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Written by Nigel
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Tuesday, 07 October 2008 |
Autumn is really here. We’ve had a run of showery weather over the last week that has produced some great rainbows. The last couple of days however have been calm and clear. Last night was our first heavy frost of the year. Out walking with Troy in the pre dawn half light I could see my breath plume in front of me and hear the frost crunch under my feet. There’s nothing quite like it. Most of the trees are turning to reds and gold, and now that harvest is almost over you can almost feel the sigh as the countryside relaxes for another year. Thomas Hood put it best
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
stand, shadowless like Silence,
listening to silence
 As the weather turns colder we’ve started to load up the bird table again. It’s rested, ignored and unvisited throughout most of the summer but now it’s covered. Visitors include: Great Tits, Blue Tits, Sparrows [both House and Tree] Greenfinches and yesterday a couple of Redpolls all fighting for a place a bit like old ladies at a jumble sale.
The baby Muscovies are eight weeks old now and their colouring is becoming clearer. We have a couple that look like they have some good pied barred markings. It’s caused by a genetic recessive and I’ve only seen it in pictures of American birds. I’ve been doing some Googling but haven’t come across a reference to it in Sweden yet. I think stabilising and improving this may turn out to be long term project, but worth it. They are beautiful. It’s meant a crash course in Muscovy genetics. It’s been a long time since I had to think about such things and I’m finally getting to grips with the mechanisms of inheritance. Fortunately for me it seems to be one of the easier traits to understand.
I’m hoping this run of clear weather we’ve been having continues as the Orionid meteor shower, an annual celestial event beloved by millions of sky watchers around the world, will return to the evening sky next week. Astronomers say it will reach its fiery peak between 20-24 October.
Despite moonlight interference, we are still positioned to get a great view of a cosmological show that does not require anything but the unaided eye, in fact watching a meteor shower is hampered by telescopes etc. The only thing that can spoil the show is the weather, which it does frequently all that’s needed to spoil the show is a cloudy night. Fate has seemed to conspire against me in recent years. Having moved to a rural location with virtually no light pollution I look forward to seeing these great spectacles with real anticipation and you can guarantee that on the peak nights we have an occluded sky. Fingers crossed for something better this year. The Orionid meteor shower is one of my favourites because you can expect to see about one meteor per minute To watch the Orionids, bundle up very warmly and bring a deck chair and sleeping bag; meteor observing is the coldest activity you can do close to home. Find a dark spot with an open view of the sky. The less light pollution the better; a shower like this one that's rich in faint meteors is especially hard hit by light pollution. Then simple lie back and watch the stars and with a little luck you'll see a shooting star every couple of minutes. Although the Orionids are not the most spectacular of sky shows I still look forward to the annual cosmic event. They've been seen for a long time too, the first known Orionid shower was recorded by the Chinese in AD 288, when "stars fell like rain." The shower has been well observed ever since astronomers first recognized its radiant in 1864.
Orionids appear as tiny, quick streaks and sail across the heavens for several seconds, leaving brief trains of glowing smoke. They are tiny particles of comet dust, each no larger than a pea shed long ago by the Halley’s Comet as it orbited the sun, slowly disintegrating. These pea-size particles enter our atmosphere at speeds up to 150,000 miles per hour, generating so much friction and heat that the surrounding air glows brightly. The Orionid shower, a sparse, moving "river of rubble" hundreds of millions of miles long, stays far enough away from the Earth's atmosphere to be a recurring event, not possible if it were any closer. Earth's own annual path around the sun carries it through the Orionid stream every mid-October. The radiant of the Orionids is located near the left shoulder of Orion the Hunter, centred within a triangle consisting of Sirius [the brightest star in the sky] and the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn.
Orion has been recognized as distinct group of stars for thousands of years. The Chaldeans knew it as Tammuz, named after the month that the familiar belt of stars first rose before sunrise. The Syrians called it Al Jabbar, the Giant. To the ancient Egyptians it was Sahu, the soul of Osiris. However in Greek mythology, Orion was a beautiful giant hunter.
There are many legends about Orion and several variations about his death and why he was placed in the stars. One story tells of his boast that he would eventually rid the earth of all its wild animals. When the Earth goddess Gaia heard of this she became upset and sent a Giant Scorpion to sting him to death. Now even after death that scorpion chases him around the sky. If you notice Scorpio and Orion are never in the sky together.
Another story says that Artemis the goddess of hunting fell in love with Orion. And when Orion was swimming Artemis was speaking to her brother Apollo. He bet her that she could not shoot a dot on the distance. She hit the target right on but had been tricked. She had shoot Orion. She put her love, Orion in the sky.
And yet another tells how Orion raped Artemis. And she took her revenge upon him, when she shot him. Now seeing as there are several variations of his death you would have to choose which one you like best and go with it. |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 07 October 2008 )
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