Sunday 30 December 2012

bright lights, old business

Predictions generally are groaning vagaries or soaring hopes and notoriously hard to makes, unless one will safely (usually) posit that we’ll be getting more of the same. Human nature and human needs tend to be stubborn and not framed as much by the fashions of the season or more meaningful Zeitgeist as we’d like to believe. Projections, on the other hand, are something quite different and science is getting better and better telescoping events, trends into the future. One specific omen that we can look forward to, astronomers foresee, is the spectacular arrival of the comet Ison, having been hurtling towards us for millions of years from the incubating edge of the Solar System, in early autumn.
The comet’s scintillations will outshine the full Moon and be a historic experience for all. It will even radiate for those who cannot see the procession of the stars and planets for themselves either because of light-pollution or impatience for the mathematical harmony of the skies.  It is interesting how such astronomical apparitions, comets, novae, conjunctions and transits, became markers of the ages, a fixed reference point in time, that are equally accessible to us as inheritors and far in the future, who are able to trace backwards and reliably match our measures against those of our ancestors. I wonder how people will reckon this upcoming year of the comet.