The Nautical Almanac # 0 --- Polaris, The Pole Star

 

In antiquity, astronomers (actually astrologers of the time) imagined patterns among the stars of the night sky. These patterns or asterisms they called constellations, and in naming them ascribed certain qualities to them. The night sky became a cultural storybook reflecting every people's myths and history. For example, the star pattern called Scorpius (the Scorpion) in Greco-Roman culture was the Swan in Mesopotamian cultures and Maui's Fishhook in Polynesia. People born "under" various constellations (i.e., the Sun was "in" --- actually backdropped by --- said constellation at that time of year) were ascribed personality traits in keeping with the mythos of the tribe or culture. The odd thing about such ascriptions is that they often seem to be amazingly accurate.    Constellations though, are true pareidolias. From Earth, all constellations seem to be equidistant against the velvet black sky. In truth, the stars in our familiar constellations lie hundreds of light years from one another in different planes, and may be star systems that distance has blurred into a single shining point of light. Each one is a Sun unto itself. Under optimum conditions human beings can see about 6,000 suns on a given night. About 60 of these distant suns, often the brightest or most evident, have become critical to celestial navigation over time. Catalogues are kept of these crucial stars, and in them Polaris is either numbered "0" or not numbered at all. underscoring its importance. It is Star Zero of the Nautical Almanac.  Although the ancients referred to "fixed" stars and described other quicker moving points of light as "Planetes" or "Wanderers", even the fixed stars are not truly fixed; they shift position over time with imperceptible slowness. The "Planets" turned out to be other worlds circling our own Sun (and we have since discovered high-speed suns screaming through space at incredible velocities, too). In the Northern Hemisphere, the central point of the sky is the North Star, the Pole Star, or Polaris. By some weird cosmic coincidence Polaris has shone down directly upon the northernmost point on Earth's globe for tens of thousands of years. Time lapse photography of the Earth's rotation shows the night stars circling around a single point, and that point is Polaris. It marks True North and is the starting point of celestial navigation. Find Polaris, and all else follows. It too has moved over the years but not appreciably so in the last five millennia. Arab astronomers of the Middle Ages called it the "Ship Star." Christian ecclesiastics called it "Stella Maris" or "Mary's Star." Pagans called it Orentil. Astrologically, it is the first of fifteen Behenian Stars which have their own influences in a natal chart. Polaris is, oddly, considered an "unfortunate" star whose influence causes afflictions, but it is also the star which confers occult sensitivities. Polaris though is not a single star but a triad of three stars, the largest being Polaris Alpha, a yellow supergiant five and a half times the mass of our own Sun and thirty eight times the size. It has grown so large because it is exhausting its hydrogen. Polaris Alpha is circled by Polaris Beta, and both are circled by the much smaller Polaris Alpha Beta. Polaris Beta can be seen on very clear nights with the naked eye, and other times with a modest telescope. Polaris Alpha is a second magnitude star, and increasing in brightness over time. The Polaris star system lies 300 light years from Earth. It is about four billion years old, the age of our own Sun. Polaris is the brightest star, and makes up the handle-end of the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor or the Little Bear). The two stars that make up the leading edge of the Big Dipper (Ursa Major or the Great Bear) point directly at Polaris. To find Polaris in the northern night sky is to have a sense of one's own position on the Earth. As a ship or person moves north, Polaris rises ever higher into the sky. At the Equator Polaris is on the horizon. At the latitude of New York, Polaris is at approximately 45 degrees. And at the North Pole, Polaris is at the zenith of the sky. While it does naught to fix longitude the Pole Star is indispensable for reckoning latitude north of the Equator.

The Nautical Almanac --- The Moon

The familiar face ('light side") of the moon. The lunar crust is thin, and the dark lava plains (maria or "seas") indicate seismic activity in the moon's distant past.

 

The unfamiliar far side ("dark side") of the moon. The crust on the dark side is thicker, and the dark side has almost no lava seas. Scientists consider this side to be largely a remnant of long-vanished Theia.

As any user of the Nautical Almanac can tell you, for celestial navigation sightings Earth's Moon is the second most-visualized celestial object, after the Sun. The moon is particularly convenient for astronavigators as it is bright (so bright that a full moon can obscure all but the brightest stars) and visible in haze and light cloud cover, can be seen during the day at times, and can be used in crescent phases to obtain compass headings (in the Northern Hemisphere, an imaginary line drawn from the horns of the moon to the horizon will indicate true South; the same is true in reverse in the Southern Hemisphere). Due to differences in motion, the navigator has to use separate moon tables to do the proper calculations, but this is a minor inconvenience.

To the ancients the moon was a deity, and almost always a female, sometimes the consort of the Sun, sometimes the Sun's sister or rival. It did not take long for even earliest Man to recognize the pareidolic "Man in the Moon" (unusual for being male). and though different cultures saw "him" differently --- in the Pacific basin, "she" was the Woman Who Weaves The Clouds --- that beneficent face has smiled down on humanity since before there was a humanity (the poet Sylvia Plath saw it different: "She is quiet with the O-gape of complete despair"). 

The Moon has always been a sign of the Divine Feminine. Moon goddesses and high priestesses were usually represented with a crescent moon bound on their brows, or as three-faced women (representing the phases) or with hunting bows. In the earliest human societies, the Moon Cult was dominant and women were the leadership.

Ancient Mankind also recognized meaning in the phases ("Faces") of the moon --- the full moon marked time (in lunar calendar systems the full moon marked the new "month," the word itself coming from "moon"), the waxing moon was a time of industriousness, the waning moon a time to complete the work, and the "dark of the moon" was a time not to embark on new endeavors (though as the "new" moon, this idea got turned completely around). 

The Moon moves through an orbital cycle every 29.5 days, giving us a Waxing Crescent, Waxing Half, Waxing Gibbous, Full, Waning Gibbous, Waning Half, Waning Crescent, and Dark (New) Moon every five days or so. A month with two Full Moons is said to have a "Blue Moon."

It did not take long for primitive humans to make the connection between the moon and the tides, nor the seeming connection between a woman's reproductive cycle and the moon's own orbital cycle ("menses" is another word derived from "moon"). 

Thus, Mother, water, darkness, silver, bow hunting (symbolic of the crescent moon), and night were all things that became associated with the moon. Father, fire, light, gold, spear hunting, and day were, in contradistinction, solar attributes. Given that the earliest human societies were matriarchal, the "moon cult" is doubtlessly older than the "sun cult."

This can be seen in the multiplicity of goddesses associated with the moon. In Greece and Rome alone, they include Artemis, Diana, Cynthia, Selene, Luna, Hecate, and Phoebe. The Celts associated the moon with Epona the horse goddess, and Danu the goddess of waters. 

The interacting orbital mechanics of the Earth, Sun, and Moon can cause one body to cast shadows on the other (occulting). When the Moon occults the Sun we call it a solar eclipse. When the Earth occults the Sun we call it a lunar eclipse

Oddly, the moon does not have a "formal" name as does the Sun (Sol), but the names of the moon goddesses are used as adjectives --- one can speak properly of "selenic" rocks. 

"Apocynthion" and "pericynthion" are used to describe the furthest and nearest points in a lunar, er, dianic, um, phoebic orbit. 

For sheer regular usage, "Luna" is probably most recognizable --- and it also gave rise to the words "lunatic" and "lunacy" and "loon" for the mentally ill, for the moon was said to have negatively influenced them. 

The moon was born out of the same nebula that birthed the Sun and its planets. Not long after the Sun first ignited 4.5 billion years ago, the new star's heat began to cause its disk of dust and gas to rotate faster, and as the heat reached further and further outward, eddies and whirlpools in the cloud began resolving themselves into planets. One of these was a planet that scientists now call Gaia; Gaia wasn't quite as large as the Earth, but it occupied the same orbit. 

The destruction of Gaia and Theia gave rise to the Earth and the Moon.

The early solar system was a wild place --- there were probably more than 20 planets, and their orbits went every which way, rising high above the ecliptic plane and falling low below, and orbiting the poles of the Sun and its equator, and sharing orbits with other planets, and having intersecting orbits. Some of these early planets were snatched up by the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and became moons. Others were so far out from the Sun that they stayed far out --- perhaps a few even got lost. 

Gaia had an orbital partner, Theia. Who knows for how long the two planets --- one not quite Earth-sized and the other Mars-sized --- revolved in their intersecting orbits around the Sun, but it was long enough for them to cool and form rocky surfaces. 

One strange day though, Gaia and Theia met at the precise spot where their orbits crossed, and a cataclysm unlike any other occurred. The collision of the two planets rocked the solar system. Theia hit Gaia with such force that Theia's surface layers were torn off and her core was driven down to the heart of the larger planet, where the two cores melded into one. Billions of tons of Gaia-material was ejected into space to mix with the ruins of Theia, for the smaller planet was effectively destroyed. 

The smashed Gaia was knocked off its axis --- 23.5 degrees off its 90 degree poles --- and the planet was sent spinning, so that a day on Gaia was only five hours long for hundreds of thousands of years. 

A solar eclipse. We are lucky to live at a time in joint Selenic-Solarian history when the Moon is just distant enough from the Earth to appear the same size of the Sun. Due to orbital mechanics, the Sun can block the Moon's reflected light (a lunar eclipse) and the Moon can block the Sun's emitted light (a solar eclipse). Solar eclipses are rare and dramatic, and we get a very good view of the energy the Sun gives off.

During a lunar eclipse light refracted through the Earth's atmosphere makes the Moon turn a dark copper color, not usually deep black. The effect is called a "Blood Moon."

Gaia settled down surprisingly fast in cosmic terms due in large part to the ruins of Theia. 

The mixed stuff of Gaia and Theia was trapped in orbit around the newly-remade planet, drawn by the strong gravity of the newly-enlarged core. Eventually, the large mass of material attained stability, and, as much of the solar system's raw material did, formed a sphere. The sphere of this new world was surprisingly large, about 25% of the size of the planet it was orbiting, and its orbit was close in. As it orbited, its own gravity acted as a brake on the planet's rapid spinning, lengthening the planet's day. As the speed lessened, the sphere began moving further away from the planet to maintain its own equilibrium. It also became "tidally locked," so that its revolution time and its rotation time became identical. It would never again show any but one face to the new and improved planet, which we now call Earth. And we call the sphere the Moon. It is the only celestial body we have visited in person.

Until 1959, no one had ever seen the dark side --- the far side --- of the moon. The first view was a muzzy photograph, and it would be another nine years before Man would orbit the moon, and another before we walked on it. When we studied the moon's rocks we discovered that much of Earth was on the moon and in the moon. The two very different sides of the Moon gave a clue to its creation from two very different worlds. We live in a binary planet system made up of three planets. 

Four billion years ago the Moon was less than 20,000 miles from Earth. It has receded to more than ten times that distance. But if it were still that close it would appear something like this. It would cross the sky about once every fifteen minutes.

If the Moon were still 20,000 miles from Earth it's likely life would be very different, if it existed at all. The Earth's day would be just 20% as long as it is now, the tides would rise and fall hundreds of feet every hour, the Earth would be rocked by gravitationally induced earthquakes, the friction induced by the force exerted by the Moon would probably heat the Earth to unlivable temperatures, and the Moon would probably be shattered by the force exerted by the Earth.

When the moon was formed it was only about 18,000 miles from the Earth. Today it is about 239,000 miles away, and is backing away (still) at a rate of about 1.5 inches per year. It is difficult to imagine the moon being twelve times larger in our skies, stretching from horizon to horizon, but it was so. How bright the moon appeared to be at that time is hard to estimate, but the Sun is 398,110 times as bright as the moon, which of course only reflects the Sun's light. 

The moon not only slowed the Earth down eventually to a 24 hour day, but it also acted to restrain the new planet's wild gyrations, so that a precession cycle, the wobble of Earth's axis, takes 26,000 years, not mere hours or days. This allowed regular seasons to establish themselves. 

Today, the Earth rotates in 24 hours; the Sun rotates in 27 days; and the Moon both rotates and revolves in 29 days. 

A moon colony, possibly in ten years.

The moon also protected the Earth by absorbing tens of thousands of hits from meteorites left over from the formation of the solar system and from the breakup of Theia. Though the Earth was battered badly, the real scars of those periods of massive bombardment can still be seen on the moon's cratered surface. 

The moon has a very weak magnetic field that affects the orbits of spacecraft circling it. It has a tiny molten core, and in the far past had vulcanism, but present-day moonquakes are caused by the gravitational pull of the Earth. It also has an evanescent atmosphere that weighs about 11 tons total. 

A footprint on the Moon

The radius of the moon is 1,079 miles, its diameter is 2,159 miles, and its circumference is 6,783 miles. The moon is just 1/81th the mass of the Earth, but it is 60% the density of the Earth. The moon's gravity is weak, just 16% that of the Earth's. A 200 pound astronaut weighs only 32 pounds on the moon. 

The moon is very cold. The average temperature is 64 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Highs of 242 degrees F. occur in sunlight. Lows of -280 F. occur in darkness. Since the moon is tilted a little more than one degree on its axis, it has seasons of a sort. The coldest temperatures in the solar system occur at the bottom of certain craters where the sun never shines. Winter Solstice temperatures in these places of eternal darkness can thud down to 413 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale. As brutal as that may be, such craters are excellent sites for remote telescopes of various types used in the study of cosmology.

Shackleton is a "crater of eternal darkness" where the sun never shines.

The Nautical Almanac --- The Sun

The most important star in the Nautical Almanac is unnumbered. It is our own Sun. 

A star gone supernova some 5 - 6 billion years ago was the end of the beginning for our Sun.

Although Celestial Navigation is becoming a lost skill with the advent of GPS, navigators are well advised to learn this Dark Art in the event that the batteries go dead or the GPS unit goes on the fritz. Celestial Nav can, and has, saved lives. And though it seems a little impenetrable, all a navigator needs to know to take ("reduce") a sun sight are the height of the Sun above the horizon (for which you use a sextant), the precise time of your sight (for which you use an accurate timepiece), the Greenwich Hour Angle (GHA) of the Sun (for which you use the Nautical Almanac) and the Declination of the Sun (for which you use a Sight Reduction Table). A few mathematical calculations later, and you will know where in the world (literally) you are.

A nebula, drifting through space. It is the death shroud of an ancient star or stars, and the nursery of newly-forming stars. Made of dust and gas and fragments (literally stardust) this nebula is backlit by other stars behind it. Everything in the stars comes from nebulas --- including us.

In Celestial Nav the Sun is the most frequently referenced object for very good reasons. It's big and it's bright and generally speaking the rest of the stars are invisible all day long. There are 58 important stars listed in the Nautical Almanac, and 115 more "Tabulated" stars (in the event you need them), but literally none outshine the Sun (from where we are). Our Sun is the ultimate Zero Magnitude star --- actually, for what it's worth the Sun's Magnitude is listed at -27. As if we need to know it's the brightest thing we see. 

Gravity pulled the dust of the Sun's ancestor into a whirlpool. Pressure at the center caused heat which caused the Sun to ignite. The newborn Sun lit up the dustcloud. The heat and energy of the new sun increased the disc's rate of rotation, causing planets to form.The stuff in the surrounding disk became the planets and everything on them, and us.

Without the Sun, we literally wouldn't be here. It is the Sun's energy that powers the Earth's own energy, and provides us with our very lives. The ancients knew that, and so they worshiped the Sun as a god. So, having said that, let's take a scientific look at our Sun: 

The Sun has a proper name: It is Sol (pronounced "Soul"), and it's Latin. The most common use of the name Sol occurs in the word "Solar," that is, "Of the Sun," as in "Solar System." A more antique word would be "Solarian" which means the same thing. In the original Latin "Solarian" would translate to "Solaris," which doesn't fit well into common English sentence usage, and has become something of a book and movie title, and is the professional name of an astrologer I know.

Another word that you might come across is "solarium" for a sunroom. 

The Sun (Sol) is a yellow dwarf, the second most common and second most long-lived of all stars. Only dim red dwarfs are more numerous and can live longer --- trillions, and not just billions, of years.

Scientists are not always seemingly respectful of the sun. They often describe Sol as an "ordinary" star, an "average" star, and a "very typical" star. They've classed it as a "Yellow Dwarf." All these descriptions may lead you to think that Sol goes home at dusk, puts his feet up, and reads the paper before turning in for the night. But this "very typical" star is unique in one respect: It's the only star in the universe (thus so far as we know) that has a living planet orbiting it. 

The Sun is a violent thermonuclear reactor. It has an intense magnetic field, blows off the substance of its outer layer in a solar wind, and occasionally flares. All this activity can disrupt activities and even the life of species on the Earth.

Although it is classed as a yellow star because it radiates much of its energy in the yellow (or more precisely, yellow-green) wavelength band, it emits radiation in all bands (as most stars do), including the ultraviolet and infrared. This "invisible" light can be seen by other animals, causes reactions in plants, and causes sunburn. It is because we are so close, and because we literally are the children of the sun, that our eyes have evolved to see its light as white. 

 

Our friendly Sun. Giver of light and warmth, it is also the giver of deadly radiation and uncontrolled heat and iciness. In reality, the Sun and the Earth are partners in a very delicate dance in which the Earth has always been just one step ahead. Planets that fell behind have been blasted into a naked iron ball (Mercury), overwhelmed by heat and light (Venus) and dessicated (Mars). It's possible that life might have existed on any of them. But not anymore.

And lest Sol seem a little boring nonetheless, consider that this "dwarf" star has a mass 330,000 times that of the Earth. It would take 110 Earths to circle the Sun's equator, and a million Earths could fit snugly inside the Sun. From where we sit, the Sun is 13 billion times brighter than Sirius, the next-brightest star we see. Sol is eight light minutes from Earth, about 93 million miles away. 

The Sun is the master of the Solar System. Huge Jupiter is dwarfed by the Sun, and the terrestrial planets --- Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars --- are barely visible in this scaled comparison.

The Sun contains 99.86% of all the mass in the Solar System, with Jupiter, the largest planet, taking up a far distant second 0.0009546% of the Sun's mass (and yet Jupiter takes up 75% of the remaining mass of the Solar System). The Sun's radius is 432,288 miles. 

The Sun is a vast ball of plasma, busily converting hydrogen to helium through a process of nuclear fusion. The temperature of the surface of the Sun is just under 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but the temperature of the core is 28,799,541 degrees F. At that temperature hydrogen (the lightest element) loses its single electron, and those "lost" electrons get picked up by other atoms, forming two-electron helium atoms. This is a violent process, and the energy released in this forcible fusion reaction is responsible for the light and heat emitted by the Sun. 600 million tons of hydrogen is converted into 430 million tons of helium every second in the Sun's core. The Sun has been fusing hydrogen into helium at this rate for 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for another 4.5 to 6 billion years. 

 

The Sun is barely visible compared to other well-known stars in this scaled comparison model

When we consider that the Sun is nowhere near the largest, brightest or most dynamic star we have met in our armchair travels, the immeasurable energy of the universe becomes just a little more evident. There are things out there --- pulsars and quasars and neutron stars --- that make the Sun look like an ember. Scientists consider the "metabolism" of the Sun to be equivalent to that of a sleeping iguana; but it is this very lethargy that gives the Sun its long lifespan and has allowed life to evolve on Earth. 

In this model Rigel and Antares are compared to Betelgeuse, and Betelgeuse is compared with the largest stars yet known. When VY Canis Majoris was found, astronomers argued that physics precluded stars from being any larger; in 2017, UY Scuti made them wrong. Sol is a glowing ember in the heavens and we live on a mote of dust.

Considering that the Sun is more dynamic than 85% of all stars, the possibilities for the long-term evolution of life on planets circling other suns increase to incredible levels. 

 

As stars go, the Sun is not very large, but there are more "yellow dwarfs" like the Sun than any other stars except red and brown dwarfs. Red and brown dwarfs exist in the trillions throughout the universe. Even more stable and long-lived than Sol, red and brown dwarfs are quite capable of hosting innumerable planets on which life has had time to develop. Jupiter may be a brown dwarf that never ignited.

The story of the Sun began long before the Sun was born. Five to six billion years ago, a supergiant star whose name we will never know, perhaps a blue star like Rigel or a red star like Betelgeuse, exploded in a dramatic supernova somewhere in our Milky Way galaxy. More than likely, this dying supergiant was a member of a multistar system containing, maybe, a green or yellow dwarf with a planetary system, and a cool red dwarf. The explosion of the primary consumed them all, spraying stardust for light years in all directions. A cloud of wreckage called a nebula, was the result. 

Some of those elemental molecules are still moving quickly through space propelled by the force of the original blast, and they will travel literally forever, reaching far distant galaxies in trillions of years. They are much like dust particles in Earth's atmosphere, the lightest of which can spend eternity suspended in midair. 

But unlike dust particles in an atmosphere, dust and gas particles in space tend to agglutinate, or clump together, in those regions of space where the nebula is more dense, drawn by gravity. The cloud breaks into a series of whirlpools. 

A single molecule becomes two, and eventually a dust particle. As it grows bigger its gravitational pull increases, causing it to grow even bigger. The particle becomes a speck, a speck becomes a grain, a grain becomes a pebble, a pebble becomes a stone . . . and as it grows, the pressure within increases, the heat increases, and it forms a sphere. If it grows very large, eventually the sphere gets so hot that it spontaneously combusts. 

And so our Sun was born, and so were the planets around it, all from the whirlpooling, swirling stuff left over from the long-ago death of the blue (or red) supergiant and its friends. We know that there must have been planets in that vanished star system because there are so many heavy metals --- like gold and silver --- on Earth and in the Sun, and more than likely on the other seven planets circling the Sun. 

The Sun is in the heart of its Main Sequence. Too small to explode, when it grows old it will first turn into a red giant, expanding and consuming Mercury and Venus (and baking the Earth). Hopefully, on that day, our species will have long been colonizing other solar systems. When it uses up the very last of its fuel it will collapse down into an ultradense White Dwarf the size of the Earth or even Mars, and will phosphoresce dimly for eternity. But in that violent and unstable red giant phase it will throw off stellar material that will eventually form the substance of other stars, and the cycle will begin again.

We are here because far away and long ago a star died. Every molecule in your body, in everything, is star-stuff --- and the stuff in your fingertip is from a different star than the stuff in your fingernail. Talk about miracles.

The story of the Sun is a story of rebirth and reincarnation. Not for nothing is our star named Sol.

The Music of The Spheres

"The Hermeticists Taught that a Strong and Wise Man Ruled His Stars. But a Negative and Weak Person was Ruled by Them."

~ Manly P. Hall