Tears for spheres
Aug. 20th, 2006 11:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pallas_athenaI finished the bias binding on my current corset! Whew. Eyelets tomorrow.
Meanwhile, since my recent post about planets, I've been thinking about Pluto and Charon. When Charon was first sighted it was thought to be Pluto's satellite, but it's not. The center of mass that Pluto and Charon both orbit is somewhere between the two bodies, making them a true double planet. Moreover, they rotate at the same speed, so they're constantly showing the same faces to each other.
Who would have thought these two distant bodies, named for underworld gods, would turn out to be lovers? Dancing forever around an invisible centre that holds them together in their eccentric orbit? Charon wasn't even noticed until 1978; they're so close together that on most telescopes they blur into one. They don't need the Sun's heat-- they've got each other. They've even got two other recently-discovered tiny moons: Nix and Hydra. One big happy family, out there in the Kuiper Belt. I've never seen them and most likely never will, but I'm glad they're there.
Back when we only had the seven "classical" planets, the Solar System ended with Saturn. (I have seen that one, from the Strahov observatory in Prague the summer after I finished university.) At the time, it was the only planet not named after a Greco-Roman god-- Saturn was, instead, the Roman name of Cronus, the Titan who fathered most of the Olympians and was dethroned by his youngest son, Jupiter/Zeus. By educated people (astrologers, doctors, alchemists and the like) Saturn's influence was seen as negative: decay, envy, impotence. After all, it was furthest from the sun, cold and dark. Of the four humours, Saturn was associated with melancholy, the black bile that caused introspection and depression.
It was the Hermeticists that redeemed Saturn: furthest from the sun, they argued, was closest to the fixed stars and to God. At the same time, melancholy got a makeover: people noticed that it tended to afflict scholars, artists and geniuses. For a brief while in the early 1600s, melancholy was in: Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Middleton (probably) wrote The Revenger's Tragedy, Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy, John Dowland wrote Flow My Teares, and all the cool kids wore black and quoted John Donne. Yes, that's right: they were... goths.
Next time you look at Saturn, remember: that's our planet up there, and it's gorgeous. Oh, and one of its moons is the Death Star. Heh.
Meanwhile, since my recent post about planets, I've been thinking about Pluto and Charon. When Charon was first sighted it was thought to be Pluto's satellite, but it's not. The center of mass that Pluto and Charon both orbit is somewhere between the two bodies, making them a true double planet. Moreover, they rotate at the same speed, so they're constantly showing the same faces to each other.
Who would have thought these two distant bodies, named for underworld gods, would turn out to be lovers? Dancing forever around an invisible centre that holds them together in their eccentric orbit? Charon wasn't even noticed until 1978; they're so close together that on most telescopes they blur into one. They don't need the Sun's heat-- they've got each other. They've even got two other recently-discovered tiny moons: Nix and Hydra. One big happy family, out there in the Kuiper Belt. I've never seen them and most likely never will, but I'm glad they're there.
Back when we only had the seven "classical" planets, the Solar System ended with Saturn. (I have seen that one, from the Strahov observatory in Prague the summer after I finished university.) At the time, it was the only planet not named after a Greco-Roman god-- Saturn was, instead, the Roman name of Cronus, the Titan who fathered most of the Olympians and was dethroned by his youngest son, Jupiter/Zeus. By educated people (astrologers, doctors, alchemists and the like) Saturn's influence was seen as negative: decay, envy, impotence. After all, it was furthest from the sun, cold and dark. Of the four humours, Saturn was associated with melancholy, the black bile that caused introspection and depression.
It was the Hermeticists that redeemed Saturn: furthest from the sun, they argued, was closest to the fixed stars and to God. At the same time, melancholy got a makeover: people noticed that it tended to afflict scholars, artists and geniuses. For a brief while in the early 1600s, melancholy was in: Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Middleton (probably) wrote The Revenger's Tragedy, Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy, John Dowland wrote Flow My Teares, and all the cool kids wore black and quoted John Donne. Yes, that's right: they were... goths.
Next time you look at Saturn, remember: that's our planet up there, and it's gorgeous. Oh, and one of its moons is the Death Star. Heh.