Astronomical News!

DISCOVERIES OF THREE EPOCHS

One way to visualize the relative sizes in the solar system is to imagine a model in which it is reduced in size by a factor of a billion. Then the Earth is about 1.3 cm in diameter(the size of a grape). The Moon orbits a foot away. The Sun is 1.5 meters in diameter(the size of a man) and 150 meters from the Earth.(a city block) Jupiter is 15 cm in diameter(grapefruit) and 5 blocks away from the Sun. Saturn(an orange) is 10 blocks away; Uranus and Neptune(lemons) are 20 and 30 blocks away. A human being on this scale is the size of an atom; the nearest star is 9000 km away -Obtained from Internet, 02/03/96.

On 4 October 1957 Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite was safely in orbit, circulating the Earth every 96 minutes. Five Orbiter spacecraft mapped the moon between August 1966 and December 1967. I finished my education, got married and pioneered to the Canadian Arctic that year. On 20 July 1969 the first man walked on the moon. Two years and two months later my wife and I left Canada for Australia. Sitting in our lounge room in Whyalla South Australia in the evening, felt like being on the moon. -Ron Price, 4 February 1996, Noon.

Wilder than your wildest imagination,
simply the most incredible reality
in existence: existence, the universe
in all its labyrinthian complexity.

Wilder than your wildest imagination,
simply the most incredible reality
in existence: one’s own life, its days,
its years in their labyrinthian complexity.

1957 to 1997: forty years on
in the great journey into space
with missions to the furthest reaches
of the solar system: Pioneers10 and 11.
Astronomy taking off at last.

Voyagers taking us to Jupiter,
Uranus and Neptune.
Light has gone around
the planet and we have gone
around the solar system.

The radio galaxy 3C65
in the constellation of Andromeda
lies some 8 billion light years
away, some say, in a universe
that expands forever,
dramatically less than a
second after its birth.

Just last week astronomers
discovered 1500 galaxies
whose light started its journey
toward Earth five billion years ago.

There are hurricanes
three times the size of Earth,
two-and-a-half billion miles away
on Jupiter-itself a sea
of liquid metallic hydrogen,
home of thousands of mysteries,
storms and chaos.
Home of the ten hour day,
home of four moons.
A place you could fit in all the planets.
Collector of comets,
protector of our planet.

Pioneering into the solar system,
into my psycho-spiritual system
into the global society
with an emerging world religion.

Ron Price
4 February 1996