Thursday 15 October 2020

Big colours, small colours


I looked out of the window at 2.30 this morning and saw Orion hanging jauntily overhead in the clear, Prussian Blue sky. It is one of the great sights of Winter and is something to actually look forward to as compensation for the long, dark nights of sleepless anxiety. 

A bright, sunny morning is here along with a start-date for my latest (and I hope not last) job of 2020. Jesus, what a year for anxiety.

Mars is also very close - in relative terms - to the Earth now, so is very prominent as it runs away, westward, from Orion and his celestial club. I know from The Rover that the surface of Mars is a rust-brown desert of rock-strewn plains and unfeasibly high mountains, so I don't know why I should find it amazing that we can actually see the colour of its landscape so distinctly from here. Even more amazing is how the ancients associated it with iron - and thereby war - when so much of its chemical make-up is Fe203. I suppose it's not rocket science after all.

Mars is very big. When things become very small they lose their colour - by which I understand that there is not enough surface area on them to refract the light and divide it up into bands of the visible spectrum discernible to the human eye. Those lurid, polychrome, electron-microscope photos of the Corona Virus are artificially coloured to make the form easier to see. Things that small can only be described as 'grey' in the limited vocabulary we apply to perceived objects.

A friend of mine wondered what a bucket-full of Corona Virus would look like if you could gather that many in one place. I said that if he wanted his curiosity to be satiated he should lower his sights a bit and settle for a teaspoon of them - but not within 1000 miles of me, please.

I suppose that although an individual virus is too small to be called anything other than grey - for want of a better description - a teaspoonful of them might produce enough surface area to have a recognised colour designated to them from our standard uber-atomic palette.

I imagine that the contents of the spoon would be a constantly shifting, iridescent and finely textured mass, like Black Pearl dust. Quite pretty in fact.

I hope I never find out. 

19 comments:

  1. The coronavirus outbreak is an unfortunate reminder
    that diseases don’t respect borders...
    In a matter of months, the virus has swept the globe,
    infecting almost 3 million people in almost every country...
    Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses with some causing
    less-severe disease, such as the common cold..! :(.
    And something that has been pumped into us from day one...
    Protect yourself, clean your hands frequently with an
    alcohol-based hand rub or wash them with soap and water...!

    As for Mars..I think it's taken over in interest from Pluto!
    Though, Pluto is still not an official planet in our solar
    system...But! Each and every planet has features of interests,
    though my favourite has always been Mercury..least one of my
    interests..Earth..! It's on the way out anyway..! HeHe! :o).
    (And l never mentioned a Chocolate bar)..

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  2. And then if you look at Mars through a telescope it will lose the red and be a black and white image. Those lurid colours in Hubble images are also enhanced. The magic of science - the same thing happening with tiny virus as an incalculably large galaxy.

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    1. Mars still keeps its colour through a telescope, but the Hubble images of deep space and closer are usually very long exposures of nebulosity which appears colourless to us down here. They also use exposure on top of exposure - many times over - to bring out the colour in large telescope photos.

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    2. And the results are utterly breathtaking!

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  3. Seeing the stars is indeed consolation for longer nights .
    We have been seeing Orion (thankyou for putting a name to it!) and Mars from the rear of our house...and I think the Plough from the front, despite the lights of Prestwick Airport ten miles away

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    1. I like the idea of spending a few nights in a dark place like mid-Wales just to look up at night.

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  4. Corona in a bucket -- or a on a teaspoon - Tom, that sounds like The Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm (which I read at the moment - not the harmless children version but the old, not altered one). They are sometimes as gruesome as corona. Lockdown and Sleeping Beauty...
    Stars - I love to look at them - and every visitor here in Berlin is amazed that you can see them from my balcony very clearly - though it is the middle of the city!
    And yes: Orion can be seen very clear too.

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    1. Sorry, I am not much of an astronomer (and gladly even less of an astrologer :-)

      So, what I see from my balcony is the "Greater Bear" (not to be confused with the "Berliner Bär")

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  5. My son keeps me on my toes with that is where in the sky and on the few clear nights we have had lately I have seen Orion and Mars - they are quite a sight. As for the Corona virus - the further away it is from me the better Tom.

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    1. There is a wonderful app called Stellarium which shows the sky in real time in your area.

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  6. I used to recognize most of the constellations in the night sky, and planets, but now I have trouble looking up and staying steady. I don't like it. But I can remember pleasant things like driving home for eight hours from a show and watching the moon rise and then set. And meteors and shooting stars! I was treated to some excellent displays over the years. The night sky and I used to be good friends.

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    1. You could stay good friends by lying on a sun lounger at night. A lot of star-gazers do just that!

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  7. The place where I have seen the most stars is Croyde bay, North Devon. We were camping and the field was pitch black.

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  8. Camping in Wales and seeing the Milky Way in all its glory. Though midnight at Avebury in January and seeing the markings clear on the full moon is something I won't forget. So cold though.

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