Moonrise at Bluebird Ranch on Wednesday August 12, 2020

 It is so rare to have such a string of clear nights - and clear mornings. Consider what the rain did last weekend to the rivers near Washago last weekend:

Or the weather where we our daughter is now living:

And then we had this:

The "tree owl" is still there but nolonger standing. Pleiades are now front and centre above Wylie.

WOB

The Moon and the Turtle

Last week, I saw my first turtle of this Spring - actually my 1st and 2nd and a frog. So ready or not Spring will arrive whether our parks and countryside are open to us or not.

I recalled a scene from early May 2013:

Can you see the pattern on shells?

The Indigenous people saw this as a calendar:

with 13 moonths per year and 28 days per moonth or month. It is a far more logical calendar than our Roman inheritance of Julius and Augustus displacing the seventh to tenth calendar months to September to December., not to mention the irregular number of days per month.

This is a solar calendar. However, to understand how the Moon was used to inform the people of the coming seasons, one has to understand that there is a stellar version, called a sidereal version, as in sidereal day, month, and year based on a relationship with a direction in space toward stars. And a solar version where the Sun is used as the marker.

So the following shows the difference between a day, really a solar day from noon to noon, and a sidereal day, the time it takes for a star to cross the meridian from day to day.

Because the Earth is revolving around the sun, successive sunrises, or transits at noon require the Earth to rotate just a little bit more than 360°. However, if one were to observe when a star transits, crosses the meridian, its highest point in the sky, we would see that it occurs about 3min  56sec earlier every night - that is the stars each night appear to drift westward through the seasons. I am using civil/solar time, hours and minutes - sidereal time uses the same names but their sizes are slightly different!

This also is true for the Moon motion:

The Moon requires just 27 days to go around the Earth when its position is measured against the distant background of stars. It takes nearly 3 more days for the phase, say New Moon, to repeat. The turtle's shell almost manages, but not quite. However, the Roman/Julian calendar was off too, and there have been several reforms to try to "control" time.

Let me consider just one example, the Moon in Taurus, near the Pleiades  - Sun Feb 17, 2013:

 

Jupiter was the disc near the "Vee" of Taurus and then the appearance of the Moon seen from Earth, here as a half of a disc. One "Moonth" later, sidereal, the moon is against the same backdrop of stars but the phase has  changed:

recall, too, that in 2013 February only had 28 days, a good turtle!

In 2020, in the midst of Covid-19, self-isolation, and time for contemplation we can, perhaps, begin to appreciate another way of learning. The example is the 3,600 year old sky disc or Nebra shield of copper with gold inlay.

You can goggle this for more information. The main thing to take away is that there is a crescent Moon near the compact group of 7 gold dots taken to represent the Pleiades, the 7 daughters of Atlas, and in the Indigenous culture, Spider Woman. The Moon has this phase near the Pleiades in Spring, and could, and probably did serve as a reminder that planting may start, animals will be migrating and fish will be returning to streams to spawn. Spider Woman lowered the first humans to "Turtle Island" and this time can also be associated with "birth" and Spring, a renewal.

I shall pause here and continue later with an introduction to Raven and the Orillia Camera Club suggestion to photograph the Moon.

WOB

Story telling - wise old bird style

The sun comes up every day and sets.
At night we see the moon - sometimes - and are aware that it moves from night to night.
We become aware of the stars around the moon.
And in March April we become aware of the Moon among the Pleiades. That was how I began my astronomy many decades ago and I suspect that humanity has behaved similarly over 100s of  millenia.

1950s
I grew into astronomy in North York in the 1950s. I have tried to date this - the partial solar eclipse on June 30th 1954 I remember - I tried to photograph it - $8 for a roll of Ektachrome 620(?) format. Took me months to save up for it and ditto to pay for the developing! Poor childhood, money did not grow on trees, had to collect a lot of pop bottles for 2 cents refund. Did help a friend, Richard, deliver newspapers. I recall see Uranus with my naked eye when there was a conjunction with Jupiter - I think May 1955 and that would have been a familiar part of the sky. That means to me that a) I had good eyes, and b) that North York was not heavily light polluted. I would have known the Pleiades and by the IGY in 1956-57 (18 months long year!) some of the meteor showers that were then known.





1972 - 1981
Fast forward to May 1972 when I arrived in Chile, the Atacama Desert, for the first of what would become over 400 days in the next 10 years (July 1981). After 1 month I encountered El Niño ,
 El Niño–Southern Oscillation
For the month of June there was 8/8 cloud cover just about every night. At sunset the horizon was approx 200km away, La Silla at 2200m elevation  - frustrating to see a green flash and yet not be able to observe.

It was while I was in Chile that I became aware of the following story:
Poor visibility of the Pleiades in June caused by an increase in subvisual high cirrus clouds is indicative of  an El Niño year,which is usually linked to reduced rainfall during the growing season several months later:
"Forecasting Andean rainfall and crop yield from the influence of El Niño on Pleiades visibility"
Benjamin S. Orlove*², John C. H. Chiang² & Mark A. Cane²
letters to Nature Vol 403 Jan 6m 2000 pp 68 - 71.
Sorry I do not have a link for you but if you write and enclose your email address I can send you the pdf.


I do not know the stories that would allow these observations to be passed along generation after generation. There are anthropological accounts of indigenous Aymaraand Quechua-speaking farmers of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes .The observations are made in mid June to forecast the weather during the growing season from Oct to May and to estimate the harvest between March and May in the following year.

2009
In the 1990s, following the reunification of Germany it was possible to visit East Germany and in particular Thüringen and Saxony-Anhalt.  In 1999 the Nebra Sky Disc was discovered by treasure hunters.  In 2009 Vicki and I saw the disc personally, quite impressive. There is even less known about this tradition but surely we are looking at a crescent moon among the Pleiades - a Springtime observation - time to leave Winter quarters to find migrating wildlife, birds, animals
and fish.

This brings me to the present. One could have used the Moon among the Pleiades to remind the Anishnaaabe or Anishinaabe that the time to leave the  Algonquin Highlands was approaching, time to return to the Mnjikaning Fish Weirs  This is wonderful.

And now let Spider Woman lower humans to Earth from the Pleiades and hope that humans do not forget their origins.

Remembrance Day is every day; Thanksgiving is continuous -

Wise Old Bird

There was one other outside influence - a movie I have yet to see - that is similar to the idea of Spider Woman looking in, and that is "The Truman Show"

We are more similar than we are different. We are all immigrants if only history were better  taught.

WOB

But science is something anyone can do .... 

“This sense of purpose, the sense of hope, this lifeline, that each person is connected. To the bigger whole, the universe, the stars. Those stars are more than just balls of gas. When we do indigenous science, those stars are our oldest relatives.”

Lovejoy from Torrance Barrens at -24C

Tried again tonight. Took nearly an hour to get there - all the time the car themometer kept sinking - is this mercury leaking from the car? Ought I to have stayed home?

Used a tracking system for the first time coupled with 3 multiple 30sec exposures:

Here is another single 30 second exposure:

I next tried  zooming in but the reading appears to be wrong. 18mm wide angle, 200mm max zoom
(Pleiades):

And then I tried the sword/M42 in Orion:

I think the correct FL for these last 2 was 200mm and for the first 3 18mm.. However, the text file says 113mm for all of them and that is not true. Camera frozen? M42 was cropped and resized so you cannot go by its appearance here. Or the value remains fixed when I switch to manual focus  - have not noticed this before and will look into that. wob