Astronomical Wanderings
Exploring our broader home
My focus in these writings has been on an ecological or Earth-based spirituality. I feel very strongly that we are beings of Earth, that our bodies belong here. I would never wish to spend years on a ship en route to Mars or any other planet, and I feel that most dreams of space colonization are based on a worldview of separation, dominion, transcendence, and ignorance of the myriad wonders that are all around us and within us every day.
That said, I have also found myself expanding my awareness outward over the past year, feeling into and visualizing our planet’s rotation, the billion-year swing with our Moon, the motions of the planets, and our greater collective motion within our galaxy. Just as we have trillions of molecules within us, and our motions and choices affect each of them, so too is the cosmic molecule that is Earth affected by and integrated within the electromagnetic and gravitational dance of the solar system and beyond.
This essay would be better with more illustrations, but sadly I am not an illustrator. I will do my best to paint pictures with words.
Where Are We Going? Part 1
Let’s imagine ourselves on a baseball field. We are standing between 2nd and 3rd base. We are the Earth. The pitcher is the Sun. We are spinning counter-clockwise, while also moving slowly around the bases in the usual (counter-clockwise) direction. The Moon is a close friend walking in slow counter-clockwise circles around us. Our path between bases is an arc, not a straight line. The bases mark the solstices and equinoxes. I’m arbitrarily making the summer solstice home base, because it’s my birthday, which puts us between 2nd and 3rd (winter solstice and spring equinox) at this time.
It is high noon. We are facing the pitcher. Our orbit - our path around the bases - is to our right. When the Moon is in front of us, she is in her new phase, and when she is perfectly aligned between us and the pitcher we have a solar eclipse.
It is sunset. We have rotated a quarter turn to the left. The pitcher is moving out of sight to our right - the Sun setting in the west. We are looking back along the path of our orbit. The path forward is blocked from our sight, passing through the Earth. When the Moon aligns with the path behind us, she is at first quarter. The first quarter Moon points behind us in our orbit.
It is midnight. We have rotated another quarter turn to the left and are facing the outfield. There are other walkers out there, following their own counter-clockwise paths more slowly. We call them the outer planets - Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. We cannot see the pitcher. Our path forward along our orbit is now to our left, and our path behind us is to our right. When the Moon is directly in front of us, she is full, and when she is directly opposite the pitcher behind us she is eclipsed.
It is sunrise. We have rotated another quarter turn to the left and are looking out at the path ahead of us in our orbit. The pitcher is to our left - the Sun rising in the east. When the Moon aligns with our path, she is in her last quarter phase. The last quarter Moon shows us where we are going.
Each day, as we complete a rotation and move one small step around the bases, the pitcher moves a little bit to the left relative to the bleachers behind him. As we complete a full circuit of the bases, the line of sight between us and the pitcher makes a full scan of the bleachers. This is the yearly progression of the Sun through the twelve constellations of the zodiac - imagine the bleachers arbitrarily divided into twelve sections. Of course because the Sun is so bright we can’t actually see our Sun sign when the Sun is there. What we see instead in the dark of night is its opposite - Sagittarius and Capricorn in the summer and Gemini and Cancer in the winter.
Crescent Moon and Crescent Venus
Venus is a slightly more fleet-footed base-runner on her own track, a bit closer to the pitcher than us. She laps us every 1.6 years - roughly on opposite sides of the field each time. She is about to lap us next month, a few days after the equinox, moving from the the evening to the morning sky. As she moves between us and the Sun, her illuminated side faces away from us, and she appears as a slender crescent. When our Moon meets her on March 1, travelling in the opposite direction through the sky, they will have identical shapes. Through good binoculars with a steady hand, or through a telescope, Venus will appear as a brilliant mini-Moon.
All On One Side
If you follow astronomy at all you have probably heard about the “planetary alignment” coming up next week. The planets are not actually lining up, in a sense that a straight line would pass through all of them. They do appear along a line in the sky, but that is simply the line they are always on, the “ground” of the baseball field, the ecliptic, the plane of our Solar System.
What is actually happening is that all seven planets (Pluto having been recently demoted to dwarf planet status) are in the evening sky, to the left of the pitcher in our baseball analogy. For the next couple of weeks, we can draw a line through the Sun dividing the Solar System in half and all of the planets will be on one side of it. This is a relatively rare occurrence that will next happen in 2040, and it can also only occur during the decades that Uranus and Neptune are close together, since they take 168 years to cross paths in the sky.
What does this mean? I can’t say, but it is a temporary gravitational imbalance of sorts, all of the planets tugging in one direction. To the extent that the motions of the planets influence solar activity and life on Earth, it feels like it could be meaningful. We shall see.
Where Are We Going? Part 2
Our entire Solar System is making a circuit of our spiral galaxy, the Milky Way. (A collective of 200 billion star systems really deserves a better name, don’t you think?) We complete this circuit in 212 million years, which means that our Earth has been around twenty-one times during her lifespan so far.
Our path around the galaxy is not a circle, exactly, as we also oscillate up and down, above and below the central galactic plane, crossing it every 30 million years or so. We are relatively close to one of those crossings at the present time - or beyond it by at most a few million years.
Where are we going? Toward the constellation Cygnus, the Swan, high overhead in the Northern Hemisphere summer and autumn sky. The band of the Milky Way through Cygnus marks the path ahead. Of course the stars of Cygnus are also moving in sync with us, so we aren’t getting any closer to them, but we are moving in their direction.
The plane of our Solar System is tilted by 60 degrees relative to the galactic plane, which is why the band of the Milky Way stretches sharply north-south in the sky rather than following the ecliptic. If our Solar System is a baseball field, we are moving - roughly - up, or skyward, collectively. This also means that those of us north of the tropics cannot look behind us. The path behind us in the galactic plane is always blocked by the Earth beneath our feet, and to gaze in that direction we need to visit the Southern Hemisphere.
Where is the point around which we are circling? In Sagittarius. The archer that to me is a much more obvious teapot. The Galactic Center is just beyond the teapot’s spout. Within the Galactic Center, as best as science can gather, is a black hole with a mass of more than four million Suns. We have no idea what black holes really are, being seemingly an unlimited-but-finite amount of mass concentrated in a single point, an infolding of dimensions, beyond our sight because even light cannot escape their gravity, part of the great cosmic mystery.
While four million solar masses is indeed rather heavy, it is still only a few thousandths of a percent of the mass of the galaxy, so we are not actually orbiting the central black hole in the way that Earth orbits the Sun. The entire galaxy is holding itself together in a collective gravitational swing, a living dance across distances and timescales so vast that our science cannot approach a full understanding, any more than a molecule or a cell within our body can understand the whole of us. And yet we are a part of it. We are stardust, and matter is energy is consciousness, and I find a deep sense of awe and wonder in noticing and contemplating it all through living eyes in living bodies on a living planet.
Here is one attempt to visualize the spiral path of our motion through the galaxy:
I love your devotional insights into our cosmic family… the moon as our “close friend walking counterclockwise circles around us” 🥹🌑
I really love and appreciate the analogies that help us feel into the reality of our solar system and greater cosmos. The baseball field context is helpful, and I really liked the visual from the video clip you shared.
It’s interesting to feel into the planetary alignment, I like what you said: “What does this mean? I can’t say, but it is a temporary gravitational imbalance of sorts, all of the planets tugging in one direction. To the extent that the motions of the planets influence solar activity and life on Earth, it feels like it could be meaningful. We shall see.”