Be Forewarned I am about to expound on a topic that I find interesting, but might be described as geeky in some circles.
It's pretty rare in my experience that you have an experience in which you can understand your physical position relative to space. For example, you can your position (and the Earth's) relative to the universe based on the position of the constellations. This is either a trivial exercise, or a mind-boggling one, depending on your state of mind. However, trying to understand the position of the Earth with respect to the solar system is incredibly difficult, unless the Sun is your only other point of reference. That's pretty easy. The other planets, however, do not all lie in a convenient plane and some would have us think, and their orbits are demonstrated through perfectly logical, but visibly confusing motions. They sometimes move backwards. This, in my mind, is one of the reasons a lunar or solar eclipse is so fascinating. It's not that you can see the Sun's corona (although that's pretty cool too), or watch the moon disappear. What really gets me is that for that brief interval of time, I can understand the alignment of at least three bodies across an incredibly vast amount of space. In a lunar eclipse, I can say, "the sun is over my back left shoulder, moving in a certain arc, I am in the middle here, and the moon is there." And I can understand the motions of those bodies while it happens.
Well, today I had a similar experience. I was standing out in my backyard, and I saw a satellite. You can usually tell that you're looking at a satellite because it looks like a bright but small star, and it moves across the sky quickly. The one I saw appeared to be covering an arc of, say 5 degrees from my vantage point in under 10 seconds. So I'm standing there watching this thing, and all of the sudden it disappears. Frantically, I look for it, but it is just gone. And then all of the sudden I have an epiphany of awareness. The sun is off to the west, below the horizon, but illuminating the satellite until it passed into the shadow of the Earth.
OK, I warned you this was geeky. But I find it very, very cool. I am notably discounting the other possible explanations, i.e., this was the international space station, and someone up there turned off the lights.
It's pretty rare in my experience that you have an experience in which you can understand your physical position relative to space. For example, you can your position (and the Earth's) relative to the universe based on the position of the constellations. This is either a trivial exercise, or a mind-boggling one, depending on your state of mind. However, trying to understand the position of the Earth with respect to the solar system is incredibly difficult, unless the Sun is your only other point of reference. That's pretty easy. The other planets, however, do not all lie in a convenient plane and some would have us think, and their orbits are demonstrated through perfectly logical, but visibly confusing motions. They sometimes move backwards. This, in my mind, is one of the reasons a lunar or solar eclipse is so fascinating. It's not that you can see the Sun's corona (although that's pretty cool too), or watch the moon disappear. What really gets me is that for that brief interval of time, I can understand the alignment of at least three bodies across an incredibly vast amount of space. In a lunar eclipse, I can say, "the sun is over my back left shoulder, moving in a certain arc, I am in the middle here, and the moon is there." And I can understand the motions of those bodies while it happens.
Well, today I had a similar experience. I was standing out in my backyard, and I saw a satellite. You can usually tell that you're looking at a satellite because it looks like a bright but small star, and it moves across the sky quickly. The one I saw appeared to be covering an arc of, say 5 degrees from my vantage point in under 10 seconds. So I'm standing there watching this thing, and all of the sudden it disappears. Frantically, I look for it, but it is just gone. And then all of the sudden I have an epiphany of awareness. The sun is off to the west, below the horizon, but illuminating the satellite until it passed into the shadow of the Earth.
OK, I warned you this was geeky. But I find it very, very cool. I am notably discounting the other possible explanations, i.e., this was the international space station, and someone up there turned off the lights.
posted by David at
8:49 PM
