This is the Classical Astronomy Update, an email newsletter especially
for Christian homeschool families (though everyone is welcome!) Please feel free to share this with any interested friends.
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. -- Ecclesiastes 9:10
IN THIS UPDATE Let's Go All the Way And Ditch Standard Time Too Comet Mailbag Hello Friends, Wow! Thank you all for your great response to the last newsletter!
So many Update readers wrote to share their comet pix and observations. It's so great to hear from everyone, so encouraging to know you're reading this newsletter and taking time out of your busy life to pause and gaze up at the glories above. Thank you for letting me be your tour guide! So for your perusal, here's a
collection of everyone's comet pix. One thing that fascinates me about the sky is that everyone can see the same celestial sight from everywhere in the world. The Earth has such a diversity of locales, from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam; jungles and deserts and tundra, islands and continents, inhabited by such a diversity of flora and fauna, and populated by people of all tribes and nations, in every shade of the human rainbow. And yet we all
perceive the same sky above -- and all the celestial bodies seen therein. That's what I like about everyone's comet pix. Most readers are Americans, and you saw the comet from your American towns, from sea to shining sea. But the comet would also have been observable from exotic destinations like Stonehenge, the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramid.
Nothing else in human life compares with that. And from the perspective of the comet, we are all crawling around on this little blue ball, which encompasses the entirety of our tiny human lives, awash in the vastness of the LORD's celestial creation. Something to ponder as you peruse these pix. Thanks again! For more information about topics from Classical Astronomy discussed in this newsletter, please check out a homeschool astronomy curriculum (but popular with adult readers too!) Visit our archive of previous editions of the Classical Astronomy Update newsletters, going back to 2007. ***** Let's Go All The Way And Ditch Standard Time Too It's that time again when we
jumble everyone's circadian rhythms with Daylight Savings Time. At least this is the one where we "fall back" and pick up that extra hour of sleep we lost in the spring. It's the only Sunday morning of the year when our family is on time for church! A lot of people (like me) are sick of all this jumping back and forth with the clocks. Medical
studies have shown that this is actually bad for our health. There are more car accidents when we go on and off DST and also more heart attacks and strokes when everyone's internal clocks are scrambled. A lot of people are in favor of ditching this semi-annual switch and remaining on Daylight Savings year round. I'd be happy enough with that but
sometimes I think we should revert to Standard Time and remain there through the year. But people like that extra hour of summer daylight in the evening instead of the morning where it belongs. But more and more I think we should dump the whole scheme altogether. Here's my thinking.... Standard Time was originally developed in the 19th century.
In olden times, everyone everywhere used Local Time in which sundials pointed to 12 o'clock at High Noon, when the Sun reached its highest point in the sky at the meridian. (For detailed info on the meridian, see our Signs & Seasons, homeschool astronomy curriculum.) Every city and village had its own Local Time based on the Sun's position corresponding to their longitude. A town 50 miles to the east or west would have a different sundial time that varied by several minutes. But travel was slow and the difference was not readily noticeable.
Travel and communications became rapid with the advent of the railroads and the telegraph in the 1850s. It was difficult to coordinate so many different local times for train schedules. So a system of Railroad Time was implemented with four time zones across the USA, where 15 degrees of longitude sundial variations were lumped together to
make a single clock time. If you wanted to catch a train, you had to convert your local time to the scheduled railroad time for your train so you didn't miss it. This was always a fixed amount of time, a fraction of an hour, and most rail travelers knew the time adjustment for their own town. A gentleman arriving in a new town would set his watch to the time on the local clocktower. Standard Time was adopted as the international standard in 1884, where the whole world was divided into 24 time zones of 15 degrees of longitude. Timekeeping was decoupled from the Sun and most people have not understood the relationship ever since. Daylight Savings was adopted in the USA during World War I and has always been unpopular with many across the country. There is a lately a growing movement to ditch DST altogether.
But I say let's ditch Standard Time too. There are fewer reasons than ever to have Standard Time. When I was a kid, everyone started work at 9:00 AM and quit at 5:00 PM. And everyone watched TV. We all tuned in to the Ed Sullivan Show at 8:00 PM on Sunday night to see the Beatles, the Jackson 5 or the Chinese plate spinners. But
traffic jams and the rise of the 24/7 culture led to the modern flexible work schedule. And nowadays most everyone watches programs on demand when it suits them, hardly ever in real time anymore. There's little in today's world that requires everyone's attention at specific times. One can argue that Standard Time has outlived its unsefulness. It
might make sense to adopt common Local Times across the world that work for each local community. This would be more natural and intuitive since timekeeping would once again be linked to the natural cycle of the Sun. We'd all be healthier if our circadian rhythms would be timed to the sunrise and sunset instead of an artificial scale. For those
instances where an absolute time reference is required, the entire world could simply adopt Universal Time (UT), which is the same as Greenwich Mean Time without Daylight Savings. UT is used in astronomy so that astronomers all over the world can have a common time stamp for coordinating observations. UT could be extended to business and government affairs and scheduling across time zones. For example, zoom meetings including participants separated by oceans could be scheduled for a single UT and everyone could reckon the fixed amount of their own local times accordingly. Airlines could post all arrivals and departures in UT and everyone everywhere would do their own local arithmetic, just like the 19th century passengers of the American railroads. Unlike 1884, global communications today are virtually
instantaneous. The world need not be divided into 24 segments. It might seem odd at first to have scheduled events transpire at, say, 8:17 PM, local time instead of on the hour. It would mess up the New Year's Eve ball drop from Times Square since the new year would begin and continuously different times from town to town instead of one hour jumps.
But having a single master time stamp might simplify all the continuous translating and adjusting all of the different time zone times according to EDT, PST, CST or whatever like everyone currently has to do constantly. Maybe you're thinking that this would be another "one world" globalist conspiracy plot, a "build back better" scheme of "the deep
state" and the World Economic Forum. But nobody squawks about the existing global scheme of standard time which has been in place for nearly a century and a half. While universal adoption of UT might somehow be beneficial to the "Bond villains" who rule the planet, it would mainly benefit the common folk. Some food for thought as we all have our sleep schedules scrambled once again. Comet Mailbag Again, thanks so much to everyone who emailed with their comet pics! It's so nice to hear from so many Update readers who saw the comet. Nicole from Colorado sent this stunning pic of the comet amidst the Milky Way: Our family really enjoyed seeing the comet. We live in Colorado, out in the country so we have little light
pollution. Some nights we were able to see it with the naked eye. Other nights required binoculars. We were camping on Monday, up in the mountains with no lights around. I was able to capture the picture I am attaching to this email. You mentioned you hadn’t really received any pictures of it, so I thought I would share. The milky way and the comet were both so clear that night. Thanks for keeping us up to date and aware of what we should look for in the night sky (and sometimes during the day!) Heather sent along this account: I
always enjoy reading your emails and wanted to share my images of the comet, which I was aware of thanks to your newsletter! My family always wonders how I’m up to date on the astronomical events - thank you! And my kids 10&12 still think I’m the cool mom because I drag them out of bed to see said events. Holly in Oregon shared her interesting story: I have been receiving your emails for quite a few years and I had just read your latest one about the comet and that
next day I made plans to go up to Marys Peak, the highest peak in the coastal range of Oregon where several times a year we drive an hour to see the sunset over the ocean and, to the East, also the see the mountains, such as The Three Sisters, Mt Jefferson, Hood and Adams in the Cascade Range of Oregon and up into Washington. I forgot we should also be looking for the comet, so lucky for us the Salem astronomy club set up beside us and we stayed for the show. My husband captured these pictures
with his Samsung. Thanks for all you do in keeping me informed of what’s going on in the beautiful heavens. Here's one from Rebecca in Virginia: We did see the comet ...near Goochland, VA! We installed had cloud cover on the evening we could try, but it cleared just
enough. This is a very raw shot from my cellphone, but once located, we could see it with naked eye! Kirsten in Illinois shared this nice comet image: Sara in Ohio had a similar view and experience as we did. I admire her spirit of adventure, trudging around at night in Cuyahoga Valley National Park! Thank
you for the update! We did see the comet although I agree it was faint and hard to find! The best days to see it were rainy and cloudy. I found a list in the CVNP on skyscaping and they said the best place in the national park to view the Western sky is Beaver Marsh so a small group of kids and moms headed out with our headlamps
after dark and went to check it out. Kids were able to see it with pictures and a few of us could faintly see a blur with our eyes! But a hike after dark, headlamps, the full moon and a spotting of a beaver swimming around made it a fun evening even without the dazzle. :))) Longtime Update reader Jamie in Louisiana chipped in with pix of the comet and the aurora. Wow, I had no idea that aurora was still visible that far south! Always enjoy your newsletter! We live in northwest Louisiana and I was so blessed to see the aurora on October 10! It wasn’t visible with the naked eye, but with the night setting on my phone camera, I got some great photos. Never thought I would see this at my house! We also really enjoyed viewing the comet
several evenings at our house through binoculars and by taking photos. We were also able to view the comet two nights with many fellow church members at our annual church camping trip; that was very fun! This chatty missive is from Emily in Texas. So nice to receive an encouraging report from a student who read Signs & Seasons! Thanks Emily! Mission accomplished! First of all, I want to thank you for the newsletter you put out about the recent comet (you know the one I mean; I'm not going to try to spell it 😉). About a year and a half ago, my family and I moved from WA to TX, so this was special for me. Back in WA, it is ALWAYS overcast and drizzling rain at this time of the year, so the chances of my seeing the comet would have been practically non-existent. As it turned though, our weather down here in East Texas,
although not perfect, was definitely clear enough for me to get good views of the comet several nights in a row! This is the first comet that I can ever remember seeing with the naked eye, and it was really a treat! I have attached a few photos I took with my phone. I hope you enjoy them. They are actually more enhanced than the real life view (as you noted in your recent newsletter about smartphone pics), but seeing it in person was really rewarding. My brother and I took your Classical Astronomy course in school, and it is one of the courses I look back on as a highlight of my education. Not only did I enjoy the course itself at the time, but it has really stuck with me, and I have never looked at the moon the same since I really learned to understand her cycles! It's on my bucket list to learn how to tell time
accurately by the stars. Growing up, my dad and my siblings and I went backpacking a lot in the gorgeous Olympic Mountains, and so I learned something about navigation with maps and the stars. To this day, wherever I am, I always tell my directions by looking up the sun, or the stars, and I get a kick out of the way other people look
at me when I glance up to see which way to turn :-) Anyway, I'll stop rambling, but I appreciate your faithfulness to educate people on the wonders of the heavens, and most importantly, to point to the Creator of those wonders! My family reads your newsletters, and even though we are "silent stargazers" most of the time and don't
usually comment, we really enjoy your updates and hope you keep them coming! I got this one from Jenny Jo: I was SO INCREDIBLY BUMMED to miss the aurora, again. I guess I must not have been on social media on the 11th b/c I
didn't hear about it until the day after. My family did get to see the comet on Oct 16. We could just make out a "slash" in the sky with our naked eyes. It gave a pretty nice view through binoculars. I actually thought Neowise was better. And finally, Dave from Texas sent along several pix with no comment. I like this one because it's a normal backyard scene with the comet in the sky. Classical Astronomy is not some "far out" spacey topic out of some sci-fi TV show, but an everyday part of daily life in our world, the view above eye level for anyone who cares
to take a look. Thanks to everyone who shared their comet views! And thanks to you all for reading this newsletter! Till next time, God bless and clear skies, - jay The Ryan Family Cleveland, Ohio, USA When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon
and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? - Psalm 8:3-4, a Psalm of David
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