Astronomy on My Mind

The Transit of Mercury

Did you know that the planet Mercury transited the sun today? This is a rare occurrence. The next transit will be in 2032, so I thought I better take advantage of today’s view.

The Westport Astronomical Society announced last week that they would be open today from 8 am to 1 pm, given a clear sky. They welcomed visitors for the viewing. Members set up telescopes and properly covered binoculars so we could get a good view.

I had almost forgotten, thinking about the other tasks for the day. But an article in The New York Times reminded me, as did a notification on my Google calendar.

Since 6th grade when I studied the solar system, I’ve been intrigued with astronomy. I took the beginning class in astronomy at Mount Holyoke College, served as a lab assistant for beginning students the next year, and worked at the Maria Mitchell Observatory for the summer after that.

All one could see was the tiny black dot of Mercury in front of the sun. The whole transit took five and a half hours. I was there about halfway through, so Mercury was near the center. I looked several times during the 15 minutes I stayed. I tried to photograph the transit which someone said I could if I used the larger telescope. That was set to make the sun look white. I saw Mercury, but when I tried to take a picture through the lens, it showed nothing.

Instead I took pictures of a few other people. Then I and asked someone to take my picture to share with you. You can watch the transit in this New York Times article that was updated later in the day.

The first recorded transit of Mercury was on Nov. 7, 1631, The New York Times informed me. It was predicted by the astronomer Keppler.

Astronomy Among Ancestors in the Southwest

Centuries before Keppler predicted Mercury’s transit and Europeans observed it, the Pueblo culture in the American Southwest had an observatory and made astronomical calculations. I was fascinated reading about the pueblos in The New York Times Travel section on Sunday.

In the article by Jim Robbins called A Search for Ancestors in the Desert Southwest I learned that “The Pueblo culture goes back centuries before the time of Christ.”

Robbins visits the great houses at the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. His guide tells him this area “was home to thousands of people” and a vibrant culture. No one knows for sure why it was abandoned in the mid-13th century. The largest of the twelve great houses has “some 600 rooms and 40 kivas, which are large round ceremonial rooms dug into the earth and lined with stone masonry.”

Most interesting for me was the astronomy connection.

Did you know there are people called archaeoastronomers? I certainly didn’t. They “study how ancient people related to the sky,” according to the article. They say that “many of the walls and windows at Chaco are aligned with cardinal points, the sun and other stars, and the buildings functioned as an observatory and calendar.”

The sentence that especially struck me was this: “On the summer solstice a sharp beam of light shines through slabs of fallen rock and pierces the exact center of the spiral petroglyph.”

I wasn’t sure what a petroglyph is. “A petroglyph is an image created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art.” Thank you, Google!

The article closes with this conversation Robbins has with Peter Pino, a cultural leader.

Mr. Pino graciously invited me into his home, and we sat on the couch to talk. I spied some Zia pottery, which famously features a bird motif. Why did so much of the pottery use it, I asked. “Birds occupy a region that we humans don’t — the heavens,” he said. “The world they see is a lot bigger than ours. To native people that is supernatural.”

The pueblos at Chaco and elsewhere are not cold and sterile piles of rock, he said, but alive with the spirit of the pueblo people’s ancestors. “All those sites are sacred,” Mr. Pino said. “They are places of significance to the pueblo people. Our people aren’t there anymore, but the spirits of our people are still there.”