Coyote 18 August, Bruno's Galaxy

by Jamie Dillon

Last Saturday night I headed over to Coyote Lake, mostly to hang out with Jardine. There was a fairly early moonset, and the conditions weren't bad. Better than in town. Did a starcount in Pegasus toward midnight and came up with a 5.7 sky. Seeing was moderate, 3/5. As it turned out, Felix stayed in the car, it was a fine night to watch the Milky Way wheel overhead and shoot the breeze, catch up on gossip and talk about life. Delaney, Lefebvre, Marcus, Mr and Mrs Grimly were all there, along with a whole raft of other folks with scopes.

The one telescopic DSO we played with was ngc 672, which I wanted to show off after seeing it for the first time the Saturday night before from the Peak. It was a whole lot less fancy from Coyote, and the fellas were pretty unabashed at saying it was subtle. The seeing mattered as much as anything. The ropy structure was barely there.

Much more impressive was this huge naked eye galaxy that stretched across the zenith. Turns out one more name for it is Bruno's Galaxy, named after Giordano Bruno, who's a major figure in the history of astronomy. Just at the turn of the 1600's, when people were getting used to the idea of the Sun being at the center of things, it was Bruno who up and thought that our Sun was one star among all the ones in the cosmos, that the universe had infinite dimensions. For this and other heresies, he was burned at the stake on 17 February, 1600.

Bruno was a Dominican, and one of the many strange parts of the story is that he was having a successful and safe career in other parts of Europe, and for some unaccountable reason decided to go back to Italy, right into the hotspot of the Inquisition. By this time, Kepler was going strong in Prague, nailing down the orbit of Mars, and setting up his 3 laws for planets orbiting around the Sun. It was 9 years before Galileo got his hands on a telescope. Ironically, Bruno was killed 2 days after Galileo's 36th birthday.

It was delightful to hear of people naming our galaxy, however informally, after the man who was one of the first in Europe to suggest that the Sun is a star. For me, it gave one more dimension to that amazing apparition in our night sky.

And now I'm caught up with my documentation for the moment.

Good weekend,
DDK

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