some connections around as if he knew what he was doing. And the new director was just placidly letting him play around with this expensive equipment like it was a toy. That aside, for a few weeks at least, it was fun to hang around some fellow students who were interested in the night sky. Unfortunately, I missed a few weeks of school that fall because of an operation I had to undergo. After coming back, I let the astronomy club go and concentrated on other things to close out my senior year there. But I did enjoy it, though. It’s too bad the people in charge there left the planetarium in such a state of neglect and disrepair for so long. Even today, I wonder whether anyone ever got it going again.