Jupiter and the Modern Pagan

The religions of ancient Greece and Rome are extinct. The so-called divinities of Olympus have not a single worshipper among living men. They belong now not to the department of theology, but to those of literature and taste. There they still hold their place, and will continue to hold it, for they are too closely connected with the finest productions of poetry and art, both ancient and modern, to pass into oblivion.

So wrote Thomas Bullfinch (1796-1867) in his introduction to The Age of Fable, which is included in the invaluable Bullfinch’s Mythology.

It’s from this book I learned the Latin “Jupiter” is equivalent to the Greek “Zeus.” Bullfinch also noticed the similarities between Jupiter and Yahweh, the Judeo-Christian god. Both are kings among multiple deities. Both are quick tempered and at times demand nothing but fear and worship. Both resolve to destroy the world by flood after it becomes corrupt after Man acquires knowledge – Pandora preceding Eve as the feminine scapegoat.

He reserved a particularly cruel punishment for Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. The titan was chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus to have his liver eaten by vultures, only to grow back and have it happen again and again for eternity.

 Fig. 10: The Gift of Fire.

Beloved and I illuminated this shot with a barbecue lighter. Thanks, Prometheus.

Jupiter, seeing this state of things, burned with anger. He summoned the gods to council. They obeyed the call, and took the road to the palace of heaven. The road, which any one may see in a clear night, stretches across the face of the sky, and it is called the Milky Way. Along the road stand the palaces of the illustrious gods; the common people of the skies live apart, on either side. Jupiter addressed the assembly. He set forth the frightful condition of things on the earth, and closed by announcing his intention to destroy the whole of its inhabitants, and provide a new race, unlike the first, who would be more worthy of life, and much better worshippers of the gods.

What am I if not a Jupiter worshipper? I look at it every night it’s up. It was the first thing I thought of when Beloved brought home a telescope. I love being able to see the four Gallilean moons: Callisto, Ganymede, Io and Europa, all named for characters in these ancient stories. I love knowing (although I’ve so far been unable to see it) that on Jupiter rages a tornado larger than any of the inner planets. Its giant clouds look like dark bands running across the face of the planet in parallel lines. That these lines appear at an angle when viewed from my telescope is a reminder that space is three-dimensional, and that “up” and “down” are human constructs. My imagination is lit up by the possibility that, as Arthur C. Clarke speculated, in the centre of Jupiter is a diamond the size of Earth.

The fact Jupiter is an indifferent ball of gas and not, as the ancients thought, a deity makes me all the more impressed by it. Contemporary Pagans are also armed with the knowledge that Jupiter itself casts no light; electromagnetic waves generated by the giant furnace that is our sun travels several minutes through the solar system, reflect off the planet and cast their brilliance on Earth. We’ve even been able to capture a record of that light, focussed through lenses onto light-sensitive film, and now, thanks to Einstein, on digital sensors.

So the other night, as I gazed at Jupiter through the trees, I said a little prayer to the ancient god, who still demands a certain sense of reverence. He told me to photograph him, so I did.

 Fig. 11-13: Jupiter's Path

Jupiter appears to patrol the sky as Earth Rotates. Notice the Pleiades, a small, bright cluster of very young stars in the top left corner of Fig. 13.

A couple of days later, while photographing Jupiter and Moon, I noticed an uncanny resemblance to another cosmic deity.

Fig. 14: David Bowie's Eyes.

Ah, so many gods to choose from.

Hunting Moon

Oct. 10 - 11, 2011 - Calgary, Alta.

Objectives:

Observe the Moon through the scope.
Photograph the Moon and Jupiter.
Get a picture of the damned telescope.

Notes:

O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

I understand Juliet’s qualms about our lone natural satellite. It was nowhere to be found while I was out in Fairmont, and had the best view of the night sky since I got my telescope. Since then it’s been taunting me, slowly revealing itself a sliver at a time, but hiding behind heavy cloud cover for most of the last couple of weeks. It’s a tease, and makes bold promises but shows no loyalty (much like Romeo, who had been in love with some chick named Rosaline only three and a half scenes prior and would be dead in a couple of days).

I spent the intervening time completely geeking out on my new favourite hobby, reading a lot of Neil deGrasse Tyson essays and attempting a little night photography of objects closer to home, illuminating things in my backyard using long exposure times and a cigarette lighter.

Fig. 5: Terrestrial Life

A piece of grass illuminated by a cigarette lighter held in three different places over a period of 20 seconds.

Pentax K10D, 50mm, 20 sec, f5.6, ISO 400

Still, my sights were set on the heavens. I paid a couple of visits to the local telescope store, which is actually some guy’s garage in Inglewood, just to feed my habit and drool over the prospect of new, better equipment that will allow me to hook my camera up to a scope and take pictures of other galaxies.

But as long as it was cloudy, none of that high-tech stuff was going to get me any closer to the inconstant moon.

Then on Saturday night, finally, clear sky. I raced home to grab my scope, camera, rum and assorted bits and pieces. My girlfriend was out of town, so I picked up my buddy, Mudshark, an eccentric harmonica player who didn’t mind being interrupted from making cranberry sauce by a deranged, would-be astronomer knocking on his window telling him he had to come out and look at the moon right now.

Two glasses of wine later, we were in a nearby field in the middle of Calgary setting up the scope. Mudshark explained the upcoming full moon was known in northern Europe as the Hunter’s Moon, the first full moon after the harvest. The moon wasn’t quite full when we looked at it, but I certainly felt like a hunter as I lined up the scope.

Fig. 6: The Mudshark and the Moon

Pentax K10D, 28mm, 1/16 sec, f13.5, ISO 400, flash

Being new to all this, I expected to see only a small disc when I looked through the scope at 28x magnification. I had no idea what I was in for. My eyepiece, despite having a special filter for looking at the moon, was flooded with a blinding light. I gasped as I brought it into focus. The level of detail was astonishing.

Not quite being full, it showed us a strange, irregular shape, with smooth regions facing us, but strange, pockmarks, particularly in the top-right side (remember, the telescope shows an inverted image) where it was still mostly in shadow.

Most spectacular of all was Tycho, a particularly prominent crater named after the Danish, 16th-Century astronomer and inveterate party animal whose data helped us understand planetary motion. It appeared as a large, white circle with a dark outline, and strange lines spreading out in all directions for what must be hundreds of kilometers.

I wondered what kind a shot I could get with my camera and a plain ol’ zoom lens, and was amazed again when I could zoomed in digitally and saw Tycho once again.

Fig. 7: The Moon

Notice Tycho near the bottom-left.

Pentax K10D, 200mm, 1/1000 sec, ISO 400

We also took a look at Jupiter, this time only three of its moons visible, and shared the experience with some passers by.

Fig. 8: Celestial Hunters

Mudshark poses with three of the four wonderers we met in the park who had no idea they’d be stopping for a little astronomy on the way to wherever they were going.

Pentax K10D, 28mm, 1/100 sec, f13.5, ISO 400, flash 

Alas, Earthbound concerns prevent me from writing any more, but I wanted to get this post out before the moon passes by Jupiter, which will ought to look spectacular over the next couple of nights, so I'll leave you with this, shot from my backyard in the wee hours Oct. 12, lighting the foreground leaves with a barbecue lighter.

Of course, it was cloudy again, but for the marriage of art and science, that proved to be not such a bad thing.

Fig. 9: Full Moon

Pentax K10D, 50mm, 2 sec, f2.8, ISO 100

To quote another of Shakespeare’s heroines, “Well shone, moon. – Truly, the moon shines with a good grace.”

A Quick Glance at the Sky

No time to wax poetic. I just wanted to get a quick picture up. Over the next few days the Moon and Jupiter will be right next to one another in the sky. Get your cameras out. You don't need a fancy telescope to appreciate the cosmos. This was the view of Jupiter from behind my apartment building early Monday morning.

Fig. 4: Jupiter

Details to come.

Notes from the Debris

Sept. 25, 2011 - Fairmont, B.C.

Objectives:

Successfully align my spotting scope.
Observe Jupiter.
Observe anything other than a light bulb.
Photograph stars swirling 'round Polaris.

Notes:

The Solar System consists of the Sun, Jupiter and debris.

I’m paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke, who was misquoting Isaac Asimov, but I think it gets the point across. As if it’s not humbling enough to be members of an insignificant species of ape who only began looking toward the heavens just a moment ago in geological terms, a closer look at the sky reveals the slime from whence we came was stuck to a bit of space dust leftover from the formation of Titans.

But the hairless apes did look up, and even those primitive astronomers correctly put Jupiter foremost among the gods. After the Sun, the Moon and Venus, it’s the brightest object in the sky, and by far the largest of the planets. Even in over-lit Calgary, its brightness is almost impossible not to notice, even with the unaided eye. The sky needn’t always be clear; sometimes it even penetrates cloud cover, casting an eerie glow.

Imagine its influence on a bronze-age culture, for whom astrology was an essential part of military strategy.

I wonder if it was visible the night of a great storm over an ancient, Mycenaean fishing village. Maybe the poets of antiquity had eyewitness reports of the celestial body, which the Greeks called “Zeus,” hurling thunderbolts from the heavens.

Maybe I'm fantasizing a bit; Greek mythology does, however, have a story in which Zeus traps the monster, Typhon, under Mount Edna in Sicily. Maybe the ancients were telling us, in their own way, of a terrifying eruption, dutifully noting the objects in the sky so future astrologers could interpret such warnings.

But if Mount Edna’s wrath represents Hell on this apparently-very-active piece of debris, the geological hotspot to which I’ve come must be Heaven.

Fig. 2: Fairmont Hot Springs

A hairless ape tests Galileo’s theory of falling bodies.

Pentax K10D, 28mm, 1/125 sec, f4, ISO 100

Here, at Fairmont’s hot springs, hairless apes baptize themselves in geoheated waters and worship the Sun. But I was determined, on my last night in paradise, to get a view of Jupiter through my telescope.
We found time in the middle of the day to make sure the telescope worked, and managed to get some nice, sharp views of the more distinctive mountain peaks, using at 67.2X, 134.4X and 420X magnifications respectively. I even managed to line up the crosshair of the spotting scope, although not quite accurately enough for it to be as useful as advertised.

Hours later we were in a clearing, our confidence unshaken by the previous night’s failure, with a celebratory bottle of Zenato Cresasso at the ready.

Once again, Jupiter, forming an upside-down triangle with Aries’ horns, outshone everything else in the sky.

I’d seen him through a telescope once before. It must have been winter of ’98 when I was taking intro astronomy (as far as I ever got, I’m sad to report). I was thrilled to see not only the disc of Jupiter with its horizontal bands of colour, but its four brightest moons: Callisto, Io, Ganymede and Europa, which appeared as bright points of light, two far out on either side, one a bit closer on the left, and another just to the right, looking as though it were just growing out of the planet itself.

So when at last light began to fill my eyepiece with weird, elusive shapes, I knew when I managed to focus on a small-but-bright point of light, that I was off target. I don't know which star I spotted, but I was encouraged nonetheless. The spotting scope helped a bit, and I made another attempt. As I wiggled the scope to and fro on its rickety tripod, the eyepiece suddenly exploded with light. A bit more adjusting, wiggling and focusing and suddenly there it was.

I let out a howl. Not only did the mammoth planet jump out at me, its moons were even more brilliant than I remember: Callisto stretched way out to the left, Io a bit closer, Europa just to Jupiter’s right and Ganymede further out still. It was by following the orbits of these four, celestial beauties that Galileo concluded Earth was not, as Aristotle had decreed, the centre of all motion in the Universe. But we were still only just learning our real place in the Universe.

But never mind the 401 years of history since Galileo first observed these heavenly bodies; just think of everything that’s happened on Earth since I last saw them. Geocentric-minded apes were in a panic about the possible end of the world with the turn of the millennium (as if our arbitrarily numerical measure could have any effect on the cosmos). The numbers “9” and “11” were still of no consequence to anyone.

And to think all that time Jupiter has been presiding over the skies with little concern for the affairs of the apes occupying a dim, far away point of light among the debris left over from the formation of the Solar System.

And yet - and yet - try getting a bottle of Zenato wine anywhere in the cosmos besides Earth. My girlfriend and I got properly drunk, glimpsed the Pleiades, did a bit of stellar photography and celebrated life on the planet of apes and grapes.

 Fig. 3: Draco, Ursa Minor and Ursa Major

As I packed up the scope, my lovely apprentice photographer heroically held the shutter open over four minutes and captured this beautiful shot of Ursa Minor ("smaller bear") hanging by his tale above a passing cloud.

Pentax K10D, 28mm, 244 sec, f2.8, ISO 800

 Tips:

A red flashlight would be nice.
Make sure to photograph any celestial body about which I’m likely to wax poetic on my blog a week and a half later.

Genesis 1:3

Sept. 24, 2011 - Fairmont, B.C.

Objectives:

Observe Jupiter through a telescope.

Photograph the stars as streaks of light due to the Earth’s rotation during a long exposure.

Notes:

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.

Nearly 300 years after Alexander Pope wrote that epitaph, light seems to be a bit of a problem. How tragically brief was that period between Newton’s invention of the reflector telescope and Edison’s invention of the lightbulb. We fill our cities with the damned things as though we don’t already get enough God-ordered light pollution from the sun. Here, under the streetlamps, billboards, neon and noise, nature and nature’s laws lay hid as ever.

And since I’ve been back in Calgary (I’m actually writing this entry in October, about a week after my wild weekend of sex, drugs and astronomy in Fairmont), I’ve realized how pitiful the urban night sky really is. But until I can get out of the city again, I may as well do a bit of blogging to satiate my zeal for astronomy, which reached critical mass a few weeks ago when my girlfriend gave me a telescope that had been sitting in a friend’s basement untouched.

We took it out to Fairmont having almost no idea how to use it, save a few tidbits we picked up on the Internet. We found a clearing just off the highway near the airport, with a bit of light pollution coming from what I think was a hotel in the distance, but an excellent view of the night sky.

As the Moon was not visible, I decided Jupiter would be the best bet for a first attempt.

Using a 76mm scope with a 25mm eyepiece and (unbeknownst to me at the time) a 2.4x barlow lens, I aimed at the ancient father of all gods, who along with his brothers, Neptune and Pluto, wrestled the dominions of Heaven and Earth from the Titans and saw... blackness. Not even a particularly interesting shade of black either.

Try as I might, I failed to spot an object 300 times more massive than Earth. I soon realized I wouldn’t be able to see anything at all until I calibrated my small, spotter scope, which is mounted atop the big scope.

In desperation, I tried to get a look at the resort in the distance. Light poured into the eyepiece, and I twisted the focusing knob until I the strange blur finally began to take shape. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was. Yup, there it was, filling the circle: a lightbulb from somewhere on the outside of the resort. Edison smirked. Jupiter shrugged. My girlfriend opened a beer.

Still, having managed to focus on anything at all was encouraging, and I did manage to get a nice photo demonstrating Earth’s rotation, despite having left my cable release in Calgary (meaning I had to stand there holding the camera shutter button for two minutes, my beer woefully out of reach).

Fig. 1: Taurus

The stars appear as streaks of light, giving some idea of how much the Earth rotates in just over two minutes. Appearing as a big “greater than” sign, Taurus' horns are easy to spot as he charges to meet Orion, the hunter, who’s about to leap over the mountain. Just slightly to the right of the horns is the bright star, 35 Iam Tau. The light we're seeing left this star in 1641, one year before Sir Isaac Newton was born.

Pentax K10D, 28mm, 134 sec, f2.8, ISO 1600

I'm calling my first mission a partial success.

Tips:

Calibrate the spotter scope while there’s still daylight.

Cable release is a must.