Jupiter's Moons

Probably most of you blog heads out there in Internet Land aren't aware for some time I've cultivated a semi-serious interest in archaeoastronomy and in the kind of star-gazing you can do even without a telescope— or rather, that would have been done by ancient cultures. I was never all that interested in Messier Objects or other Deep Space phenomena, though I wouldn't pass up an opportunity to gaze at something 55 million light years away if the occasion should ever arise again— but looking at the sky from the perspective of someone in the ancient world has always been fascinating to me. And there's plenty to keep an eye on, even without a telescope— the rising and setting of planets, and their conjunctions and separations; eclipses and occultations; constellations and star lore; navigation and time-telling; and so forth. So I'd been thinking, before i left america, that it'd be nice to have a telescope here, but of course i couldn't afford the extravagance. I did pack a few books on visual astronomy in the small library that I'm shipping here, to keep me occupied on these insanely lovely tropical nights and to share some facts and ideas with the seminarians. But a telescope would have been nice.

Well, God provides.

A niece of the first bishop of Uganda recently returned here from the US, where she now lives, for her vacation. It happens that she brought with her a fairly decent little telescope to give to her young relatives here, but I guess they can't figure out what to do with it, so she gave it to me yesterday, out of the blue. Whoopee! Thank you, Irene!

It's a Meade Instruments Corp. "Jupiter 60AZ-A", 60mm Altazimuth Refracting Telescope, very nice. Unfortunately, it's missing the 78x (9mm) eyepiece— I only have the 28x (25mm) one— but I discovered tonight when i trained it on Jupiter that even with the weaker eyepiece, it's good enough to see Jupiter's stripes and four of its moons! And the craters of the moon were close enough to walk around in!

"So, what do you call this one?"— several people asked at various points during the evening. "A telescope", I replied. Most of them had heard of such an instrument, but had never seen one, apparently even in a picture, so they didn't recognize it when they saw it. And still less had anyone ever looked through one. Several joked that i had some kind of "bomb" in my room, or missile. But doesn't that tug at you? They didn't know what a telescope was when they saw one!

I'm sure there was a time in the history of these peoples when star lore was an integral part of tribal life. How much of that has been lost! The Dogon people, over in Mali, are said to recognize, in their mythology (but how could they possibly know this?) that Sirius is a double-star system. But these kids can't even point out the Big Dipper, which we can always see at the end of the road near the water tower. Or even the Southern Cross (I think that's what that one is& mdash; must check it out).

So it looks like we have a lot to share in the coming nights.

One seminarian tells me he grew up in a place that's usually foggy in the morning. Because of the fog, the sun appears as a dull red disc as it rises, so they can more or less(!) look directly at it without harm. One morning, he says, they saw that a bite had been taken out of the sun. The bite got progressively larger and then passed. Cool!

I also saw this evening— not through the telescope but just flying around— a bat as big as an owl. In fact that's what i thought it was at first, because i'd found an owl feather on the ground the other morning, on my way to church. But it was a bat. Big!