The Fomalhaut Mystery

Americans are fighters, not lovers.

Images by Daniel Johnson Salem-News.com

(CALGARY, Alberta) - I was 11 years old when I discovered astronomy. Early one autumn evening, high in the western twilight, was a bright, white object. Was it a star or a planet? I believed it to be Venus, second planet from the sun, but how to know for sure?

Sitting at a table in our enclosed front veranda, I watched it sink towards the horizon as I wrote a little "essay", in which I argued that Venus was known to be cloud covered, had a high reflection of sunlight and would, by definition, be very bright. It could also only be seen as a morning or evening “star”, close to the sun.

There were other points, but those were the main ones. I gave the "essay" (perhaps 100 words) to my teacher, Miss Snaith, looking for support and confirmation. She accepted it then, nothing... I asked about it and she said it was very interesting, and that she would talk to me later. Nothing came of it though because, as she finally admitted to me, she had lost it.

(I had a similar experience in the late 1970s when I was editor of the Airdrie Echo. I gave a talk on newspapers to a grade six class and a few days later the teacher delivered a stack of essays from all the students. I promised to respond to them but, you’re getting ahead of me—yes, I lost them.)

Almost exactly two years later, in November 1960, I started my first astronomy journal. My first observation, with a diagram, was of a striking rectangle in the southwest formed by a very thin crescent moon and three planets—Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.

Here is a section from the first page of my astronomy journal, November 21, 1960 at 515 p.m.

Using a star program called CyberSky 4, here is what the region of sky looked like:

Notice on the far left just to the left of the constellation name Piscis Austrinus is a blue star. That’s Fomalhaut.

Over the next few years, I filled four notebooks with detailed observations of the positions of the moon, the brightest stars, and the naked eye planets. One winter night I caught a bad cold after stretching out in a sleeping bag on a lawn chair while I watched an eclipse of the moon with my small, handheld, telescope.

Amateur astronomers live by lists and I was no exception. For example, the planets: after easily finding the five planets known to the ancients, I used a small telescope to easily find Uranus then, with a little more effort, the much fainter Neptune. Pluto (it was a planet in those days) would have required a telescope far beyond my modest means so I just knew where in the sky it was, even if I would probably never actually see it.

Astronomy is not just a night time hobby. I once spotted Venus in the middle of the day near the sun with my naked eye. Venus has to be close to its brightest and you have to know approximately where to look. You also can’t see it directly, but have to “sweep” the sky, using your peripheral vision. When you find it, it looks like a little “hole” in the sky.

There is one list that is in every astronomy book: the twenty or twenty-five brightest stars. Seventeen of them are visible from southern Canada (and Oregon) and ten of them can be seen at one time in the southern February sky around 9:00 p.m. local time.

This most spectacular part of the sky centres on the winter constellation Orion the Hunter, about halfway up the sky, due south. To the west and above is Aldebaran in Taurus the Bull. High above Orion is Capella in Auriga, the Charioteer. Orion has Betelguese (upper left) and Rigel (lower right). To the east and below of Orion are the two dogs with Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, and Procyon higher and further east. Farther east from there are Pollux and Castor in Gemini, the heavenly Twins. To their east is Leo the Lion, with Regulus.

Here’s the mystery. For years I observed the brightest stars as they made their way across the sky. But of the seventeen, there was one I apparently never saw.

Fomalhaut is a reddish, southern hemisphere star in the Southern Fish. Here in Calgary, its highest point above the horizon at the meridian (due south) is about nine degrees (0 is the horizon, 90 is directly overhead. To determine its highest altitude at your location, subtract your latitude from 60. At the equator, it would be nearly two thirds towards overhead). Fomalhaut (rhymes with foam-a-lot) is about 25 light years away and is the 17th brightest star in the sky.

In the Salem, Oregon area, Fomalhaut rises at almost SE around 915 p.m. and as it moves across the sky is easily seen below and a bit east of the only bright object in that part of the sky, Jupiter. (If you have binoculars, look at Jupiter and you will be able to see the four brightest satellites.) Fomalhaut reaches the meridian, about 16 degrees above the horizon just before 1 AM. From the screenshot above, you see that in late November it rises about 5:00 p.m.

In my astronomy journals I noted the positions of all the major stars, not just the brightest ones, on a regular basis. But I apparently never saw Fomalhaut. Making notes in later years I assumed that it was never visible because it was so low in the sky from Calgary, where I lived then, and still do now.

When I took up active amateur astronomy again in 1986, I found Fomalhaut with ease. I’ve since returned to the old neighborhood where I grew up and, sure enough, it was dead easy to see. Today, I can see it easily from my apartment balcony in downtown Calgary. I don’t even need dark skies. Fomalhaut is the only star you can see in the whole southern sky. Why I never saw it in those early years…

After going through this long narrative, the typical city dweller, who almost never sees the stars, might legitimately wonder: What’s the point? I can only say how the astronomy experience has contributed to my philosophy and to my life.

I started spending nights under dark skies at an impressionable age. It gave me a meaningful connection to a larger reality, and a perspective on life, equivalent, probably, to what people born into a religion might feel. They feel themselves supported by a deity. I, in my own way, feel myself connected to and supported by the entire cosmos. When I walk in the quiet, under the stars, the universe itself overwhelms and calms my spirit by shrinking the petty and the profane to insignificance—whether I can see Fomalhaut or not.

What prompted me to pick up this topic today, is a summary report by a NASA panel released two day ago saying that NASA won't be able to get human beings out of low Earth orbit and on the way to the moon again without another $3 billion a year more than it is getting for exploration, and even then it won't be able to meet the ambitious back-to-the-moon goals of its current program. Three billion dollars is nothing compared to the hundreds of billions wasted in recent years in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There were muted celebrations over the summer commemorating the first lunar landing in July 1969.

Jim Lovell never made it to the moon as commander of Apollo 13 which he recounted in his book Lost Moon which was released as the movie “Apollo 13”. Tom Hanks played Lovell and he was asked why there were further moon flights after the first landings were successful. He said: What if Christopher Columbus had returned to Europe after he discovered the New World and no one went back? The last time men were on the moon was December 14, 1972. Nearly forty years and no one has gone back!

This is because Americans are fighters, not lovers.

In the coming weeks I am going to develop two themes on space exploration. One relates to the failure of democracy and the other to the unrecognized limitations of space exploration itself. Stay tuned.

For ongoing commentary on this and other stories, visit my blog at: daniel-at-salem-news.blogspot.com

Although he had published a few pieces (unpaid) in the local daily, the Calgary Herald, it was not until 1975 that he could actually make a living from journalism when, from 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman (1979-1993), Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting with the CBC. You can write to Daniel at: Salem-News@gravityshadow.com