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| Blogs > LennyMet59 > My Blog |
My Perception of the Solar System
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My Perception of the Solar System Now that I'm a mature man, 57 years old, I often think of the way I first perceived the Earth and the solar system since I was a in the 1960s. Of course, even as a small , I remember looking at the sun and the moon. When I was 11 years old in 1971, I recall observing the planet Jupiter as a very bright white appearing star in the sky above Rego Park, Queens, NY. About the same time, my parents gave me a small 2-inch refractor telescope painted white. I vividly recall using it to look at the sun's surface and observe sunspots with a sun filter in the summer of 1971 at a bungalow colony in Kerhonkson, NY. I was very much aware that those small sunspots I was observing were much larger than our Earth in size. I also saw the craters and maria of the moon and the planet Jupiter around the same time. I saw the colored cloud belts and 4 large satellites of Jupiter. In the autumn of 1972, I was looking at this ordinary looking 1st magnitude yellow star in the constellation Taurus low in the evening southeastern sky with my telescope and I had difficulty getting the tiny image into focus as these two small "holes" in the image kept appearing. After a few minutes, I finally realized that I was in fact looking at the planet Saturn and those two "holes" were in fact the space between the planet's disc and its ring system. That was quite a revelation for a naive 13 year old . Then in 1985, I purchased a much larger 8-inch reflector telescope which was too large and very awkward to use. The major observation I made with it was to observe and make out the disc of the red planet Mars on one of its very close every 15 year oppositions when it becomes brighter than Jupiter for a few weeks in the month of August low in the southern sky and is only 35 million miles away from Earth opposite the sun. I could distinctly make out the tiny disc and see a dry ice white polar cap. I gave my mother and brother a chance to observe it. When I was a until the mid 1970s, that was before the launch of the interplanetary probes, Pioneer, Viking, Venera, Magellan and Voyager, etc. So, we still didn't know exactly much about the appearance and surfaces of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and their satellites. I recall reading by now outdated astronomy books about them. Then Voyager 2 and New Horizons showed us what Uranus, Neptune and Pluto look like close up later on. I still look forward to someday observing Uranus and Neptune through a telescope. When I was employed as a night watchman at Jones Beach State Park on Long Island, New York on clear nights, I became very aware of the rising times and phases of the moon. I noticed that the full moon appeared very bright and lit up the entire landscape while 2 weeks later, the half moon hardly lit up anything. I have seen the planets, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in the sky but I've always wanted to see Mercury, Uranus and Neptune. Often in the autumn night sky I have always desperately tried to look for the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.3 million light years distant from our Milky Way galaxy, which is supposed to be visible to the unaided human eye but I've never been able to see it, obviously because of all the annoying light pollution prevalent over the eastern United States where I live. They say it is about 3 times the diameter of the full moon. I vividly remember the Surveyor probe landing on the moon in the mid 1960s and then all the Apollo missions to the moon. I have seen a couple of moon rocks at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, NY. Actually, Earth rocks and minerals are a lot more interesting. As a , I used to read in astronomy books, all the statistical facts about the planets and moons of the solar system including their masses, physical dimensions, orbital characteristics, axial tilts, etc. Back then, those books had just artist's conceptions of what those planets looked like, before the later interplanetary probes arrived and took close up photographs. I saw a television documentary that explained that the Earth and the other planets condensed from a debris ring orbiting the sun composed of sand sized particulate matter over 4.6 billion years ago. I have seen several ton iron meteorites in museums. One thing I've always wanted to see is the Zodiac light produced by small particulate debris orbiting in the plane of the ecliptic which is supposed to be seen at dawn or dusk in March and September, but I've never seen it because of all the urban light pollution.        |
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