"Here's a little agit for the never-believer
[...]
Here's a truck stop instead of Saint Peter's
[...]
Moses went walking with a staff of wood
Newton got beaned by the apple good"
R.E.M. - Man on the Moon
Like everyone who's anyone, I spent my solstice evening watching the Greatest of all conjunctions! (- and I am very much including "but" for "and" "or" other junctions) yet it wasn't until I zoomed the image in to its full pixelated glory that I noticed a couple of surprise appearances.
Also, they don't line up with the light's angle on the moon and
all these fancy space rocks are supposed to be roughly in the plane of
the ecliptic, but then again what do I know from optics and axial tilt?days nights the
discerning lycanthrope just snaps his fingers a few times with an air of
solemn detachment, beatnik style. Diana digs it.
Nothin'! - that's what.
Still, for a snapshot taken freehand while shivering on a clear but windy winter evening, I'd say I caught a decent one. And no, I did not howl at the moon, thankyouverymuch. These More startling, I was not expecting the little clusters of pixels around Jupiter, which though distorted vertically just like the two planets are a bit more solid than the usual amateur photographic artifacts. They seem to be at about the correct distance for me to brag I managed to accidentally photograph two of the Galilean satellites. Io and Europa, maybe?
If those stray pixels really are the real deal, then I have to wonder how Galileo and Kepler ever managed to spot them though primitive telescopes of 8x-30x magnification and foggy focus and probably worth a house to boot, the pinnacle of scientific equipment back in 1610, with Ottoman pirates hounding the coasts and the West Indies a largely unexplored shore, and inquisitors breathing down your neck lest your new toy with the stacked lenses catch Yahweh with his pants down.
Millions of better images were produced yesterday, of greater magnification and clarity than my own feeble attempt, but this one remains noteworthy by its very feebleness. I do not work at an observatory. I don't even own a telescope. I did not drive up to a mountaintop in search of clear, rarefied air or torture the digital image through a quadrillion clock cycles' worth of post-processing. Ignorant and unmotivated, possessed of no specialized knowledge whatsoever, I took a five minute stroll, two hundred meters away from my apartment complex to an empty field, aimed vaguely in the direction astronomers pointed out, and clicked the shutter on my $160, off-the-shelf, mid-range consumer-grade autofocus camera. The same instrument I use to snap pictures of the family dog and funny-looking birds and the forest at sunset and a selfie for my senile grandmother, this half-kilo plastic, glass and copper lump in my coat pocket, can bring into mundane reach aspects of the universe which puzzled and frightened better men than myself for millennia. There was a time when the existence of other planets' moons was denied, because nothing could revolve around any astral body other than the Earth.
We most often hear scientific advance described either in terms of abstract, specialized projects like supercolliders or of technological intrusion into our social lives like cellphones, but somewhere between those extremes, between the abstruse and the vulgar, lie endless straightforward, accessible means to verify reality for ourselves. This is a golden age for autodidacts.
Now flip the channel to current events.
There's the astrology section, going as strong as it ever has. There's the state lottery raking in tens of millions. There's another stampede at Mecca. There's a million Flat Earth conspiracy nuts calling the moon landings hoaxes, and dust-caked sadhus with million-dollar Swiss bank accounts claiming they eat cosmic rays, and Bigfoot lurking in every blur, and Jehovah's Witnesses scared of turning into Dracula and presidents farting from the strain of trying to disbelieve the existence of methane, and Deepak Chopra curing your quantum autism by squinting at you, and neon-haired attention-whores claiming their gonads are a social construction, and grunting, hooting creationists missing as many links as they can, and Alex Jones defending us all from gay frogs and feminists defending us from rapist ducks and flood "geologists" whitewashing all the rock strata, and separatists goose-stepping in protest against "the government", and the political correctness police crying "defund the police", and tarot decks prophesying the fifth or sixth Mayan apocalypse this year alone, and bored widows with university educations paying through the nose to speak to the ghosts of their dead poodles, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, idiots, morons, cretins, imbeciles, retards by the billion, by the billion, a never-ebbing tide of simian degeneracy choking the life out of the world...
At some point you have to realize it's not just stupidity but neurophobia. Terrified of their own inadequacy, of being outpaced by reason, the masses take refuge in denial, in as ludicrous an idea as possible, the better to define themselves by their dogma. Their goal is not to seek alternate interpretations of the world but to find allies in anti-intellectual vandalism, to band together under the standard of a shibboleth in defense against an incomprehensible reality. Apes huddling in the darkest cave they can find, blinded by a few points of light giving the lie to the center of their universe.
"Is the rabble also necessary for life?"
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