Star watchers

Just after First Contact

See that tiny notch on the left side of the sun?  That's Venus, passing between us and the sun.  Did you get to see it? 

I'm always surprised and pleased when throngs gathered to geek out over science, but it was beastly waiting in the shadeless line that snaked from the fountain with the giant sundial around the courtyard and out onto the sidewalk outside the Museum. 

How is it possible that I do not own a pair of eclipse glasses? 

When a friend called so say he'd found a less populated place for viewing, I hopped in my car and headed over to Land, Sea, and Sky where they'd generously erected three telescopes in the parking lot for free public viewing.

We were still sweating for science,

but the line was short enough to cycle through and peek into the telescopes as many times as we wished.

Remember that Venus is about the same size as the Earth.  About one million Earths would fit inside the sun.  The sun is BIG.  As we tried to explain our feelings of insignificance to her, a five-year old friend commented, "It's funny how we're so big, and it's so small."  But it's true.  We feel so big and important and significant, and the sun looks small.  It's hard for a five-year-old to hold the bigness of the sun and the universe in her mind, but it's also hard for me.  It's hard to imagine such bigness, until a planet the size of ours becomes a tiny dot overlayed on the sun--and I would be an invisible, insignificant speck on that dot. 

Yesterday morning, I listened with amazement to the story of how astronomers in the 1760's worked together (without benefit of telephones or the internet) to use measurements taken around the world during the Transit of Venus to calculate the distance of the sun from Earth.

In the ages prior to electrical lights, computers, and produce capable of traveling half-way around the world to a grocery store near you, astronomy took on religious significance.  I recently finished reading Turn Right at Machu Picchu, after visiting this Inca site last summer. 

Similarly, the Mayans built the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan

and the astronomical observatory at Palenque.

Today, we sometimes need a reminder that our world still revolves around the sun.