Music by RJK Writing by RJK


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INTRODUCTION

The People's Guide To The Cosmos is a richly illustrated layman's guide to the science and mythology of the night sky, as well as a detailed reference for backyard astronomers with four to ten inch telescopes. It is arranged as a step by step tutorial, beginning with an introductory overview and a comprehensive exploration of our solar system, ultimately moving out into the depths of the Cosmos to study all 88 official constellations, through all four seasons, covering the entire sky. It can also be used a la carte, as a reference and information manual.

Extensive use is made of the extraordinary photographic archives of the Hubble Space Telescope and other large professional observatories, providing a stunning visual compliment to all the facts and numbers.

It's impossible to study the Cosmos without referencing the ancient mythologies that gave birth to modern astronomy and filled the night sky with so much colour and import for so much of Human history. Until the relatively recent advent of electricity, the night sky was a huge, integral part of cultures world wide. Most of the planets and stars and constellations have names and stories associated with them dating back many hundreds if not thousands of years, making any modern study of the heavens a look into our past as much as our future.

The whole world shares the same sky. All nations, all races, all religions. The study of the night sky crosses all borders, and is a truly international endeavour. Sharing the wonders of the Cosmos brings people together and is an object lesson in the fellowship of the Human species. If The People's Guide To The Cosmos can in some small way help facilitate this worthy goal, especially in these dangerously fractious times, it will have served its purpose.


CONTENTS


ASTRONOMY - The Science and the Magic
THE SOLAR SYSTEM - An Overview

SOL - Our Home Star ASTEROIDS - Primordial Rubble
MERCURY - The Messenger JUPITER - The King
VENUS - Goddess of Love SATURN - Lord of the Rings
EARTH - Mother Earth URANUS - The Tilted Planet
METEORS - Shooting Stars NEPTUNE - Ruler of the Deep
MOON - Goddess of the Night PLUTO - God of the Underworld
MARS - God of War COMETS - Wayfaring Strangers


THE CONSTELLATIONS - An Overview

ANDROMEDA - The Princess LACERTA - The Lizard
ANTLIA - The Pump LEO - The Lion
APUS - The Bird of Paradise LEO MINOR - The Little Lion
AQUARIUS - The Water Bearer LEPUS - The Hare
AQUILA - The Eagle LIBRA - The Scale
ARA - The Altar LUPUS - The Wolf
ARIES - The Ram LYNX - The Cat
AURIGA - The Charioteer LYRA - The Harp
BOOTES - The Herdsman MENSA - The Table
CAELUM - The Chisel MICROSCOPIUM - The Microscope
CAMELOPARDALIS - The Giraffe MONOCEROS - The Unicorn
CANCER - The Crab MUSCA - The Fly
CANES VENATICI - The Hunting Dogs NORMA - The Rule and Square
CANIS MAJOR - The Big Dog OCTANS - The Octant
CANIS MINOR - The Little Dog OPHIUCHUS - The Serpent Bearer
CAPRICORNUS - The Sea goat ORION - The Hunter
CARINA - The Keel PAVO - The Peacock
CASSIOPEIA - The Queen PEGASUS - The Winged Horse
CENTAURUS - The Centaur PERSEUS - The Hero
CEPHEUS - The King PHOENIX - The Phoenix
CETUS - The Sea Monster PICTOR - The Painter
CHAMAELEON - The Chamaeleon PISCES - The Fish
CIRCINUS - The Compass PISCIS AUSTRALIS - The Southern Fish
COLUMBA - The Dove PUPPIS - The Poop Deck
COMA BERENICES - Berenice's Hair PYXIS - The Compass
CORONA AUSTRALIS - The Southern Crown RETICULUM - The Reticle
CORONA BOREALIS - The Northern Crown SAGITTA - The Arrow
CORVUS - The Crow SAGITTARIUS - The Archer
CRATER - The Goblet SCORPIUS - The Scorpion
CRUX - The Southern Cross SCULPTOR - The Sculptor
CYGNUS - The Swan SCUTUM - The Shield
DELPHINUS - The Dolphin SERPENS - The Serpent
DORADO - The Dolphinfish SEXTANS - The Sextant
DRACO - The Dragon TAURUS - The Bull
EQUULEUS - The Little Horse TELESCOPIUM - The Telescope
ERIDANUS - The River TRIANGULUM - The Triangle
FORNAX - The Furnace TRIANGULUM AUSTRALE - The Southern Triangle
GEMINI - The Twins TUCANA - The Toucan
GRUS - The Crane URSA MAJOR - The Big Bear
HERCULES - The Strongman URSA MINOR - The Little Bear
HOROLOGIUM - The Clock VELA - The Sail
HYDRA - The Water Snake VIRGO - The Virgin
HYDRUS - The Male Water Snake VOLANS - The Flying Fish
INDUS - The Indian VULPECULA - The Little Fox





Astronomy

The Science And The Magic

In the beginning, it was all magic.

Our earliest ancestors imagined super beings with magical powers that controlled the world around them. These magical deities were responsible for putting the lights in the sky, controlling the earthly elements, and steering the hearts and minds of lesser mortals. Everything that happened on Earth and in the sky was caused by magic.

Magic explained everything, and magic explained nothing, but it was the best ancient Earthlings could come up with. Eventually, however, as their mental abilities increased, they began to hypothesize, and experiment, and draw conclusions, and the scientific method was born. When this thinking was applied to the heavens, the science of astronomy developed: the empirical exploration of the Universe around us, and what makes it tick. The mother of all adventures had begun. A journey through the looking glass, to infinity and back again.

The results were astounding. The tiny twinkling lights that marched across the night sky turned out to be enormous suns, similar to our own Sun, except very, very much farther away. The handful of lights in the sky that moved contrary to all the others were given the Greek name planetes, or "wanderers". These wandering lights were discovered not to be far away suns like all the others, but a very much closer family of worlds that circled our nearby sun, just as our world did. And it wasn't until a mere hundred years ago, that we discovered that the vast city of countless, sparkling, far away suns filling our night sky were not the entire Universe at all, but only one of untold billions of cities of stars (now known as galaxies) that make up the incomprehensibly vast and seemingly infinite Universe around us.

Heady stuff, indeed, but hardly definitive. Instead of being the centre of the Universe, as the church had decreed for so long, we discovered we were rather small, fragile creatures, specifically evolved to exist on a small, fragile world, in a tiny, unremarkable corner of an apparently infinite Universe that was far larger and grander than our poor minds could even begin to comprehend. Our understanding of the Cosmos grew by orders of magnitude, and it overwhelmed us. Our knowledge had exceeded our comprehension. The cosmic hand was still far quicker than the mortal eye.

The magic refused to go away.

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Spiral Galaxy NGC 7331 - Vicent Peris - December, 2008

We discovered Black Holes that defied the laws of physics. They were invisible. Entire star systems disappeared inside them. Where did they go?

We found that photons of light sometimes behaved like particles, and sometimes like waves. How could they be both?

Subatomic quarks displayed the seemingly impossible ability to be in two places at once through a process called quantum entanglement, dubbed by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance.”

Calculations showed that the structure of the Universe could not be accounted for by the amount of matter it contained, leading scientists to the inescapable conclusion that there had to be something else out there, beyond our ability to detect. Some sort of invisible substance creating a gravitational framework that held the Universe together. They called this unknown substance dark matter.

Instead of the expansion of the Universe slowing down, as it should after an explosion like the Big Bang, the expansion was accelerating. Scientists could only attribute this to some sort of invisible force that caused the expansion of spacetime itself. They called this unknown force dark energy. Together with dark matter, these two phenomena were calculated to compose 97% of the Universe around us, and we knew virtually nothing about them.

At the end of the day, as much as we have learned about the science of the Cosmos, there is still a very great deal more that we do not understand, and when we escape from city lights, and are confronted with the staggering spectacle of a star filled sky, even the most dispassionate of souls cannot help but be stirred. The majesty of the Cosmos is as overwhelming as it ever was.

The magic just goes on and on.

"What we have learnt
Is like a handful of earth;
What we have yet to learn
Is like the whole world."
Avvaiyar - c. 100 AD

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Comet Lovejoy - Y. Beletsky - European Southern Observatory, Chile - April, 2012





Perception


The fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning round.
Lennon-McCartney, 1967

Of course the "fool on the hill" was no fool at all. Instead of the two dimensional illusion of "the sun going down" that most people saw, as grand and glorious as that was, he experienced the even more grand and glorious reality of the "world spinning round", rolling away from the warm, bright Sun, and taking him with it, into the cold darkness of space. He felt the cosmic wind at his back, and the mighty planet rumble beneath his feet as it turned, great and ponderous on its axis, carrying him along like a tiny, microscopic flea on its back, into the night.

This type of enlightened perception is the ultimate reward of astronomy. The joy of seeing the true geometry and dynamic of the Universe around us, by training ourselves to add the third dimension of distance, and the fourth dimension of time to our mind's eye perception of the Universe.

We can practise with the Moon, consciously seeing it as the great three dimensional globe that it is, a world in its own right, 2,000 miles across, 200,000 miles away, with the Sun hidden below the horizon, shining up like a giant spotlight, lighting up the side of the Moon's face like the profile of a lone actor on a dark stage.

And finally to add the fourth dimension of time, and understand that when we look at the sky, we are looking at the past. Pretty much everything up there is very far away, and since light can only travel so fast, we are seeing things as they were, in various stages of their past lives, depending on how far away they are. It takes about a half hour for the reflected light from the planet Jupiter to reach Earth, meaning we are not seeing the big planet in real time, but as it was a half hour ago. Most of the stars we look at are as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. It's like looking down through tunnels of time in space. When we look at the Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant object visible to the naked eye, we are looking down a tunnel 2.2 million years long.

To better understand the Cosmos that envelopes us, we have to transcend the stubborn two dimensional illusions our minds all too easily adopt, and feed them information and concepts and images that open them up and allow them to see, little by little, the grand reality of it all, each small step on the path to perception rewarded by a wonderful rush of endorphins, like sugar on our tongue - a taste of the infinite.

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M31 - Andromeda Galaxy - Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble) - July, 2011

Light Years

Some realities, sadly, are beyond our perception, no matter how hard we try. The capacities of our "frail and feeble minds", as Einstein put it, are limited. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in our perception of the vast distances in spacetime, and the unit of measurement: the light year. The light year is based on the speed of light, the fastest known speed in the Universe, and according to the present laws of physics as we understand them, the fastest speed possible.

This cosmic speed limit is 186,000 miles per second, or 670 million miles per hour, and we can use it to measure both space and time. A photon/wave of light travels a million miles in the time it takes to read this sentence (about five seconds), measuring both distance through space (a million miles), and distance through time (five seconds). To perceive the distance light travels in just that five seconds is beyond the reach of most of us. Perceiving the distance light travels in a year is impossible. We can calculate it, measure it, and explain it until the cows come home, but we can never actually perceive it.

To understand the futility of perceiving the distance light travels in a year, we can start by wrapping a string around the world, about 25,000 miles, and stretching that string out into space. Can you see the end of it, way out there, 25,000 miles away? Can you imagine it? How about doubling it, or tripling it? Maybe you can still imagine it, if you have an open, creative mind. How about 40 times that distance - a million miles? Your mind would have to be exceptionally open and creative to perceptually see the end of a string a million miles long. Now, how about 12 million miles, the distance light travels in one minute? Anyone who says they can truly perceive the end of a twelve million mile long piece of string, is either a truly gifted mutant, with a mind much more capable than the rest of us, or someone with their pants on fire.

And that's just the beginning! One lousy light minute. How can we possibly hope to imagine the staggering distance light can travel in a whole hour, or a day, let alone an entire year? If a light year was the length of a thousand football fields, we would be smaller than the smallest microscopic bacteria, and we have no more possibility of perceiving the distance of a light year than microscopic bacteria have of perceiving the length of a thousand football fields.

If we crunch the numbers, we can calculate the distance of a light year as 5,865,700,000,000 miles, or about six trillion miles (9.6 trillion kms). But numbers that large are nothing more than numbers. They are beyond our comprehension. And that's only one light year. The closest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light years away, and most of the stars in our sky are very much farther away than that. Our galaxy stretches an amazing 100,000 light years across. And once we leave our galaxy, the next closest galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, is an incomprehensible 2.2 million light years away! We can say the words, we can write them down, we can do the math, but we cannot truly perceive what the words and numbers describe. We are like two dimensional beings living in a three dimensional world. Even when a third dimension is explained to us, and mathematically proven to exist, it's still impossible for us to see it, or to even imagine it.


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Spiral Galaxy M81 - Hubble Space Telescope - May, 2007

Billions and Billions

When it comes to the number of stars in our Universe, even Carl Sagan's famous "billions and billions" doesn't come close to covering it. There are more stars above our heads than all the grains of sand on all the beaches in all the world. And then some.

In 2004 the Hubble Space Telescope focused on one very tiny, very empty, very black spot in the sky in the constellation Fornax, where there was no hint of anything. It held that focus for one million seconds, a time exposure that lasted 11.6 days, to capture even the faintest trace of light, to see what - if anything - might be there. The results of that experiment were mind-boggling, and gave us a whole new appreciation of the incomprehensible scale of the Universe we live in. The telescope captured the images of galaxies 13 billion light years away. As far back as the giant telescope could look, the Universe just kept going and going. The resultant photo was called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and it remains one of the most revealing, mind-bending, iconic photographs ever taken.

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Hubble Ultra Deep Field - Hubble Space Telescope - March, 2004

There are only four individual stars in the above Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo. Only four residents of our Milky Way Galaxy. Everything else, every blur, every smudge, every pinprick of light - too many to count - is a galaxy outside our own. Galaxies behind galaxies behind galaxies. Untold numbers of galaxies stretching 13 billion light years back through space and time. Each galaxy an island universe, containing hundreds of billions of stars like our Sun. And that is just one tiny, microscopic fraction of the sky. In one fell swoop, the Hubble Space Telescope has graphically illustrated just how small we really are, and how difficult it is to even begin to perceive the seemingly infinite scale of the Cosmos.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. As the I Ching says, "Perseverance furthers," and if we keep at it, and truly open our minds, the fates will occasionally pull a corner of the cosmic curtain aside, and favor us with a quick glimpse of what's behind the magic. And sometimes a glimpse is all it takes to alter our perception, and change our life.


Extraterrestrial Life

"If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly;
if they be na inhabited, what a waste of space."

Thomas Carlyle, 1795 - 1881

Thomas Carlyle's muse on the multitudes of stars in the night sky is a sentiment of the ages. Since the time of ancient Greece, there has been speculation about other forms of life somewhere, out there, among the stars. Over time, as science and technology revealed the true vastness of space, filled with untold numbers of suns like our own, it was logically assumed there must be many planets orbiting those suns. And surely on at least some of those planets, life must have evolved. It was simply a matter of numbers. But there was no proof, because any planets that might be out there were just too far away for even the most advanced telescopes to examine. But eventually, technology was developed to measure the gravitational and electromagnetic effects of far away planets on the stars they orbit. The first extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, was discovered using these indirect methods in 1992, and since then thousands of extrasolar planets have been detected. And as technology marches relentlessly forward, and more telescopes are launched into space, away from the distorting effects of Earth's atmosphere, we are able to deduce more and more about these extrasolar planets every day. We have discovered planets around virtually every star we have examined, and understand now, that planet formation is a natural by-product of star formation. We have even been able to deduce part of the atmospheric content of some of these planets, and it is surely only a question of time before we detect some sort of indication of life on one of these planets, and we will finally know for certain what we have supposed for millenia: that we are not alone.


Time Travel

"The distinction between past, present, and future has only the significance of a stubborn illusion."
Albert Einstein

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Albert Einstein on his 72nd Birthday - March 14, 1951

As Einstein proved, space and time are inseparable. They are two interwoven components of the same thing. When we look at a star 10 light years away, we are also looking ten years into the past, because it took ten years for the light from that star to reach us. We are being visited by a ghost who lived ten years ago. When we look at the Andromeda galaxy, we are being visited by a very old ghost indeed. A ghost that lived over 2 million years ago! We have no idea what the status of the Andromeda Galaxy is right now, if it still exists at all. And it makes us wonder if such speculation is even relevant? Is it even possible for two things so far apart to occupy the same moment in time?

Einstein also proved that the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time, and at the speed of light - 186,000 miles a second - time would theoretically come to a complete stop. Einstein discovered that time was not a linear constant as it appeared on the surface, plodding along in a static, predictable manner, but that time was in fact flexible, and mathematically at least, subject to manipulation. A concept as difficult to perceive as a light year, but just as real.

Someday Humans will undoubtedly learn to move through time, just as they learned to move over the oceans, and up into the air, and out into space.


"We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started,
and know the place for the first time."
T.S. Eliot

To Boldly Go

But first things first. Let's get our bearings, and find our way around, starting with our own backyard: a group of planets and other things held captive by the gravity of a star called Sol - our solar system...

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