Dear word explorer,
I’ve been leaning hard into my side-interest in astronomy lately, but I’d like to mention a couple of items before I leave the planets and foray into another passion: medieval/reformation history.
First, I wish you all clear skies for the Super Hunter’s Moon on the 17th of October! The best time to view it will be at Moonrise, as it will appear huge and luminous in the darkening skies. You can easily check online when that will occur at your patch of the world. The Moon will be at its perigee — its closest approach to the Earth in its orbit — and it will be 14% closer and approximately 30% brighter.
To human eyes the Moon may seem much larger than this, and that’s down to the Moon Illusion.
This is the result of a visual processing glitch in the human brain, which scientists don’t truly understand. There are theories of course, and I’ll leave it to NASA to offer some of them, but no one is certain why we perceive it this way.
We possess an innate need to exaggerate the Moon’s presence, but perhaps that’s simply because only a couple of hundred years ago the cycles of the Moon were vitally important to how people ran their lives (especially to those near coastlines). Let’s not forget that many insects and animals can navigate via Moonlight, and other lifeforms plan their breeding cycles around the movements of the Moon.
Perhaps when we look up at the gravid, shining Moon swinging over the horizon there is some part of our brain trying to initiate old programs. So we stand, dazed, admiring the bright mystery, waiting for instructions that are (mostly) pruned away.
Congratulations to NASA for a successful launch yesterday of the Europa Clipper, a spacecraft which will travel 2.9 billion km by using the orbit of both the Earth and Mars to sling-shot itself towards Jupiter and reach the gigantic planet and its Moon, Europa, in April 2030.
The Clipper will loop through 49 close flybys of Europa as a way to cope with the massive radiation of Jupiter, and it’s hoped it will collect dust particles and fly through its water plumes.
Yes, water plumes! Europa is approximately the same size as our moon but it is coated in a 25 km-thick layer of cracked ice, which covers a vast reservoir of water. It is thought that this liquid vents through some of these fractures.
What will the Europa Clipper discover? What secrets flow through the unseen waters?
It’s not the only spacecraft arrowing towards Europa — last year the European Space Agency launched the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) spacecraft which will have it sensors also trained on the frozen moons of Ganymede and Callisto. Due to the vagaries of interplanetary navigation, it will arrive after the Europa Clipper.
From top to bottom, the moons shown are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The Great Red Spot, a storm in Jupiter's atmosphere, is at least 300 years old. Winds blow counterclockwise around the Great Red Spot at about 400 km per hour.1
Jupiter, the Roman God, similar to the Greek God Zeus, is famous for his large appetites, lightning flinging and lecherous habits. It should be no surprise that the planet Jupiter has 90+ moons, not including the ‘moonlet’ progeny spawned by those objects. Taken as a satellite system, Jupiter's moons are referred to as the Jovian system, with the four Galilean moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, named after Galileo Galilei who discovered them in 1610.2 Since 1892, smaller Jovian moons have been continually added to the roster.
Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are from Greek Mythology, so technically it was Zeus who was their mythological pursuer. Zeus is the charismatic and awful pillager of the mythos, capable of great acts of subterfuge and shapeshifting to achieve his desires. It mattered not a jot to him if his attention was unwanted. In this way he is the archetypal narcissist king: vainglorious, thin-skinned and unable to comprehend why some people don’t love him despite his despicable behaviour.
The situation reminds me of the dilemma of Christina of Denmark (1521 – 1590), who at seventeen years old became the subject of King Henry the VIII’s attention. At this point Henry had divorced his wife of twenty-four years and divided England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland along religious lines, wed his girlfriend, Anne Boleyn, and beheaded her shortly afterwards on trumped-up charges.3 His third wife, Jane Seymour, died a year after their marriage due to complications after the birth of their son. Despite his dreadful track record as a husband and ruler, Henry commissioned the German painter Hans Holbein to paint portraits of eligible European noblewomen so Henry might consider their potential as the next English queen.4 Yes, a very, very slow form of Tinder, where the painter is terrified of the consequences if his forceful patron should swipe left on every image.
Christina was already a widow — she’d been married at twelve years old and her husband, Francesco II Sforza, Duke of Milan, died a year later, and they had no children.5 Christina had enjoyed an astonishing three and a half-year gap in which she had been dodging marriage proposals in Italy while honing her political savvy and trying to live her best teenaged life. At sixteen she was fetched back to dreary Brussels thanks to various European skirmishes, and faced the prospect of a marriage to a forty-five year old English King who still considered himself cock of the walk.
When Holbein arrived to paint Christina, she appeared wearing unflattering widow’s weeds, and granted the painter three hours for the job. She staged the room with black velvet, black damask and a black cloth-of-estate, putting her centuries ahead of the Goth lifestyle and the unfiltered Instagram moment.
Best of all, she supposedly said, “If I had two heads, one should be at the King of England's disposal.”
Despite her standoffishness, or perhaps because of it, Henry fancied his chances with Christina for nearly a year, until Holbein changed tactics and painted a ‘glow-up’ of Anne of Cleves. Henry didn’t take to his bride when he met Anne in person, and annulled their unconsummated marriage after six months. She clearly got the best deal of the wives: a nice home, a pension, and she kept her head, even during the political tempests following Henry’s death.
What about Christina? In 1541 at the ripe old age of nineteen she married Francis, Duke of Bar … who had been previously betrothed to Anne of Cleves! Francis inherited the titled of Duke of Lorraine upon the death of his father in 1545, but he passed away the following year just as Christina gave birth to her third child. She had been named Regent of Lorraine and guardian of her son in the will, but of course seedy political manoeuvring occurred to attempt to take control of her estate and her son.
I cannot say that Christina had an easy life, but she spent much of it in the thick of the European political tangles of the day, fighting for some form of independence and for her children’s future. She faced every turn and challenge and forged her destiny with determination.
In 1578 she earned a retirement, so she moved to Tortona in Italy, a fief she had inherited from her first husband, where she was known as ‘Madame of Tortona’ until she died in 1590. She was an active sovereign, well-liked and fought for the rights of the Tortona people under Spanish rule.
What has this got to do with Jupiter and the Moons, named after his dubious ‘loves’? Each one of them contains depths and secrets, and they are more than a satellite of the planet which has trapped them in its orbit.
Life may be stirring within those realms, contained and fostered by their strange environments. They are worth investing years of research and millions of dollars and euros to develop the technology to shoot spacecraft to visit them, taking five-year journeys through the dark silence, to whizz by their surfaces and beam their details back to us.
Great Jupiter always tries top pull our focus, but spinning around him are thousands of unique forms, forging their destinies despite the crushing gravity and intense radiation.
These survivors are worth knowing.
From Wikipedia’s image file.
Also independently observed one day later by German astronomer Simon Marius, in a cool synchronicity that unfortunately resulted in accusations of plagiarism against Marius. Yet, for all of this animosity, it is Marius’s mythological names for the Moons which we use today.
Queen Catherine bore a daughter, Mary, and lost five other children to miscarriage and stillbirth, while Queen Anne gave birth to Elizabeth, and miscarried another three times while Henry started to seek a replacement.
Even more crazy, when Christina was a mere seven years old there were suggestions that she marry Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, the illegitimate son of: Henry VIII! But you know, Henry VIII did marry his dead older brother’s wife… Feudal Empires established the original templates for soap operas.
He’d survived a poisoning attempt years previously and had never fully regained his health.
Great post! Died in 1590? Thx and cheers
I love the very, very slow form of tinder! Made me laugh. Also the moon illusion is freaky. Great post.