The Big Picture
Last night was clear, so it was a good opportunity to get out and see comet Holmes .It’s located a little to the -ahem- left of the fifth star of Perseus. Perseus is near the Pleiades. I have no trouble finding Pleiades because they are quite distinct. I can also find Orion, Cassiopaeia and the Plough. To find comet Holmes, I had to learn what Perseus looks like, and now I do, and it feels good to have learned a constellation I didn’t know before. It would probably have been better to look at the comet through binoculars. With the naked eye, it was quite faint. It may have been a better show a few days ago when it suddenly increased in brightness, but it has been cloudy here for the last while.
It got me thinking about the constellations, and how human beings inevitably ‘joined the dots’ and saw shapes in the stars. In a way, the night sky has been like a giant canvas for generations of people. They made pictures that are hundreds of light years across. The universe is so vast and so complex, yet it cannot imagine or concieve of itself. That is up to us. We may be insignificant in scale, but we can encompass the stars in our minds.
