Astronomy
The joy of understanding the Universe around us.
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National Poetry Month – 22 Earth Day
In the beginning God created Earth for four billion years there wasn’t much here every once in a while a bacterium made its way out to the surface, only to be blasted by a comet or consumed by a volcano. Life had a very hard time. When humans came upon the scene everything was already…
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Observing Comet Hale-Bopp, Summer 1997
Every evening during the summer I had to water Grandma’s stunted Colter pine it grew out of a wine barrel that was slowly falling to pieces its rusty iron flaking off to mix with dried red pine needles and pitiful pinecones half-cooked on hot asphalt I would stand there with a green hose looking up…
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What is the Numinous?
What is the numinous? Why do I use this word as a byline for my personality and view of the world? The classical definition from Webster’s Dictionary is “having a mysterious, holy, or spiritual quality.” I certainly do not believe in the holy or the divine, but I do feel that there are elements of…
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ET Calls Collect
This essay is in response to the open letter recently published by several luminaries in many diverse fields regarding active attempts at communication with ETIs . You can read the open letter here: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/meti_statement_0.html First contact. This two word sentence can birth evocations broad and diverse: horror, fear, hope. The meetings between one society less advanced than another have…
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Mars 3
The sun sets on the lowest tide Mars had ever seen. Small creatures clung to the basaltic rocks and waved tiny flagella at that distant star, almost as if that plaintive gesture of goodbye would allow for one more perfect day. Now, the ebb and flow of the stinging, salted seas was waning. Their dark…
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Jupiter From Europa
This is an acrylic on canvas painting, with color pencil for outlining and scragglies on the surface ice grooves. Larger version:
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Lives of the Red Suns: Coda
Through the void, in silence radio light streams in defiance, to the lack of listeners nearby. In and out of hydrogen clouds losing bits of the data shroud, the answers the Big Ones searched finally coming to receivers perched. Bowls caved, the structures compromised their metal frames heavily oxidized. Around them lie the cities…
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Lives of the Red Suns V
The Big Ones found a way to create tiny suns of their own, pocketing fusion into buildings all along the coast, pumping excess heat into the seas. Celebrations abounding over the endless energy allowing them to create a new world. They harvested protein from vats, they built enormous radio antennae to see the universe in…
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Lives of the Red Suns IV
The Big Ones spoke about the things they had learned and understood, about how the Red Sun was a massive ball of hydrogen, how its heat and light drove the currents in the sea and stirred the clouds in the sky. They learned about and named the elements and broke them down into atoms and…
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Lives of the Red Suns III
“What care the creatures under the Red Sun for the unknowns out there?” -the aged philosopher Until there were some that asked questions of the sand on the sea shore, or observed the stretched membranes of flying beasts- Who ground transparent glass and saw far over the seas the trading rafts bringing in their…
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Lives of the Red Suns II
Self-awareness under the red sky at dawn. Amongst themselves they are the dominant form of life here. How would any other being come close to their intelligence, their beauty and cunning nature? The sky gave birth to these philosophers and artists, these writers and builders. Only them, around the Red Sun, in this unchanging universe.…
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Lives of the Red Suns
PART ONE 60 Billion worlds fed under regal red giants. The dull red glow intolerable to adapted eyes, like stoked fires burning white. The phototropic life evolved here to accept the light and nourish and flourish within its biome. There are some small self replicating creatures in the ‘underbrush,’ they have a need of…
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Red Light
I was thinking on something Carl Sagan said about the last perfect day on Earth. One day, in the far future, the sun will one day change from the happy main sequence star we know, to a bloated red giant—many times its original size, engulfing the entire inner solar system. We are standing on…
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A Merry Christmas
“Amen.” In their Father’s name the explorer priests broke fast orbiting a long dead stellar mass. The researchers found a hidden cache on a world now turned to ash. Inside were artifacts, artwork and knowledge from alien minds, but minds all the same. They had beauty, they had love. They tried to save some of…
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Star Power
There is a certain moment when our world turns its darkened face to our local star and its light shines upon it, and the small photovores consume its tasty effusion with what can only be joy. The nuclear reactions deep in the heated heart of it explode with beneficence, ensuring that the planetary retinue about…
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Deserving of Observing
My wife and I are from Southern California. I was fortunate to grow up surrounded by a wealth of beauty; from the shoreline of my native Long Beach, to the snow capped San Bernardinos; the rolling hills of Los Angeles, to the quite coves of Cabrillo beach. Even though I now live in Washington State…
The Numinous Cosmos 