astronomy@iowa

Spanning nearly 200 light-years, IC 1805—known colloquially as the heart nebula—is a stellar nursery in which we find the star cluster Melotte 15. Compared to our own 5 billion year-old Sun, the stars of Melotte 15 are still in their infancy at a mere 1.5 million years of age. Destined to live short lives and violent deaths, the stars of the cluster are ionizing the hydrogen gas from which they formed and it is the recombining hydrogen atoms that are producing the red-pink emission characteristic of the element’s spectrum. Even at a distance of over 7,000 light-years, the star-forming region is so large that it spans five times the size of the Full Moon.

Ironically, while the nebula’s shape evokes thoughts of Valentine’s Day, it is located in the constellation Cassiopeia—the mythological queen of Ethiopia whose vanity drove her to boast that her daughter Andromeda was more beautiful than the daughters of the god Poseidon. As retribution, Poseidon sent a sea monster (depicted as the constellation Cetus) to ravage the kingdom. King Cepheus, wishing to spare his country from devastation, consulted an oracle and was told he must sacrifice his daughter to the sea monster. Andromeda was chained to a mountain and awaiting her fate when the warrior Perseus—riding the winged horse Pegasus—came upon her and used the severed head of Medusa to turn the sea monster to stone and save the princess from being devoured. In gratitude, Cepheus and Cassiopeia offered Andromeda’s hand in marriage to Perseus.

As punishment for her boastfulness, Cassiopeia was placed in the heavens after her death and is found near the north celestial pole where she spends half of her diurnal motion on her head. The other characters of the legend can also be found as constellations.

The Full Moon of February occurred at 8:49 a.m. CST this morning. Known as the Snow Moon, it is the second Full Moon of the northern hemisphere’s winter. As far as the lunar calendar is concerned, February is unique in that it is the only month in which is it not possible to have two Full Moons and it is that prospect of two Full Moons in a month that brings up an interesting historical oddity referred—incorrectly, as I’ll discuss in a few moments—as a Blue Moon. It is impossible for February to have two Full Moons, incidentally, due to the 29.5 day synodic period of lunar phases. Thus, the interval between Full Moons is over one day longer than the length of a typical February (and one-half day longer than a leap year February.)

But just what is a Blue Moon, anyway? Not what most people believe when you ask them for a definition. The earliest known usage of the phrase “blue moon”, however, appears to be a 1528 pamphlet entitled Rede Me and Be Not Wrothe in which the author wrote “Yf they say the mone is belewe We must beleve that it is true.” The expression seems to refer to something so absurd as to be unbelievable. According to common lore, however, a Blue Moon is usually described as the second Full Moon in a month, but in reality they are not so rare as to warrant the phrase “Once in a Blue Moon.” In fact, there are two Full Moons in a month about once every two years—hardly a rarity. Believe it or not, this particular usage of the phrase appears to stem from a misinterpretation of the original meaning and can be traced to the original Trivial Pursuit game of the 1980s.

The modern usage of Blue Moon appears to have its origin in the Maine Farmer’s Almanac. Editors at Sky & Telescope, with the assistance of several librarians, obtained 40 copies of the Almanac dating back to the early 1800s and found numerous citations that referred to Blue Moons, but not one of them referred to the second Full Moon of the month. In fact, the Blue Moons always occurred on the 20th – 23rd days of February, May, August, or November! These Full Moons always occur about one month before a seasonal change. A further nuance discovered with additional research revealed that the almanac definition relied on the use of the tropical year, which is measured from one winter solstice (Yule) to the next, instead of using the traditional calendar year. Most tropical years have 12 Full Moons—three per season—but occasionally there are 13 Full Moons with one season having four Full Moons.

Why is the third Full Moon significant? Because historically the name of the fourth Full Moon must be in accordance with the seasonal change as the name of that Full Moon relates to the impending equinox or solstice. Thus, the Full Moons of this winter are: the January (Moon After Yule) Full Moon, the February (Snow) Full Moon, and the March (Lenten) Full Moon. Occasionally, however, the first Full Moon of winter occurs just hours after the winter solstice and is therefore in December and not January. In those years, the occurrence of Full Moons will be: the December (Moon After Yule) Full Moon, the January (Snow) Full Moon, the February (Blue) Full Moon, and the March (Lenten) Full Moon. In both cases, the sequence of Full Moons occurs prior to the arrival of the vernal equinox and the start of spring. Thus, Easter won’t occur until after the first Full Moon of spring—referred variously as the Egg, Grass or Hare Full Moon.

A complete description of how Blue Moons are determined is quite convoluted, but is an interesting example of how calendar reform, religious observances (namely Lent and Easter), and astronomical events are joined together.

Read the full Sky & Telescope article for a detailed explanation of the calculation and how the editors traced the history of the Blue Moon definition.

Where am I?
In the Village.
What do you want?
Information.
Whose side are you on?
That would be telling…We want information…Information.
You won’t get it.
By hook or by crook, we will.
Who are you?
The new Number 2.
Who is Number 1?
You are Number 6.
I am not a number. I am a free man!

Irish-American actor Patrick McGoohan died Tuesday at the age of 80 in Los Angeles, California.

Long before Twin Peaks, Lost and a small group of other television shows that kept viewers on the edge of their seats each week and became the topic of water cooler conversations, there was The Prisoner. Four years after Rod Serling last invited us to “Imagine if you will…” in The Twilight Zone, Patrick McGoohan’s surreal vision was first broadcast on American television. While The Twilight Zone was an anthology series of morality plays that probed humankind’s deepest fears and insecurities, The Prisoner addressed some of those same fears but in a way that left more people scratching their heads than nodding in agreement. Viewers were left wondering what that strange canopied bicycle meant, who or what the big white balloon was, and who exactly was Number 1. If McGoohan had the answers, that would be telling. Throughout the rest of his life, the reclusive star refused to answer those questions and others regarding the meaning of the show, preferring to let viewers and fans discuss it and figure it out for themselves even if, in the end, they all come to different conclusions about what it all means.

About all that seems clear is that the show reflects each viewer’s prejudices and ideals. Religious allegory; a “magical mystery tour” of psychedelic nonsense; ode to anarchy; or a cautionary tale warning of a time when individuality is suppressed, societal needs are supreme, and the masses blindly accept their fate—The Prisoner may be all of these or none of them depending on your interpretation. It’s as if Kafka, Orwell, Dali and Hitchcock got together to work on a project and left it to us to figure out the meaning of it all. My feeling is that the show represents the continual struggle of the individual to maintain his or her individuality and how to balance those rights against authoritarian efforts to maintain an orderly society with rules that sometimes place limits on personal freedoms. There is also the deeper struggle of the individual to control the baser, evil side within each of us. Which viewpoint right? Perhaps all of them, and therein lies one of the truly great conundrums—not only the personal struggle of good versus evil or conflicts between Right and Wrong, but also the conflict between two Rights. Fighting back against oppression that would suppress individual freedoms and stopping Right from becoming Wrong is the responsibility of everyone whether that suppression comes to us from within, in the form of dogma, unjust laws, blind obedience to authority, or ignorance. In that sense, Number 6’s struggles are similar to those of Thoreau, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. insomuch as Number 6’s subversive actions are often acts of civil disobedience and non-violent protest that serve not only his own ends but protect and benefit his fellow “prisoners” in the Village. When comparing the Village to today’s world, however, in some ways the scales may have already tipped the balance against the individual.

Astronomer and popularizer of science, Carl Sagan, envisioned a circumstance frighteningly similar to what Patrick McGoohan may have had in mind when Sagan wrote “The Demon Haunted World.” In that 1996 book, Sagan describes his fear of a future when the vast majority of citizens are technologically and scientifically illiterate and incapable of understanding important issues or making informed decisions that profoundly affect their well-being. The scientific method is ideally a democratic process and is one way to ensure that Right prevails. Whenever one asks “Why?” and demands an unbiased answer—even when that answer requires that you discard your own cherished conceptions—you are employing the ideals of science. Although many articles and reports state that the protagonist in The Prisoner was a secret agent, no doubt based on the belief that Number 6 was adapted from John Drake, the character portrayed by McGoohan in his previous series Danger Man—a.k.a. Secret Agent Man in the United States, Mr. McGoohan emphatically stated that Number 6 was not John Drake¹ and once stated that he considered Number Six to be a scientist. In fact, during World War II the British Inter-Services Research Bureau did “host” individuals with invaluable information at their disposal in a remote area of Scotland. They were well-treated and lived comfortable, but were not able to leave.²

Should you wish to see The Prisoner for yourself, the entire series—of which only 17 episodes were made—is available on VHS and as a DVD boxed set. Many libraries and video rental stores have the series on hand or you could add it to your Netflicks queue. Although there were 17 episodes eventually produced between 1966 and 1968, McGoohan originally envisioned a serial of seven episodes. According to Mr. McGoohan³, the essential episodes in order are:

1. Arrival
2. Free For All
3. Dance of the Dead
4. Checkmate
5. The Chimes of Big Ben
6. Once Upon a Time
7. Fall Out

To learn more about The Prisoner, visit Six of One, the Official Prisoner Appreciation Society, or Retroweb. You can watch the opening credits that served to inform viewers of the show’s premise.

Sources:
¹From an interview with Patrick McGoohan conducted by Barrington Caslia and originally published in the Summer/Fall 1985 issue of New Video magazine. Reprinted in The Official Prisoner Companion by Matthew White and Jaffer Ali.
²White, M. and Ali, J., The Prisoner Companion, Warner Books, New York, 1988.
³Hora, M., The Prisoner of Portmerion, The Prisoner Appreciation Society, 1985.
Carrazé, A, and Oswald, H., The Prisoner, H W Allen & Co., London, 1990.

Emmy-award winning composer Alexander Courage died several weeks ago at the age of 88. Although he wrote musical scores for hundreds of television shows and movie musicals, he will be forever remembered as the composer of the theme to NBC’s television show “Star Trek.” He composed additional scores for just a handful of the show’s episodes, but did compose scores for many episodes of “Lost in Space,” which aired on rival network CBS.

After the end of World War II, Courage was discharged from the Army Air Corps and hired by MGM. While working for the studio he went on to arrange scores for some of the most famous musicals of the 1950s, including “The Band Wagon,” “Funny Face,” “Gigi” and “Guys and Dolls.”