Constellations and the March of Time

 After an intense period of trying to organise a children's party - lots of walking, lots of cycling in the rain, getting locked in a venue - I've not had much time to write for you this last week, and the freezing weather has prevented any expeditions on the bike. 

Ugh, how fat winter makes me feel. 

-7 nights however have proved to be a blessing, with infinite skies diamond strewn with stars. Mars shines red among them, and I got some ok photos with my Pixel 6A of Gemini, Auriga, Taurus and Orion, the great winter constellations.

The universe is crazy to think about, how these balls of firey fusion energy of varying luminosities and colours randomly scattered in the cosmos, form these patterns that are immediately familiar - I've known the form of Orion since I was a small child. 

It will still look the same when I'm a very old man, but at a universal scale this is nothing. Eons from now, these patterns will have been destroyed by the march of space time.

Almost too much to think about.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 20.12.22

The Jewels of the Silmarills Light My Way Home

Obviously being at work, I'm not getting to see very much of interest at the moment apart from the odd crow squawking by the canteen window, although his morning I got buzzed by three low flying Canada Geese hurtling out of the girdle of Venus to the north-east. But on my way home at 630pm, I currently have three beautiful travelling companions who light my way home.

In the west there is setting Venus, gradually leaving its conjunction with Mars behind. In the south scorching Sirius twinkles violently, flashing red and green. And in the East Jupiter rises, the colour of bone.

Set in a sky where the final traces of twilight are painting the horizon with a beautiful indigo-green light, they remind me of Tolkien's Silmarrils, the jewels designed by the Elven king Finwe to capture the light of the two trees that illuminated the Undying Lands for all eternity. At the moment I set off for home, they form a wide triangle, all of them about the same height above the horizon and so adding to the illusion they've been placed there by figures from supernatural literature.

Tolkien's Silmarills ended up being responsible for the genocide of virtually an entire race of Elves and the eventual destruction of a huge chunk of Middle Earth, my personal celestial jewels merely provide a comforting sight as I make my way home, into a wind still faintly tainted with winter's malice.

How stunning they are.

Si

The Creeping Terror of Mars...

It's not there to be seen at the moment, it's crimson brilliance hidden away until it next approaches opposition in a year or so's time. Jupiter entertains all night, Venus glitters in the frozen mornings and soon Saturn will be shaking off his duvet just before the dawn.

But not planet Mars, not for now.

And in some ways, this suits me fine.

To see Mars, late at night, in silence, on your own, is to be reminded of the tentacled terrors that we know DON'T, but REALLY DO, wait for their chance to cross the gulf of space between us and devour our living blood. I go inside after observing Mars, and every hanging coat, every shadow, every shadow cast by a streetlight, becomes an animate creature of terrifying, horrifying, scareifying Martian origin waiting to put a clawed finger on your shoulder the moment your eyes close.

You wake in Sleep Paralysis, and just beyond your frozen visual periphary, an upright bipedal grey martian prepares his probes and samplers for journeys into unmentionable parts. They control the horizontal, they control the vertical. They control the speed with which they open up your stomach and eat your intestines while you watch.

Observing with a telescope at 2am, as I have done, is worse. The green flash of launching cylinders is an imagined nightmare only a heartbeat away, the collapse of civilization under piles of mouldering, mutating red weed.

I shiver with fear every time I look at it. I bet many of you do too, as you stand alone surrounded my menacing whispering trees. But we all come back for more to see the God of War gaze contemptuously down at us, seeding our mind with fears...