Return of Memoryfest - Day 21/31

[bironic]

We went stargazing tonight at a small observatory about 60 miles east of here, almost at the end of the north fork of Long Island. After a nice 90-minute lecture on naked-eye astronomy from a local university professor, we went out into the bitter, windy cold so one of the employees could point out the easier constellations and show us some astrophotography in progress. Then we hiked up into their bigger telescope, through which we saw a wavering Saturn (too much disturbance to make out the rings clearly) and the wispy M42 nebula in Orion. The skies were so clear -- cloudless and cold, and with the hour and a half's drive from home came a striking drop in light pollution. Lovely.

Tonight's memory has only the most tangential relation to all of that. We already covered stargazing a couple of days ago. :)


21. Middle School

Sitting on the school bus at the end of the day, waiting to pull out of school grounds and go home, I saw the most picked-on class nerd in the next bus over, pretending to shoot ray guns out the window at passersby.

WTF

Comments

[synn.livejournal.com]

How ironic! I just watched a show about space.
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alright, so the two are not really anything alike. At least it was a highly entertaining show, so I am less sorry that I've never had the chance to see saturn -- even a wavering version through a telescope -- because now I know that there are Ice volcanos made of nitrogen.

Were you able to find casseopea? taurus? orion? There will be a test next time we're out on a clear night : )

[nightdog-barks.livejournal.com]

The first time I ever saw the Milky Way was in New Braunfels, Texas. My boyfriend (whom I later married, and am still married to, over twenty years later) were camping just outside of the town.

We were together, lying in a sleeping bag on the ground, and I looked up and saw a waterfall of stars spilling across the sky.

I'd never seen anything like it before, and it brought home to me not only the vastness of the universe but the ineffable constancy of presence within it.

Did that make any sense? I doubt it. But it's why these days I wear a small gold Celtic knot always around my neck -- never ending, always beginning.

It's the least I can do.

[thewlisian-afer.livejournal.com]

I think it makes sense, and I think it's lovely. :)

[elynittria.livejournal.com]

There's a very complicated Scottish country dance that's based on the particular type of Celtic knot found in the Luckenbooth brooch. I always enjoyed that dance: it was like enacting a finite, spatial representation of infinity.

[thewlisian-afer.livejournal.com]

When I was in third grade a boy of Iraqi descent (years later I learned that his father was actually born in Iraq and came here when he was a teenager) named Darius moved to my school district and joined my class. He had glasses with unattractive frames that were never quite straight, his parents dressed him like Steve Urkel, he walked like Urkel and he was just generally Very Strange. My two best friends and I did our very best at first to help him fit in more, but he was completely unreceptive of help from girls. This annoyed us more than a little, so we decided to let his weirdness run rampant.

He was convinced that if you ran around a tree in the school's front yard at a certain speed, it would have strange effects on the space-time continuum. So he would spend all of recess racing around this tree and then trying to figure out if it had worked. My friends and I finally began picking out different time periods and different names for ourselves, and when Darius would come over to us to see if he could find out if his time travel or whatever had worked, we would pretend to be from these different time periods. We acted confused as to how we ended up in this strange place in these strange clothes.

I don't know if he actually bought it or if we were really all just playing a game. But years later in high school (he was still a complete social disaster and the most disliked and picked on person in the school) he asked me if I still had "the computer chip." I can't remember exactly what role "the computer chip" had played in the game, but all it was was one of those little wooden things that came with individual serving ice cream cups for you to scoop the ice cream up with. I told him I didn't have it anymore. Which was a lie.

I still have it.

[crazypalefreak.livejournal.com]

My stargazing story:

On my recent trip to Australia, I spent one night camping out in the Lamington National Forest just west of the Gold Coast. Our little group were walking across a paddock towards a lodge where we would watch a guy play the digeridoo. I looked up at the very clear sky and noticed a sort of wispiness I'd never seen before. I suddenly realised it was the Milky Way. I shouted 'Holy shit! It's the Milky-fucking-way!' and everyone laughed at me.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Of course they are alike. Stars are in space. What was the program about, Jupiter's moons?

Never seen Saturn? Absolutely tragic. You should come over some night and we'll break out the telescope and show you stuff. There's a workshop on Feb. 3 that we're/he's going to that'll help us learn its ins and outs, and then we should be able to really use it. There's going to be a conjunction around then involving Aldebaran and I think Mercury.

:) Yes, no and yes. Orion and I have instant recognition. Learnt a trick last night for finding Taurus, Gemini and Canis Major off Orion that I want to test out.

[kabal42.livejournal.com]

Not quite related either, but still. And a happy one today! :-D

I was, I think, one of the very few people at my very tiny library (where I lived age 11-18) who ever read sci-fi or fantasy. And I read all they had and more than once *G* One time, the elderly librarian there, who knew and remembered everyone (town only had 2000 inhabitants) asked me if I'd read a book they just got and tell him if it was any good and a bit of an outline so he knew who he should recommend it for. I was 12 and very proud of that. He did this once or twice more and I've always loved him for that kindness.

[mer-duff.livejournal.com]

I think I've already told you my favourite stargazing memory (Gordon Lightfoot and the Northern Lights), but that same summer I drove across Canada with friends in a VW van (our home for nearly four months).

We drove up the Dempster Highway to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories and took a midnight(ish) flight/tour to Tuktoyuktuk. Because there weren't enough passenger seats in the plane, I got to sit in the co-pilot's seat on the way home. I remember watching everything the pilot did in silent fascination. Finally he asked me if I was curious. I said yes, so he talked me through everything he was doing. Then he let me take the controls for a little bit - when he put the headphones on me, I was expecting to hear air traffic control, but he was actually listening to CBC-FM.

After we landed, we stayed to talk with the pilot and he invited us back to the trailer he shared with several other bush pilots for a late pot-luck dinner/drinkathon. When we finally staggered back to our van at about 3am, it was just dark enough for us to see the Northern Lights streaking across the sky.

[elynittria.livejournal.com]

That sounds like it was a great trip! I've never seen the Northern Lights, unfortunately. Supposedly they're visible sometimes here in New England, but I just haven't been lucky enough to be outside at the right times.

I was expecting to hear air traffic control, but he was actually listening to CBC-FM.

Hee! You could never get away with that in the airspace where I fly: too much traffic. I've even had to leave the headset and radio on, tuned to the relevant ATC frequency, while, er, participating in Mile High Club activities.

[mer-duff.livejournal.com]

The last time I saw the Northern Lights was a couple of summers ago, right in Vancouver. You hardly ever see them in the city, but the atmospheric conditions must have been just right.

When we first boarded the plane, the pilot asked us if we were afraid of heights. He meant in terms of lack of altitude. We learned later that the bush pilots had a competition over who could fly the closest to the ground (presumably without crashing). They were crazy fun.

And now I'm imagining the logistics. I hope you were on autopilot :)

[elynittria.livejournal.com]

Bush pilots definitely sound like they're my kind of crazy guys. They sound like they would have gotten along great with the guy who taught me how to fly: one of his favorite things to do in small planes at night was to imitate a UFO by turning the landing light on and off abruptly while flying in a nonstandard way close to the ground. Then he'd see if anyone reported seeing a UFO the next day—which they often did.

I hope you were on autopilot

Yes—when the plane had an autopilot.