“Italian Kisses: meteor shower wishes in love and ... - Examiner” plus 2 more |
- Italian Kisses: meteor shower wishes in love and ... - Examiner
- Walt Whitman Meteor Mystery Solved by Astronomer ... - YAHOO!
- Solving Walt Whitman's meteor mystery - Los Angeles Times
| Italian Kisses: meteor shower wishes in love and ... - Examiner Posted: 05 Jun 2010 10:53 AM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. For anyone who grew up in the countryside, shooting stars were gifts from Mother Earth sent to us so that we could wish for love and kisses. As young teens, whenever we knew there would be a meteorite shower, we would be allowed stay up into the wee hours and eat gobs of gelati and count the shooting stars. Yes, the gelati was made in Grandma's kitchen. Each star we saw would be the number of kisses we would receive, or the number of boys who would fall in love with us. As adults we know that shooting stars are simply the result of a meteorite shower. And no -- wishes do not come true from star wishing. A couple's book of star wishes: But our couple's book of wishes arose from this tradition. I remember once during a particularly difficult place in our lives, we sat in a marriage counselor's waiting room. I saw a children's book about stars and began talking about those days of shooting star wishes. Then the idea of a wishing game occured to me. Yes, there was resistence at first. But, during the 10 minute wait, we suddenly had come to a place where we remembered some of the joy we had lost. It was tenuous, but I reasoned, "We have nothing to lose right now." What started out as a perfectly silly game of "Star Wishes" helped change our attitude from one of doom to possibilities.The rule was this -- all positive wishes -- nothing such as, "I wish you would stop coming home late at night." "I wish to see us loving again," said she. "I wish to see us smile again," said he "I wish to visit Paris again," said she. "I wish to laugh as much as we did in the Bistro where you tripped a waiter," said he. And of course, I had to answer "I did not trip the waiter." We carried the conversation and laughter with us into the therapist's office and then suddenly stiffened as we sat in the chairs. The therapist said, "You two don't laugh enough anymore. What was so funny?" Star wishes and celebrations: From that afternoon on we periodically found time for "star wishes" which eventually became a "New Year's Eve Wishing Book" ritual for us for many years. It is difficult to play this "Wishing" game when you are really angry. But in love and marriage it helps to have excuses for celebrations. In the world of large Italian families there is always a celebration -- a reason to eat, laugh, give and receive hugs and kisses. As our lives become more complicated, we need to create our own moments to celebrate, moments to wish, to laugh. Tonight is a good one. Go to work late if you must in the morning. But tonight, gather gobs of gelati, watch the shooting stars, then make wishes and love. Copyright 2009 Rita Watson
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| Walt Whitman Meteor Mystery Solved by Astronomer ... - YAHOO! Posted: 05 Jun 2010 10:17 AM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. The long-standing mystery over exactly what famed poet Walt Whitman saw streaking though the sky 150 years ago has apparently been solved by a team of bookworm astronomers. Following a trail that began with a 19th century painting and led to hundreds of newspaper reports, the researchers discovered that the "strange huge meteor-procession" mentioned in Whitman's noted collection "Leaves of Grass" indeed refers to a rare procession of earth-grazing meteors that occurred in 1860. "Meteor processions are so rare most people have never heard of them," said Texas State University physics professor Donald Olson, who worked on the investigation. "There was one in 1783 and a Canadian fireball procession in 1913. Those were all the meteor processions we knew of." Earth-grazing meteors unmasked Earth-grazers enter the atmosphere at low angle, from the point of view of a given skywatcher, and appear to scoot slowly and dramatically along the horizon. They're much different than meteors appearing overhead and shooting swiftly toward the horizon For years, Whitman's description had been alternately attributed to several events, including: The 1833 Leonid meteor shower, the 1858 Leonids shower and a famous 1859 fireball. [More Leonid meteor shower photos.] But the timeframe of the poem, which is titled "Year of the Meteor," listed under "1859-1860," and includes a definite reference to the Great Comet of 1860, conflicted with the 1833 sighting. Evidence for the1858 sighting was also weakened when the date of a separate meteor shower observation by Whitman was corrected from 1858 to 1833. Additionally, a fireball is only one blaze in the sky, while a meteor procession exhibits multiple blazing objects. Olson and his team describe their astronomical investigation in the July 2010 edition of "Sky & Telescope" magazine. Painting shows the way A single painting by 19th century landscape artist Frederic Church was the happenstance clue in solving the puzzle behind Whitman's reference. Titled "The Meteor of 1860" and picturing a procession of meteors through the night's sky, the work was glimpsed by Olson on the back cover of an art exhibition catalog. Upon visiting Church's house in New England and a research library that contained old diaries of a friend, the team learned that Church lived in Catskill, NY, in July 1860, when the painting was produced. That date allowed the researchers to focus their study on the time period's newspapers, which surprisingly enough verified the sighting of an Earth-grazing meteor during the evening of July 20, 1860. Breaking apart in the atmosphere, the meteor split into multiple fireballs that burned overhead in skies visible from the Great Lakes to New York State. The New York Times, Smithsonian, and Harper's Weekly all covered the event, with Scientific American calling it "the largest meteor that has ever been seen." According to Olson, the eyewitness accounts from town newspapers alone totaled in the hundreds and provided enough information about the meteor's changing location for the team to extrapolate its route. "From all the observations in towns up and down the Hudson River Valley, we're able to determine the meteor's appearance down to the hour and minute," Olson said. "Church observed it at 9:49 p.m. when the meteor passed overhead, and Walt Whitman would've seen it at the same time, give or take one minute." "A really cool part is that the Catskill newspaper describes it as dividing into two parts with scintillations, exactly like the painting," said co-researcher Ava G. Pope, an Honors Program at Texas State University who contributed to the project. Despite its extreme rarity as an astronomical phenomenon and its heavy documentation in the day's newspapers and magazines, the event was forgotten by the mid-20th century, researchers said in a statement.
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| Solving Walt Whitman's meteor mystery - Los Angeles Times Posted: 05 Jun 2010 08:23 AM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. The rare event described in the poem 'Year of Meteors (1859-1860)' is indeed called a 'meteor procession.' It takes place when a grazer meteor breaks up and the pieces travel together as if in formation. Scholars have for decades tried to identify a puzzling celestial event in one of Walt Whitman's poems from his collection "Leaves of Grass." Now they've done so — using clues from a famed American landscape painter. In the July issue of Sky and Telescope magazine, a team that includes astronomers and a literary scholar, all from Texas State University, details the existence and nature of the rare event, in which meteor fragments crossed the sky in stately, synchronized fashion. The heavenly display is described in the poem "Year of Meteors (1859-1860)," in which Whitman writes of the tumultuous period leading up to the Civil War. He touches upon the hanging of abolitionist John Brown and the ascendancy of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, and he makes two references to astronomy: "The comet that came unannounced out of the north, flaring in heaven," and "the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads."
Identifying the comet in the verses was easy, said astronomer Don Olson, lead author of the article. It had to be the Great Comet of 1860, seen in the Northern Hemisphere on June 18 of that year. Identifying the second event, what Whitman called the "meteor procession," proved much more difficult. "Various authors have tried to figure out what Whitman was describing. This thing has been bubbling in my mind [since] 1994," said Olson, who that year started teaching a class on astronomy in art, history and literature. Prevailing theories didn't make sense to Olson. Some scholars had thought that the poem could have been referring to an 1859 daylight fireball — but Whitman has the meteor occurring at night, and describes several flares traveling through the sky at once. Others thought the poet may have been recalling the 1833 Leonid meteor shower, which Whitman did indeed witness — but that is inconsistent with the poem's timeframe (1859-1860) and doesn't match the description. Whitman's procession lasted "a moment, a moment long," but meteor showers last for hours, even days. The breakthrough came in 2000, when Olson picked up a catalog of works by 19th-century landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church. "Scientists in general, but astronomers in particular, love Frederic Church because he was such a careful observer of the sky," Olson said. "You can see it in his paintings." Olson turned the catalog over. On the back was a copy of the painting "The Meteor of 1860." The scene clearly depicts two large balls of light passing almost horizontally across the night sky, followed by a series of smaller fragments. The astronomer recognized this as an extremely rare event that is in fact called a "meteor procession," in which a meteor breaks up and the pieces travel together as if in formation before exiting the Earth's atmosphere once more. A procession is rare, Olson said, because so many factors need to fall into place. The meteor, known as a grazer, must travel almost tangent to the Earth's surface, giving it a long, near-horizontal path across the skies. It usually has to travel between about 35 and 40 miles above the ground — any higher and it would not light up, any lower and it would likely fall to Earth. And it has to break up very soon after entering the Earth's atmosphere, or the procession-like effect will be lost. Since the 18th century, only four have been documented, Olson said. Compare that with meteor showers, which happen several times a year, he added. Griffith Observatory Director Edwin Krupp said the most important impact of this celestial rediscovery would be its literary significance. "There is a fuss about this because the literary analysis that has accompanied this famous piece of Americana, [what could be considered] the backbone of American literary tradition, has sort of been misunderstood," Krupp said. Krupp pointed to the fact that Whitman was writing about an omen-filled time that led up to America's bloodiest war. "This article allows us to reenter the minds and imaginations of people roughly 150 years ago and see that they were keen observers of nature and profoundly affected by what went on overhead." Whitman appears to use the theme of meteors as a metaphor for the fleeting nature of what appeared to be major events as well as for his own connection to life. "Year of comets and meteors transient and strange," he writes, ending with: "As I flit though you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this chant, / what am I myself but one of your meteors?" Five Filters featured article: Into the Abyss. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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