From Cosmos to Kitchen I

On October 24, the Comet 17P/Holmes, an otherwise well-mannered, highly ignorable comet, erupted in light. While this didn't make the press, the stargazing world is abuzz with excitement. My son - the astronomer - called us at 11:30 at night to tell us to go out and look up and see this amazing phenomenon. Indeed, there where no star usually is seen, was a messy blob of light.

What follows is a quote from astronomy.org/starwatch website I found that explains this phenomenon.


" What happened to dinky Holmes, to transform it into a fuzz ball visible... in center city Allentown? It is thought that a sinkhole collapsed on the tiny one-to-two mile diameter nucleus which triggered an explosive amount of outgassing caused by the sun’s heat. The gasses pushed out huge quantities of dust which were sprayed like a turning garden hose as the nucleus rotated. The result has been a circular halo of debris now over one million miles in diameter, scattering sunlight back to us and creating the fluffy blob of light near the bright star Mirfak in Perseus the Hero. Why the media hasn’t picked up on this is anyone’s guess, but it is the top story if you’re an astronomer. Comet 17P/Holmes won’t be around forever. Its expanding coma will eventually get so huge that it will simply disappear against the sky background."

We live in an exciting neighborhood!

And while we are on the subject of the sky: the annual Leonid meteor shower is coming up.

Meteor showers - when you can possibly see a dozen or so shooting stars an hour! - occur throughout the year.



The Leonids are so called for they appear in the constellation of Leo.

This is what upcoming.yahoo.com tells us about this year's Leonids:

"Because Leo does not start coming fully into view until the after midnight hours, that would be the best time to concentrate on looking for the Leonid meteors.

The Leonid meteors are debris shed into space by the Tempel-Tuttle comet, which swings through the inner solar system at intervals of 33 years. With each visit the comet leaves behind a trail of dust in its wake."

That site also gives you a lot more stargazing information in user-friendly (non-technical) language.

http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors is also a good popular and understandable site. This is their explanation of meteor showers:

What are meteor showers?

An increase in the number of meteors at a particular time of year is called a meteor shower.

Comets shed the debris that becomes most meteor showers. As comets orbit the Sun, they shed an icy, dusty debris stream along the comet's orbit. If Earth travels through this stream, we will see a meteor shower. Depending on where Earth and the stream meet, meteors appear to fall from a particular place in the sky, maybe within the neighborhood of a constellation.

Meteor showers are named by the constellation from which meteors appear to fall, a spot in the sky astronomers call the radiant. For instance, the radiant for the Leonid meteor shower is located in the constellation Leo. The Perseid meteor shower is so named because meteors appear to fall from a point in the constellation Perseus.

You can also find a full list of the eight major meteor showers and the best dates for viewing them at this site.

So much for the cosmos.

To the kitchen:

My foray into the CSA world (Community Supported Agriculture) has taught me many things. Two of which are this:

That we as modern privileged westerners generally tend to consume according to our desires. If we want a nectarine in February - no problem. Fresh strawberries in November - just run to the store. We may pay a bit more, but otherwise we generally don't think much about it.

Yet I can remember not so long ago a series of commercials that promoted something called "summer fruit." Pictures of luscious peaches and mounds of berries would be draped across the tv set, telling us these fruits that we have waited for are once again available. Because they were not available all year round back then - at least not at any prices that normal folk could afford. It is hard to imagine these days that something we craved to eat was beyond our reach simply because it was cold outside.

Our cheap fuel and impressive transportation and refrigeration systems have enabled us over the past 20 years to make it summertime all year round in our supermarkets. And while that is great for our appetites, it might not be so great for the planet.

For one thing, today, freighters and tankers that move cheap food and products around the world contribute more to greenhouse gas emissions than does the aviation industry. That is a relatively new development.

In addition, the fields that are cleared to feed our summertime desires in the midst of our winter, and the "cheap" products that are made (for example) in China are, in fact, quite costly. They take their toll on the earth and on the health of the workers (occupational safety as we know is not well regulated in China). Additionally, as you probably know, China has now surpassed the US in the amount of CO2 emissions it spews into the air largely from the coal-fired power plants it is building now (using outdated 1980's technology) that run the factories that give us our cheap merchandise.

It all begins with our appetites.

The CSA has taught me what I knew but did not yet feel: that the earth has its cycles and that we live within them. Even more, that there is a grace and humility and joy that comes with living within those cycles. Which is not to say that agriculture and manufacturing cannot be pushed to bring the earth to its fullest potential. Humanity is charged with bringing both ourselves and our earth to our greatest level of dignity and productivity. But not by sacrificing the long-term health of the workers, the land, the water or the air.

So bending my appetite to the cycles of the earth instead of bending the yield of the earth to my appetite is a lesson I take away as this CSA season ends.

I will talk about the response to (some would say oppression of) abundance in the next post.