Seeing Stars
Today I’m back to looking at stars, albeit on the internet as the weather is so bad at the moment you can’t see beyond a blanket of grey cloud above us. It was the weather that set me off on this trail today. The river was high and full and brown and threatening, and I wasn’t sure what time high tide was due, so I looked up the tides on the Irish Times website. To my relief, high tide this morning was at approximately 10.26am, just the time I was crossing the bridge on my way to work. Next high tide in Bray will be around 10.44pm today.
Floods are never far from my mind these days, particularly with this continuous downpouring of rain that we’re experiencing right now in Ireland, and the catastrophic floods that have already occurred in England recently. All over Ireland ’minor’ flooding is occurring too, and by that I mean property is being damaged. I wouldn’t wish flood damage on my worst enemy, but at least it’s better than the loss of life that occurred in England, and that could very easily occur here in Bray, if flood defences aren’t put in place very soon.
On Monday a delegation from our flood campaign group is meeting the new Minister for the Environment, John Gormley of the Green Party, to discuss proposed flood defence works, and the importance of the floodplain as part of that protection. It’s probably the best, and most important, thing that has happened in the campaign since Pizarro’s applications were turned down by An Bord Pleanala.
…But, while I started this post by talking about stars and then went on to talk about floods, this morning my concern about floods, and consequently tides, brought me back to looking at stars. I say ‘back’ because the stars have fascinated me for a long time. I don’t study them in the sense of sitting looking at them with a telescope – in fact, the awe stars evoke in me when I look at them on a winter’s evening from the beach, or in summer from a country road late at night, comes close to fear when I see stars too close up. So I look at them with the naked eye, feet firmly planted on earth, and I wonder like a child…
Today, remembering a conversation I had with Jan earlier in the week about tides (he wanted to go to the beach at high tide and then return there at low tide to see the difference), I went on to look up again exactly what causes a spring tide. It’s caused, of course, by the gravitational pull when the sun, earth and moon are all in alignment, so it happens every new moon (when the moon is directly between the sun and the earth) and at full moon (when the earth is directly between the sun and the moon). Its name has nothing to do with the season of spring: it comes from the verb ‘to spring’ because of the force of the tides then.
But, while looking all of this up, and happily meandering off to look at how the earth orbits the sun and the moon orbits the earth, and what other planets revolve around the sun in our galaxy – all of which I find totally fascinating – I came across a website that presents tremendous visuals of all sorts of physical phenomena. It’s called Exploring Earth. I particularly like the model of earth’s yearly revolution around the sun, which demonstrates why our summer is Australia’s winter, for instance, and the simulated views of the night sky from Chicago, Illinois, at midnight, once a week over a year. I would absolutely love to see a model like this showing the night sky from Dublin, Ireland.
One of the most fascinating of all for me though is the simulated voyage from the sun past all nine planets, showing each planet’s average distance from the sun. (For convenience, the planets are lined up in the same direction.) It’s a good desk-bound alternative to the old London Planetarium voyages through space (changed by Madame Tussaud’s in 2006, apparently, to a celebrity based Auditorium), or to the fabulous Space Show in the Hayden Planetarium in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
By the time I’d finished, I’d stopped worrying about how the position of the moon, and the height of the tides, could affect our community, and just enjoyed the wonder. Soon enough, I know, as we continue to argue our case for flood protection works and an open floodplain, it will turn to fear again, but for now it’s simply awe…