The Phase Between Gemini's Legs

I’m lying on my back in the grass—cold, but not too cold. Just enough to cause fingers to numb slightly in fifteen minutes’ time. I hear a couple laughing as they walk somewhere behind me. A tall guy with a beard passes by, looks at me funny. A girl power walks across the courtyard, holding a plastic bag at the end of each arm. I see a jogger with a headband, unicolor in navy blue. I hear cars, trucks, buses, horns, and nineteen seconds of crosswalk beeping roughly every minute and a half.

Above, the bright light of Venus blurs behind a thin cloud layer, off to the right of my view. An almost perfect half moon—a first-quarter moon actually—is pretty much directly overhead, a bit right of center. Off to my left, the illuminated, curving spire of the MIT Chapel shines skyward, pointing to the pale red dot of Mars.

The first-quarter moon phase began today at exactly 3:41pm, EDT, Friday, March 30, 2012. It shines in front of the constellation Gemini, between the legs of the twins, Castor and Pollux of Greek mythology, high above the faint, sinking sparkle of Betelgeuse.

Summer just started in the northern hemisphere of the red planet, causing the Martian North Polar Cap to slim to a sliver—a tiny white hat on top of a round, horribly sunburned fat man.

It takes sunlight about six minutes to reach Venus.

These things about the universe I know because I’m watching it through the tiny 3.5” glass display of my black iPhone 4.

The software application—or app—on my phone that enables this knowledge is called SkyView. Point the phone’s camera at any part of the sky, day or night, and this program will tell you exactly which object you’re looking at, along with a few fun facts about that object.

I direct the camera above and to the left of Gemini and the image of a giant crab appears on the screen. This is Cancer, which fittingly means crab in Latin, depicted by only two stars I can see: Tarf and T-0314. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but that’s all that SkyView gives me.

Below Cancer I see a new image on the screen. It’s a satellite with a designation “Cosmos 1400.” I learn from my 4.9 ounce friend that many old Soviet and now Russian satellites are given generic Cosmos designations in a meaningless nomenclature that covers many military and scientific instruments. Hmm, so much for specificity. I have to open up a web browser and Google “Cosmos 1400” to learn that it’s a Soviet ELINT (Electronics and Signals Intelligence) satellite, launched on August 5, 1982, from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the Archangelsk Region of the former USSR, about 800 kilometers north of Moscow.

My first reaction to the fact that I had to actually close one program, open another, type in a few words on a screen without buttons, and tap on the first result that came out of a web search to learn the launch location of the Cosmos 1400 satellite—annoyance. Why didn’t my app already know I’d want more information about the Cosmos 1400 satellite and nicely arrange those details for me, saving me such a hassle?

Of course, this reaction was immediately succeeded by a second, thankfully more powerful one: my, what expectations we have these days.

What would Galileo have thought of the power to point an instrument at any location in the sky and have its information displayed on a tiny screen at his fingertips? It’s taken over three thousand years of painstaking observation, data collection, debate, theory, and seemingly outlandish (sometimes heretical) claims from some of the finest minds in history to reach our current understanding of the universe. Now anyone can buy an app that catalogues everything you can see in the sky—all for only $1.99.

Presumably, we’ve been looking up for a long time. Considered the oldest of the sciences, astronomy was first practiced by priests and holy men who studied the movements of celestial bodies to determine celebrations and planting cycles. The earliest star catalogues archaeologists have found date back to around 1600 B.C. and belonged to the Babylonians, though even earlier drawings of eclipses, comets and supernovae by the Sumerians at least confirm that our earliest ancestors found occasion to glance skyward and ask, “what’s that?”

The Greeks were the first to construct a cosmological framework based on astronomical records they inherited from the Babylonians. Thales, who Aristotle deemed the first philosopher of the Greek tradition, predicted solar eclipses around 480 B.C. Aristarchus developed the first heliocentric theory in 270 B.C. Hipparchus first recorded the names of the constellations in 100 B.C., and Ptolemy developed the first mathematical framework for predicting the apparent motions of the planets in 200 A.D.

Then the Library of Alexandria burned, Roman culture collapsed, and a thousand years of Dark Ages swept western civilization before the Renaissance breathed new life into the science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Copernicus reinvented heliocentric theory (which had originally garnered few serious followers when Aristarchus pitched it 1,800 years earlier). Brahe used the first-quarter moon to show just how much farther the sun is from our moon with trigonometry we now learn in high school. Kepler formulated laws of planetary motion based on elliptical instead of circular orbits. Galileo looked through a tiny 3-inch refracting telescope to find spots on the sun, mountains and “seas” on the moon, the phases of Venus, and the four largest moons of Jupiter. And then Newton established his theory of gravity, giving us a framework for understanding all motion in the universe except for the extremely fast and extraordinarily small.

Today, I can learn three thousand years of astronomical history while lying on my back in the grass.

Starting to feel the numb tingle in my fingers, I’m overwhelmed at the magnitude of this power that I take for granted on a daily basis. Brahe stared through instruments he designed himself to track the same objects for twenty years, cataloging a thousand stars, and now I can call up a program that tells me the distance, history, and location of a thousand stars in a few seconds. I think of the couple, the tall guy, the power-walking girl, the jogger. Do they know and use this power, too? Maybe they do. Maybe they take it for granted. For now they’re consumed by universes of their own making.

We’ve got the universe in our pockets but nobody’s looking up.

I can’t blame ‘em. I only decided to lay in the grass because I just downloaded this app and wanted to check it out.

SkyView even works if you point it through the Earth. I can see the sun, just an hour or two since dipping below the horizon. I point this device through my stomach and notice the International Space Station is on nearly the exact opposite side of Earth from me, orbiting above the South Pacific Ocean. Huh. Looks like Uranus and Neptune are down there, too. Some couple billion miles straight below me.

Technology can be distracting. It can lead us down rabbit holes and pollute our minds with an endless, senseless stream of junk and inconsequence. But it can also induce wonder.

This pointing through the Earth thing is what gets me, even more than being able to target a pindrop in the black sky and identify it as the double star Acamar, 120 light-years away. In a world of almost endless distraction, I can point my phone at my backpack and see Saturn, aim it at my toe and catch the dip of Mercury just below the horizon, direct it at a garbage can and there’s the Hubble Space Telescope.

I suppose this has its drawbacks. I can imagine a world where starstruck citizens wander dumbly about, absorbed in their augmented realities on tiny handheld screens, occasionally bumping into each other and inanimate objects, pointing cameras at unsuspecting children while following the projected orbit of Jupiter across the southern hemisphere. I don’t think our legal system is quite ready for the “I plead wonderstruck” defense against restraining order requests.

It’s almost completely cloudy now. Mars has disappeared, as well as the entirety of Gemini. Only the half moon and a faint glimmer of Venus maintain observable evidence of the vast universe all around me. But no matter—I’ve got that universe right here.

Ring ring. With a flash of the screen, my black Delphi vibrates in my hand and Gemini is gone.

My ride’s here.