Why There Are Suddenly Stars

Why There Are Suddenly Stars

You may have noticed that I have just opened an astronomy hub on this website. It has been in the works for a year, but it took time to create exactly what I wanted. Rather than rush, I took my time and worked with experts in the field to create an accurate rendering of star values and a unique set of content pages. There is more to come, and I look forward to finally revealing it all.

The Beauty of the Stars

I was lucky enough to grow up in a family that was creative in all sorts of ways; we fell along a creative continuum, with no differentiation between the arts and the sciences. We were all creative in our own flavor, but we were all readers with a love of science. Me, I wanted to be an astronaut, I think, partly inspired by the hamfests (gatherings of ham radio enthusiasts) we went to every weekend, weather permitting.

Our family lived in the middle of nowhere, and the night skies were dark, and the stars were bright. I would go out after dark with my little red Astroscan telescope and try to find the planets and observe the Moon. Pitch black, and the stars were a soup of bright points.

I am looking at it on my shelf as we speak. True, it was not a good telescope and would wander out of alignment, but it was sturdy and cheerful, and a great way to get children interested in astronomy. I wish they still made them. Indestructible.

I would dream of attending the NASA space camp for kids. It was a good time for space exploration. Back then, regular space shuttle voyages made space discovery feel accessible and even mundane. That joy and love of math, science, and astronomy never left me, even though I eventually took other career paths.

The older I get, the more I see that there is no division of desires in how we are made. We simply are, and we follow our hearts, not in what we end up being, but in what we organize toward. It is not a matter of money; our talents remain.

So, that is why there are suddenly stars on this website, one, because I find them awe-inspiring, and two, because, like many things of beauty, they lie in an unbroken line to both lovely order and creation.

An Unbroken Line

Astronomy is not a departure from the creative arts. In fact, in a way, it was probably one of the first steps of human differentiation from the animals. Long before fine art, written music, and symbolic math, early man was already watching the stars, and the watching was part of what made us human.

For them, the stars were indeed useful for counting the days until the rivers flooded, for fixing planting seasons, and for finding their way across the land or sea. But early man, I think, found them, too, a source of delight and beauty, and made up stories, imagined gods and goddesses, and created elaborate works of art; the earliest records stretch back perhaps 35,000 years.

Everything creative at once

A map of the sky is geometry, algebra, physics, art, music, and poetry combined. We can throw our imaginations at it and never reach the end. It will always be a source of wonder and science. Like many complex ideas, it is rich in possibilities. Anything you want is contained in it: poetry, prose, art, music, and math.

The same order across creation

This is why the sky belongs with the music, the arts, and the language. The instinct is identical. A scale is order heard, a tessellation or fractal is order seen, grammar and words are order spoken, and the sky is order on a grand scale. The work of every astronomer who ever lived was to understand the rules the lights were obeying.

That is also the standard for everything in this section. The aim is to explain the mathematics honestly and make it accessible, the way a good teacher does, without hiding it behind jargon and without pretending it is simpler than it is, while at the same time inspiring exploration and wonder.

Accuracy of order

Our sky data is based on real catalogs and calculations and has been independently verified by Dr. Juan Manuel Salerno, an astronomy researcher at Instituto de Astronomía Teórica y Experimental in Argentina.

What you will find here

This is the entrance to the Sky section. From here, you can read about what a star chart is, understand the geometry of flattening a sphere, learn why the pole star changes over time, and explore the stars and the cultures that named them. There is much more planned, and I hope you come along with me as I develop this side of the site.