Oh to live under the stars!
One night in Broome, I joined Greg Quicke’s fantastic star tour.
What an insight into this ancient knowledge.
Here’s a small transcript of Greg speaking after sunset whilst looking through his telescopes:
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The earth moves 1 degree in 24 hours. 1 degree is hard to notice. But it means the stars will appear over this horizon 4 minutes earlier tomorrow. So once a week it will be half an hour earlier. This same time of night next week Diphda will be 7 degrees higher. In 3 months time Cetus the whale will be 90 degrees across the sky. In 6 months, Cetus will be as far below that horizon as it is now. In fact, in 6 months there will be a completely different set of stars in the sky. For instance, the Southern Cross is below the horizon now, 6 months ago it was there, nice and high.
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Any movement that you see is the earth turning.
Please turn your torch off! It takes 20 minutes to achieve night vision. Turn it off please!
You’ve just stuffed it, Ken.
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Orion is also known as the saucepan. Not to be confused with the Northern Hemisphere Big Dipper. Here in Broome we get to see both of them. Northern and Southern constellations.
A reminder, if you touch telescopes they move, so best to keep your hands off ‘em.
When you look into the telescope, remember to breathe. The first thing you loose when you hold your breath, is your eyesight. Breathe in, then out, and look.
Looks like intestine.
Someone’s in front of me.
I can’t find a globular cluster.
Oh!
Shooting star!
Orion is opposite the scorpion. So if you hang around here a couple of hours later, it will show up.
In three months time, Scorpio will be here and Orion there.
Looks like crystals!
In 6 months, they’ll be at the other side of the sky.
Good God.
In watching this change, you will see the earth moving around the sun.
It will take you a year, until it feels real.
Do you see it?
Everybody on the earth can see the same sky at the moment, they’re just in different parts.
There has been a series of revelations in my life that has made me realise these things.
The Earth Is Turning.
I knew the earth was turning, just like you guys do. It wasn’t until I turned this intellectually into actual experience, that I started to discover this and “earth turning consciousness”, and a series of revelations. I also started getting curious about the stars. I mean, we’ve named some tonight, and seen constellations, and asked how far away are they, how big are they? Where do they fit into this picture? I was working in the Kimberley, carting trucks across the land, at night I rolled my swag out and lay under a sky like this and put into practice what i’d been reading about.
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This earth is 12,700 k’s in diameter.
So if we travelled 12,700 k’s we’d pop out the other side.
If we left earth, the first place we’d come to is the moon, 3.5 thousand k’s in diameter, about the same size as Australia. If you picked it out of the sky and put it on top of Uluru, it would just cover Australia. It’s 400 thousand kilometres away. I mean, I had a land cruiser once that had done 401 thousand km’s. So it was officially on its way back from the moon. If earth was a grain of sand, the moon would be 30km’s away. The earth is turning around its axis 28 times. Once in 28 days, it’s going to pass Saturn and come past the sun around us and back again.
Sometimes you see the reflection of the sun on the dark side of the moon. They call this the old moon in the new moons arms. The moon lit up by earth shine. A beautiful effect.
Open star clusters are family groups of stars that were all born at around the same time. They all stick together when young, then start to spread out.
Globular clusters can have 100’s of thousands of stars. These are the New York’s, the Geneva’s and the Tokyo’s. The clouds of Magellan.
It’s 100 thousand light years across our galaxy, and only 200 light years across, so it’s a disk and its really skinny. Like a pizza with a very thin crust. This bulge up here is the centre of our galaxy. So 30,000 light years this way is the centre. That means we live out in the suburbs of our galaxy.
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RIP Greg Quicke. A beautiful human. 1961 – 2024
