Month: July 2013

The Great Comet of 1811, “Napoleon’s Comet”

No. 6 in our Comet a Week is The Great Comet of 1811, also known as Napoleon’s Comet. With a coma over a million miles across, it was visible in the sky for almost a year. The comet was believed to have portended Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the War of 1812.

The Great Comet of 1811

The best thing about this comet is that it makes a cameo in Count Leo Tolstoy’s magnificent War and Peace, where it’s called, confusingly, the Comet of 1812.

It appears at the end of Book Eight (in my Kropoktin translation). Pierre has just confessed his love to Natasha. Here’s the passage:
 

“Where now?” asked the driver.

“Where?” repeated Pierre to himself. “Where can I go now? To the club, or to make some calls?”

All men, at this moment, seemed to him so contemptible, so mean, in comparison with the feeling of emotion and love that overmastered him–in comparison with that softened glance of gratitude which she had given him just now through her tears.

“Home,” said Pierre, throwing back his bearskin cloak over his broad, joyfully throbbing chest, though the mercury marked ten degrees of frost.

It was cold and clear. Above the dirty, half-lighted streets, above the black roofs of the houses, stretched the dark, starry heavens. Only as Pierre gazed at the heavens above, he ceased to feel the humiliating pettiness of everything earthly in comparison with the height to which his soul aspired. As he drove out of Argat Square, the mighty expanse of the dark, starry sky spread out before his eyes. Almost in the zenith of this sky–above the Pretchistensky Boulevard–convoyed and surrounded on every side by stars, but distinguished from all the rest by its nearness to the earth, and by its white light, and by its long, curling tail, stood the tremendous brilliant comet of 1812–the very comet that men thought presaged all manner of woes and the end of the world.

But in Pierre, this brilliant luminary, with its long train of light, awoke no terror. On the contrary, rapturously, his eyes wet with tears, he contemplated this glorious star which seemed to him to have come flying with inconceivable swiftness through measureless space, straight toward the earth, there to strike like an enormous arrow, and remain in that one predestined spot upon the dark sky; and, pausing, raise aloft with monstrous force its curling tail, flashing and sparkling with white light, amid the countless other twinkling stars. It seemed to Pierre that this star was the complete reply to all that was in his soul as it blossomed into new life, filled with tenderness and love.

 
I think we can all agree that no one writes comets like Tolstoy.

Publishers Weekly Review of The Night of the Comet

PW

 

 

 

 

Bishop’s resonant follow-up to his 2010 mother-daughter themed
debut, Letter to My Daughter, is set in 1973 in a Louisiana town
eagerly anticipating a celestial event. Alan Broussard, Jr., a newly 14-
year-old bookworm who considers himself to have “no obvious talents,
no great looks, no exceptional humor or intellect or passions,” is
excited about entering high school, though his father is the school’s
resident science teacher and, therefore, a source of embarrassment.
Alan Sr. becomes incrementally obsessed with the impending arrival of
the “comet of the century” Kohoutek, but his son is more interested in
spying on “angelic” Gabriella, the beautiful girl across the canal, with
his new telescope. Bishop’s characterizations of young Alan’s mother,
father, and sister Megan are endearing and their relentless coddling of
their maturing son is wincingly accurate as Christmas Eve, the
projected date for the comet’s sighting, approaches. Meanwhile, the
boy’s infatuation for Gabriella ebbs and flows and ultimately both father
and son come to crushing realizations. More thematically developed
than Bishop’s first novel, this book explores the complexities of a
father-son relationship through science, astronomy, and the growing
pains of adolescence. Agent: Marly Rusoff, Marly Rusoff Literary
Agency. (Aug.)

Reviewed on: 06/24/2013
Release date: 07/30/2013

The Minor Planets: Who Knew There Were So Many?

At first I thought this simplified illustration of the solar system was whimsical and interesting, but hardly accurate. That band of “Minor Planets” between Jupiter and Mars–that couldn’t be right, could it?

Odd Solar System Drawing

Ah, but it’s true. Hundreds of thousands of minor planets have been discovered within the solar system and thousands more are discovered each month (from Wikipedia). That band in the diagram is more often referred to as the Asteroid Belt, but asteroids are only one class of minor planets bouncing around the Sun.

There are also Dwarf Planets, Centaurs, Trojans, and Trans-Neptunian Objects like Cubewanos and Plutinos–all “minor planets” in our solar system.

The Minor Planet Center, of the International Astronomical Union, logs the many, many minor planets as they’re discovered, along with comets.

Their Latest Published Data indicates, incredibly, 100,913,328 observed Minor Planets and 658,679 comets.

I haven’t been able to find out who the artist of that illustration is, by the way.

Cheseaux’s Comet of 1744

Okay, so maybe you’re not that crazy about comets, but I promise you’ll like No. 5 in our Comet of the Week: the famous Cheseaux’s Comet of 1744, or, as I like to call it, The Great Singing Comet.

Cheseaux's Comet

What distinguishes this comet, spotted in late 1743 by, among others, the Swiss astronomer Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux, was its remarkable six-rayed tail.

“The comet arrived at perihelion on March 1 by which time it was bright enough to be observed in daylight with the naked eye. After perihelion a spectacular multiple tail developed which rose well above the morning horizon, in a dark sky while the head was still well below that same horizon. The tail formed a giant fan comprised of six multiple tails. While astronomers were familiar with comets having two tails (a straight gas or ion tail and a curved dust trail), one with six was something completely different.” (From Hunting and Imaging Comets, by Martin Mobberley, 2011.)

But wait! It gets better: Cheseaux’s comet made noise. Yes. Chinese astronomers, who also observed it, reported hearing sounds issuing from the comet. I like to imagine it as a kind of singing:

“Mysteriously, some of the Chinese records of this comet describe atmospheric sounds when the object was at its peak. In an era when there were no planes or cars how can this be explained? Maybe the sounds were distant animals howling in terror at the sight of such an awesome spectacle?” (Mobberly.)

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology offers this possible explanation for sounds emanating from falling stars and comets:

“This was one of closest cometary approaches on record. If the comet’s charged particles or magnetic field interacted with the magnetosphere, VLF waves may have been generated to produce electrophonic sounds at ground level.”

There you have it.

After the nights of March 7-8, Cheseaux’s Comet was never seen, or heard from, again. But it achieved such great and flashing fame that for a time it appeared on German coins.