Year 2009 - International Year of Astronomy
- From: atto <dayib78@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 03:26:41 -0700 (PDT)
The year 2009 has been designated as the international year of
Astronomy, commemorating the night four hundred years ago when Galileo
Galilei peered through his telescope into the night, and saw things in
the sky that no human has ever seen before, moons orbiting other
planets,
moons and planets that seemed to move, visions that brought the wrath
and punishment of the ruling theocracy of the Vatican upon him, what
he saw with his own
eyes was condemned by men of 'God' who never actually looked up as he
did, but only looked down and near to read from the holy scriptures,
and forced him to recant and deny his own scientific discovery, and
then condemned him
to a lifetime of house arrest.
With that simple act of using his telescope, Galileo opened the gate
to the heavens for the modern exploration of the Universe, and as we
all know now, Copernicus was right as proven by Galileo's
observations, and it was only the year 1992 when at last the Vatican
apologized for what was done to Galileo in the name of Religion, and
nodded in agreement that after all he was 'damn right' when he said
"Eppur si muove..", and accepted that at least in this neighborhood of
the Milky Way galaxy, it was both Earth and Moon and with all the
other Planets and their Moons and all other objects in her realm that
revolved around the Sun and ruled by its massive influence (a million
earths can fit inside the sun), and thatit was not the other way
around where the Stars and the Sun were thought to revolve around the
Earth.
So in remembrance to Galileo and his telescope, this year the curious
all over the world are making preparations for a unique summer of
Astronomy, to observe and celebrate the wonders of the night skies.
With the multitudes of more pressing issues facing our people today
in mind, its nonetheless my hope that Somali children all over the
world are encouraged this year to look up and wonder at the mysterious
beauty of the
stars in the clear sky of moonless nights.
As a child I was in that lucky generation that grew up in Somalia in
her narrow window of relative peace, and had the opportunity and the
curiosity to look at the night sky, and saw the gleaming, flickering,
shimmering starry clouds of the Milky Way, mighty clouds of light that
in some places appeared to form ridges and peaks and valleys
in the sky, and was always thrilled by the zooming streak of light
from the occasional falling star.
To me, looking at the starry night sky is like watching god in the
act of creating the universe, to me this is like watching that event
in real time, and neither scripture nor a holy book can tell it
better than the night sky.
My earliest memory of childhood interest in Astronomy was the
appearance of a what I now assume to have been a comet, a bright
smudge that appeared on the evening western sky over Kismayo that I
think lasted for more than a week, a phenomena which was at the time
explained to us by the elders to have been a clear heavenly sign on
the death of a local Holy man (I think it was Sheekh Nuur’s), - a kind
of a welcoming celestial fireworks for the saint?
Later on, from the shelves of the library of the American Embassy in
Mogadishu I found Astronomy books, books with strange titles like ‘The
Collapsing Universe’ by Isac Asimov - a title that grabbed my
attention like a
magnet - , and from there I was introduced into the world of Nebulae
and Galaxies, Super Novas and Black Holes, Pulsars and Quasars, the
Big Bang and the magnificent possibility of life existing elsewhere
across the sky on other worlds, and I was intrigued, and I was hooked.
Some of what I saw then as mere stars, later I learned they were much
morethan that, sometimes like a far away cloud of dust and gas in a
distant corner of the sky where new stars are reborn from the recycled
material of stars from earlier generation that died in colossal
explosions, other times like distant galaxies consisting of millions
of millions of suns , some of them hundreds of times larger than our
own sun, yet due to the unimaginable distances from us looked like a
faint point of light to the naked eye.
Another interesting side of Astronomy is the perplexing quandary of
Time and Space, the insanely mind bending thought of actually seeing
things now as they were a long time yesterday, with the probability
that some of the stars
that we see now have died thousands, millions or more of years ago,
and what we are seeing tonight is how these stars were when the light
hitting our eyes was emitted from the star, a vastness of space and
time spanning maybe hundreds of millions of years.
Even the Sun, we don’t see it now in her present state, but we see
it as it was eight minutes ago, the amount of time it takes light to
travel between the Sun and Earth.
Motion in dizzying speeds seems to be the rule of the Cosmos, nothing
is at rest, everything is in a constant flight at very high speeds,
with light being the express courier delivering the news in relative
time.
Consider this: Even now as we sit at the coffee shop doing the “fadhi-
ku-dirir” or sleeping tonight after a long day’s work, there is no
resting for us in space, we are all the time hurling through space at
the speed of 100,000 km or 62,000 miles per hour around the Sun, and
at the equator, in Kismayo and Mogadishu we are also rotationally
spinning at the speed of over 1600 km an hour, in short we live on top
the very thin crust of a somewhat cooled surface of a massive ball
that was hurled into existence a very long time ago, still going
whirling and spinning.
.
- Prev by Date: Somalia, Rwanda discuss military cooperation
- Next by Date: AT&T Usenet Netnews Service Shutting Down
- Previous by thread: Somalia, Rwanda discuss military cooperation
- Next by thread: AT&T Usenet Netnews Service Shutting Down
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
Loading
