37 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes until the Once And Future President, Donald John Trump, is restored to the office that was Rightfully his the last four years.

Not that I’m counting, mind you.

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

Our Turn

[Yes, I did this one five weeks ago. But it was too cathartic to just throw away.]

We’ve often seen that quote from David Plouffe: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”

This was of course a declaration of intent to annihilate not just Trump, but rather “his kind.”

You know what? I think we should flip it around. David Plouffe’s kind should be destroyed thoroughly and their kind must not rise again.

What is Plouffe’s kind? I suppose it depends on who’s talking and what they are thinking of in particular. Well, at the moment it’s me talking and I am thinking of the sort of maggot who is attracted to politics not to better his world but rather so that he can wield power over others, or line their pockets with “free” money. Often these people end up as what Ayn Rand called “pull peddlers,” receiving money in exchange for using their connections to do favors.

This type is parasitic. Utterly parasitic. And they should be destroyed thoroughly and not allowed to rise again.

The bad news is we will never eradicate them. Useless turds who can’t do anything productive will always be with us. As will the outright sociopaths.

Of course they find Trump to be their enemy. And of course they find us to be their enemy. If we won’t simply lie down and let our “betters” have their way with us, we’re a problem, we’re something to be got rid of. And of late, we haven’t lain down without a protest, as we are “supposed” to do. Dang uppity Garbage Deplorables! We don’t know our place!!!

The good news is we can provide far fewer niches for these parasites. The niches come into being when something that people formerly did of their own free will is taken over by the government; then every aspect of that activity becomes a political football.

Take for instance education. Since the government runs it, if you don’t like what’s being done, you have to form a political movement and try to work your way around the maggots embedded in the bureaucracy. If education were private, then if you didn’t like what they were doing to your child, you’d take your money and your child elsewhere. And people who didn’t even have school-age children presently would have no voice–and not have to pay money. Making it a government “thing” turned it into a political thing, and the maggots began to swarm.

So we wreck them by seriously cutting government and giving them fewer places to exist. Among all of the other benefits, the body politic would have fewer sociopaths and parasites in it.

People like Plouffe are the same type, but they are the full-on political hacks who set policy, rather than implement it. They’re just as bad if not worse; they help government grow, and steer it into serving its own ends, rather than those of the people it is supposed to be serving.

The Deep State is nothing more than a government that serves its own ends.

And we have had enough of this.

They must be destroyed thoroughly, and their kind must not rise again.

This election wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. There are millions of these malignancies in this country and we’ve just defeated two of them. Keep pushing. Now we can go after them wholesale.

It’s our turn.

Our turn.

Our turn.

OUR TURN!

You stole the 2020 election. You’ve mocked and ridiculed and put people in prison and broken people’s lives because you said this thing was stolen. This entire phony thing is getting swept out. Biden’s getting swept out. Kamala Harris is getting swept out. MSNBC is getting swept out. The Justice Department is getting swept out. The FBI is getting swept out. You people suck, okay?! And now you’re going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country.

And I’m going to tell you, we’re going to get to the bottom of where the 600,000 votes [are]. You manufactured them to steal this election from President Trump in 2020. And think what this country would be if we hadn’t gone through the last four years of your madness, okay? You don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity.

And if anybody gives it to you, it’s Donald J. Trump, because he’s got a big heart and he’s a good man. A good man that you’re still gonna try to put in prison on the 26th of this month. This is how much you people suck. Okay? You’ve destroyed his business thing. And he came back.

He came back in the greatest show of political courage, I think, in world history. Like, [Roman statesman] Cincinnatus coming back from the plough [returning to politics to rescue the Roman Republic]. He’s the American Cincinnatus. And what he has done is a profile in courage. We’ve had his back. But I got to tell you, he may be empathetic. He may have a kind heart. He may be a good man. But we’re not. Okay? And you deserve, as Natalie Winters says, not retribution, justice. But you deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.

Steve Bannon, on election night

OUR TURN!!

OUR TURN!!!

OUR TURN!!!

OUR TURN!!!

January 6 Tapes?

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.

If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…

Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.

Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.

Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.

I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.

In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.

Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.

The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”

Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.

We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.

And yet,

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?

In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).

We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)

We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Lauren Boebert?).

That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.

Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”

If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.

That should make you good and mad.

The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.

I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.

In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.

In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.

So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.

We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*

We know it. What is going to be done about it?

*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.

If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.

This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.

But what is it?

Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.

Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):

Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 or 2026 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,634.20
Silver $31.11
Platinum $936.00
Palladium $982.00
Rhodium $4,850.00
FRNSI* 126.429+
Gold:Silver 84.674-

This week, at Friday close:

Gold $2,647.50
Silver $30.62
Platinum $934.00
Palladium $976.00
Rhodium $4,875.00
FRNSI* 127.073-
Gold:Silver 86.463+

Gold blooped up over 2700 on Wednesday then got beaten with the ugly stick the last two days, but still ended up a bit up for the week. Silver, however, didn’t end up for the week. Platinum continues to be on sale.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

The Final Experiment Begins

I wrote this first bit on Tuesday. Then realized my mistake. Rather than try to edit it, I think I’ll just tack on the next bit, written on Wednesday, and leave both parts in, plus what I come up with Thursday and Friday. It might give you some insight into what I choose to call a “thought process.”

My First Take [Written Tuesday, to be read Saturday]

It starts today. After a few days’ travel the four Flat Earthers, four Globers, and Will Duffy (who put the whole thing together) have now arrived at nearly 80 degrees South latitude, where they will enjoy several days of uninterrupted daylight.

Assuming, of course that globe earth is true. I’d normally not have to put that caveat in but under present circumstances, it’s necessary.

I contacted Will Duffy and will be taking photographs of the Sun over the next few days to bolster the data set. People all around the globe will be doing this.

Duffy dropped a video on Tuesday the 10th, mentioning someone that dang near everyone forgot. Including me, though as I watched the video I did guess what it was before he said it.

The video starts with a recap. Before the Final Experiment was announced, the Big Name Flat Earthers were adamant that there was no 24 hour sun in Antarctica. Once the Final Experiment was announced, they scurried like cockroaches when you flick the lights on, coming up with crazy rationales…followed by more crazy rationales.

Oh, the participants (including the Flat Earthers, who are really paid off shills) secretly went to the NORTH six months ago and filmed the sun there. Whoops–that won’t work, because the Sun would be traveling in the wrong direction. No problem, the film will be run backwards. Except that one of the Flat Earthers plans to wear a body cam. Run THAT backwards and people will be walking backwards. That string of Grade-A Stupid was their second resort; it came about after the first suggestion–that they’d be going north right now was instantly shot down on the grounds that you have 24 hour darkness in the Arctic right now.

[It’s funny that they’re changing their position on what a 24 hour sun means before they see the results. It’s almost as if they knew all along that the Final Experiment would show a 24 hour sun and were lying six months ago, and for years before that, when they said there was no 24 hour sun in Antarctica, but willing to stake their whole line of bullshit on it because they figured no one would actually offer to send them on a $31K trip to see for themselves.

Yeah, almost as if. In fact, these people are duplicitous cunts.]

There is not only a twenty four hour sun according to the Globe model…there is going to be a 24 hour moon! And, at least up to six months ago, Flat Earthers would have considered this impossible too. But! No one has ever videoed it, at least nothing can be found on YouTube.

(Contrary to grifter flerfer assertions, there are plenty of 24 hour Antarctic sun videos on YouTube, and not just the one that had an edit in it that was readily acknowledged and explained by the uploader…once someone actually bothered to ask him instead of leaping to conclusions about his motives. Of course the flerfers will say ALL of these have been doctored but when you demand evidence for that they change the subject.)

On the 14th the moon will be full. It should be visible in daylight, opposite the sun. If the Sun is to the north, the moon should be visible to the south. If the sun is to the west, the Moon should be visible to the East.

By the 19th the moon will be a waxing gibbous (as seen from the northern hemisphere, the right hand crescent is dark; it should be the left hand side as seen in Antarctica because the observer is upside down with respect to what we’re accustomed to (we in the Northern Hemisphere I think). At that point it will follow the Sun around the sky, trailing it by a bit less than 120 degrees. (If the sun is directly in front of you (“twelve o’clock”) the moon will be at about four o’clock. Both will move right to left [not left to right as in the Northern hemisphere].)

For those who need a quick refresher on terms like “twelve o’clock” and “four o’clock” as directions:

A nice timelapse from the 17th onward should show a visible change in the moon’s phase over the span of 24 or better yet 48 hours. Let’s see what Will Duffy comes up with.

Flat Earthers: What are you going to do if there’s not only a 24 hour Sun, but also a 24 hour Moon? Are you going to create a brand new set of outrageous theories and ridiculous excuses for the Moon, like you did for the Sun? Or will you just do the right thing, and finally acknowledge that we live on a globe?

I am throwing down the gauntlet, right here, right now. If we return from Antarctica with videos of both a twenty four hour sun, and a twenty four hour moon, this debate is over. Done. Finished. This is The Final Experiment.

Will Duffy of The Final Experiment, in the video linked above

But this is actually WRONG! [Written Wednesday]

In fact, I realized on Wednesday that the Moon will not be visible at all from Antarctica at this time of year! (And I am by no means the only person to realize this. Plenty of comments for the video, in fact, are from people who spotted this. They checked online. I, on the other hand realized from first principles there would be a problem.)

What!?!

[At this point, I wrote what eventually became the science part of this post. You can go read it, or not…but what follows might not make sense without it.]

OK, let’s step back a bit, and get back to the Final Experiment, applying what we’ve learned.

The reason there’s a twenty four hour sun near the June solstice in the Arctic or near the December solstice in the Antarctic, is because the sun’s declination is extreme enough that it never sets in these locations. If you look at that last diagram, right now the Sun is near the left hand side, almost where that sun is drawn onto the far side of the sphere. Look carefully, it shines onto the south pole, albeit at an oblique angle. Earth rotates, but no matter what, the south pole is lit as long as the sun stays near there. That’s the current situation in Antarctica.

“Okay, Steve, but we dove down this rabbit hole because you got cranky about the twenty four hour moon. So what about the moon?”

The moon will be full on the 14th. Which means that on that day, it is on the opposite side of the celestial sphere from the sun. That way the Sun lights up the same side we are looking at, because the Sun is behind us as we face the Moon.

Is the Moon exactly opposite of the Sun on the celestial sphere? No. It usually is not exactly opposite on a full moon. But when it is, we get a lunar eclipse, because the Moon is actually traveling through the Earth’s shadow.

We need to know a bit more about the Moon’s orbit. Wikipedia says the inclination of the Moon’s orbit is 5.145 degrees relative to the ecliptic. (Oh, goody, just for once the data is in the most convenient form!) The plane of the Moon’s orbit intersects the ecliptic just like the celestial equator does, somewhere. In fact that intersection line moves a lot. But we don’t need to know where. We just need to know that the moon is never more than 5.145 degrees away from the ecliptic.

Now since we’re conservatives and old school, we go to a table and look something up. the declination of the Sun on December 14th:

https://www.starpath.com/blog_files/Table%20of%20the%20Declination%20of%20the%20Sun.pdf

The table says 23 degrees, 11 minutes south. Or almost exactly 23.2 degrees south. That’s the declination of that point of the ecliptic.

The opposite point on the ecliptic…near where the Moon will be, since it’s full on that date, is at 23.2 degrees north declination. The Moon is not more than 5.145 degrees off of this. I’m going to round that to 5.1, and say the Moon will have a declination of between 28.3 and 18.1 North.

So if I duck-duck-go that, there’s another table of lunar declination and it turns out that on the 14th the moon will be anywhere from 25 1/4 degrees to 27 1/4 degrees north declination. Later on the 16th its declination will be almost 26 1/2 degrees north.

That’s close to where the right hand Sun is in that diagram above. THAT Sun always shines on the north pole as the Earth rotates, never on the south pole.

In other words, if the moon is at that point (and it will be), it won’t be visible from the south pole, or anywhere within 25 degrees of the south pole. It will be below the horizon, all of the time. They will never see the moon at all.

If Will Duffy is expecting to take a video of a twenty four hour moon while he’s down there, he’s going to be sorely disappointed.

Is Will Duffy a chimp who didn’t think to check on this? Well, let’s think about this very carefully.

The moon not being visible in Antarctica for days is also a prediction of the Globe Earth. The flat Earth would never make a prediction like this, for exactly the same reason it won’t predict either 24 hours of sun or 24 hours of darkness in Antarctica. So if you are in Antarctica and don’t see the moon “over there” away from the Sun, like I described above, and never see it for days on end, the Globe model is in fact successful. Furthermore, any sight of the Moon would be evidence against the Globe Earth.

But note I not only said “you,” I emphasized it. Because there’s an important epistemic point here. If you don’t go to Antarctica, but someone else goes and says he didn’t see the moon, do you trust him? If he shows you pictures of a sky with no moon in it, how do you know he didn’t just face the wrong way deliberately when taking the picture, to avoid photographing the moon that was actually there? Oh, a really hard-core fisheye would photograph the whole sky…and immediately be condemned by the flerfers as NASA photoshop. (And you’d want a filter over it, one that wouldn’t let the moon through, because you don’t want the Sun–which will also be there–to burn a hole in your camera’s sensor.) The point is, someone who went to Antarctica can’t prove to you that he didn’t see the Moon. [He can prove to you that he saw the Sun, by producing photos with the Sun in them, but a photo with no Moon in it can happen even if there’s a Moon up.]

And the big-name flerfers who aren’t going to Antarctica A) won’t accept anything a glober says and B) won’t accept the testimony of the flerfers who went. [They’ll believe it because based on their recent behavior, they know the globe is true. They won’t accept it, though because that would be them admitting they are grifting pieces of shit.] Remember, now the flerfers in Antarctica are all “shills” just for having the intellectual integrity to go and look!

So how do you prove the Moon is behaving in accordance with glober predictions?

You have someone in the Arctic make the movie of the 24 hour moon. Because the moon will be 24 hours as far south as 63 1/2 degrees north latitude. In other words, Fairbanks will be able to see it for a few days. Prudhoe Bay will have no trouble seeing it the full length of time. People in Northern Scandinavia and Russia will have no trouble. There are plenty of people “up” there (I’ve even seen YouTube channels by some of them, talking about the round the clock darkness). And a pro photographer with the right equipment should be able to get “up” there, too.

And I believe this is what Will Duffy is doing.

He talked about a 24 hour moon happening at this time. He talked about a 24 hour moon happening in Antarctica (without being specific as to when). He never quite says he will see the 24 hour moon on this trip.

“But, he says he’s going to make a video!”

No, he says he will hopefully procure a video of the 24 hour moon. Elsewhere he says obtain. Not take it. Procure it, obtain it, do not necessarily mean he makes it himself.

Alternatively, he had someone film a 24 hour moon, six months ago, during Antarctic night.

I don’t think he’s a chimp who forgot to look it up. His phrasing is too careful. He knows.

I do think, though, that an Arctic 24 hour Moon won’t be helpful; if Flat Earth can predict a 24 hour Sun during north hemisphere summer time, it should have no problem with 24 hour Moons in the Arctic. What Flat Earth has a harder time explaining is why 24 hour full Moons only occur in the Arctic around December. What forces the Moon to be at its farthest north when the Sun is at its farthest south? They’re running around in two separate race tracks over the disc in that model.

OK, so let’s think about this, some. Imagine being at the south pole, just before sunrise. Early September. You have 24 hour pre-dawn twilight. The moon could well be above the horizon when it is at first or third quarter (a “half moon”) and it would be up for 24 hours. That would be another cool way to get a 24 hour moon video. And that could have happened just this last September. That would be a 24 hour moon in Antarctica, filmed under conditions short of completely brutal.

So I’m waiting to see what Will has up his sleeve.

Thursday Writings

A slight clue dropped on Thursday…Duffy dropped another video acknowledging the difficulty, and agreeing that he never actually said he expected to see a 24 hour moon this coming week.

It doesn’t tell us how he’s planning to do it. Some commenters speculate he’s simply planning to stay for an extra week until the moon rises. That would be cool, but I think he want some witnesses, preferably at least one flat Earther, to stay with him.

More Goodies

Jeranism, one of the flat Earthers going to Antarctica, was near the southern tip of South America this last week, preparing to fly to Union Glacier. He made this video in the middle of the night, twilight directly to the south. This is in perfect accord with the globe model, where at that latitude (56 degrees south, if memory serves) the sun is just twelve degrees or so below the horizon at that point in the circle. The flat Earth model does not allow for this, so he has already seen enough evidence that he should give it up. I heard elsewhere he had noted the sunrise and sunset being to the southeast and southwest, also in perfect accord with the globe (as I will explain in the “science” section).

Astronomical Coordinate Systems

This is a bit of a quick and incomplete lesson on celestial coordinates. This is a working tool of astronomy that often gets glossed over in popularizations and certainly in “science journalism.” But there are millions of amateur astronomers who know this stuff really well.

In order to look at something, you have to know where to look, and in order to report a discovery (and amateur astronomers often make discoveries, e.g., of comets), you have to be able to tell others where to look.

Astronomers in some ways operate in a two dimensional realm. If you specify a direction without a distance, you know where to look, since everyone is pretty much at the same location, Earth. (This direction can change slightly when it’s the Moon we are talking about–this is how the ancient Greeks figured out how far away it is. Everything else is so far away, the difference across the 13,000 km diameter of the Earth is insignificant.)

Astronomers have this concept of a “celestial sphere” for visualization purposes. It’s not a literal hard surface, but they conceive of it as being centered on the observer, with a very large, perhaps even infinite, radius. You are on the inside of the sphere, looking outward. The surface is two dimensional, and astronomical coordinates specify points on that sphere with two numbers. (In the deep sense that’s what “two dimensional” means).

How do those coordinates work? There are multiple schemes used. There are two major different systems; they work totally differently and each have their strengths and weaknesses. Astronomers (particularly amateur astronomers) think in either or both systems depending on context. There are two other commonly used ones as well, one of them quite useful for working in the solar system (so I should have covered it a few months ago, right?), the other more useful for discussing the Milky Way galaxy. I’m not going to discuss them here.

Let’s take up the conceptually easy one first.

Local Horizontal Coordinates

Imagine yourself standing on a flat plane, the horizon plane. It’s basically an extension of the horizon out to infinity.

The celestial sphere is centered on you. How do you specify locations on it? First, you measure along the horizon an angle from north, clockwise. This is called the azimuth. North is 0, east is 90, south is 180, west is 270, then back around to north which is sometimes called 360 as well as 0.

Then you measure up from the horizon, another angle. This is called the altitude (or more often in my experience, the elevation, but this diagram says altitude).

The zenith is directly overhead. Azimuth can be anything, elevation is 90 degrees. One more important line is the “celestial meridian,” the line running from due south to the zenith, and then down to due north. This doesn’t seem to mean much at this point but it will turn out to be very useful.

This system is also used a lot in aviation, it’s ideal, for instance, for specifying the direction of an airplane seen by a radar. Also, those numbers at the ends of runways actually are a reference to azimuth; an runway with (say) 15 painted at the end runs in the 150 degrees azimuth direction. That’s the direction you need to point your plane to land on that runway (assuming you want to stay on that runway after touching down, that is). The one difference is here they determine which way north is with a compass, rather than off of true north. And, yes, at the other end of the runway the number is 33, because if you’re landing there, you’re flying in the opposite direction, which will differ by 18 (= 180 degrees).

Artillery is another application. Once they’ve computed the exact direction you need to fire the gun (based on a number of things including curvature of the earth) it’s easy to tell someone to point the gun at azimuth 267 elevation 39. (Actually I think they are more precise than that.) Also surveying; it’s relatively easy to measure the direction of a mountain, then how far it sticks up above the horizontal plane.

Some telescopes have mounts that swivel around a vertical axis, then allow you to tilt the telescope up; this is called an “azimuthal” mount (or more commonly, an “alt azimuth” mount) because it naturally follows this coordinate system.

An alt-azimuth mount is used for a lot of very large amateur telescopes; the other alternative (which will be discussed in due course) is much more expensive and impractical for large telescopes.

But there’s an even more specialized case. There’s a thing called a “transit telescope.” It does not swivel horizontally at all. It can only move in elevation. And it’s fixed so that its azimuth is either 180 or 0. In other words it can point only along the celestial meridian. Here is an example:

It doesn’t seem like such a thing would be very useful, but in fact it’s very useful. I’ll explain in due course.

The local horizontal coordinate system, by the way, works quite naturally for flat Earthers as well. In fact it’s in some ways more natural for them, because everyone on Earth is believed by flat Earthers to have the same horizon plane. On a spherical earth, every point on the globe has its own unique version of this system (though it’s very hard to tell the difference for distances less than a few miles). The ancient flat earth model had the celestial sphere at a great distance (effectively infinity) so this was a natural for them (the earth was flat and finite, and the stars were fixed to a literal sphere that would rotate around the earth, with stars actually going under the earth after they set). The modern flat earth model conceives of the sky as being a big physical dome only a few thousand miles away, so it makes some difference where you are on earth, describing the location of some star. You could be directly under it, but someone a few thousand miles away will see the star as not being overhead. The orientation of the system is the same for both people but their centers will be offset enough to make a difference.

So LHC is easy…but it has a major drawback. As the Earth rotates west-to-east, the sky appears to rotate east-to-west, and the stars will move along arcs that do not conveniently follow either the elevation or azimuth axes of such mounts. Literally from one second to the next, the stars change coordinates!

[A geek inside joke: LHC is a “left handed” coordinate system, unlike most, and people often claim that LHC really stands for “left handed coordinates.”]

Celestial Coordinates

It would be handy to have a system where the stars do not change coordinates. That way you can look up a star’s location. You then have to do some math to figure out, based on your location and the time, where the star should be in your local horizontal coordinates, but at least you can (in principle) do the math and know where to look. (Nowadays there are web pages and apps to do that for you.) But there’s a very important point here. The formulae to do this were derived based on a full celestial sphere (not a flat earther dome) and they require your location specified on a globe. If the Earth were flat, and the stars on a small dome, these formulae would not work because they’d be based on nonsense.

But they do work. Perfectly. You can predict sunrise and sunset times and azimuths decades in advance. You have to correct for refraction which is worse near the horizon, but then these formulas are dead-nuts on, without fail. The celestial sphere and spherical earth models work, and they work because the models are in accord with reality. Flat earth provides you no mathematical method whatsoever to even attempt to do these computations…much less a method that would actually give you the right fooking answer every time, in every place.

With that rant out of the way, I have to do an aside: There’s a caveat about what I am about to describe. Absolutely nothing in the sky is truly stationary. But there are fast motions (the Earth’s rotation, the Earth’s orbiting the Sun, the motion of the Moon and planets) that you can readily observe, and others that take decades to become apparent, and even then perhaps only with very sensitive instruments. We will ignore everything but the fast motions. I’m going to skip right past precession of the equinoxes and proper motions of the stars and perturbations to the Earth’s orbital plane. They’re there, but too small to make any difference in the short term, and people usually teach them after they teach the “simple” case I am presenting here. OK, finally we can move on.

I alluded to there being four major systems. The other three are all designed so that star, galaxy and nebula coordinates don’t change (at least not over the span of decades). They are the equatorial, ecliptic, and galactic coordinates. We are going to talk about equatorial coordinates here. How do they work? They are actually defined by analogy with the Earth. With the Earth, we specify two numbers and they identify a unique point on the Earth’s surface. (The fact that the Earth isn’t quite spherical introduces a lot of complications that only matter when you’re trying to be really, surveyor-grade precise…ugly, ugly math; I’ve had to deal with it.)

Similarly we can specify two numbers, and identify a specific location on the celestial sphere, and we even have analogues to the equator and poles.

On Earth, we have latitude and longitude. Latitude essentially [not quite because it’s an ellipsoid] measures distance away from the equator, in degrees along the Earth’s curved surface, or in other words, how far north or south the point is. Longitude measures an angle east or west from some meridian line (a line which runs from the north pole to the south pole, intersecting the equator at a ninety degree angle). The choice of meridian line is arbitrary; we’ve settled on using the one that runs through the observatory at Greenwich, England.

We can do something similar to latitude and longitude on the celestial sphere. It turns out that since the Earth rotates, we can extend that axis of rotation (which goes from the north pole through the center of the earth to the south pole) out to infinity; the points where it touches the celestial sphere are the north and south celestial poles. The poles are stationary [aside from the caveat above].

Similarly you can think of a plane that goes through the equator of the Earth and the center of the Earth. You can extend that out to infinity, and where it crosses the celestial sphere, that is the celestial equator.

You can measure an angle from the celestial equator north or south to some object out in space (a planet, star, nebula or galaxy). However, we don’t call it a latitude, we call it a declination.

The constellation of Orion actually straddles the celestial equator. If you are in the northern hemisphere, the right hand star of the three on Orion’s belt, Mintaka, is nearly dead-on the celestial equator; it’s 0.3 degrees south declination. (If you’re in the southern hemisphere, Orion looks “upside down” compared to what we see in the US, and Mintaka will be the leftmost star in Orion’s belt. If you’re still confused, it’s the first of the three to rise or set.)

The stars are stationary [besides the caveat]. On the other hand, the planets–indeed any object within the solar system–move visibly.

The Earth orbits the Sun. That causes the Sun to appear to move against the celestial sphere. The Earth’s orbit is a plane. The intersection of that plane and the celestial sphere is yet another circle, called the ecliptic.

Since the Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted about 23.5 degrees with respect to its orbit, the celestial equator is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to the ecliptic, as shown below.

But since we’re thinking in a set of coordinates that goes from the celestial equator, we think of it the other way around: we think of the ecliptic being tilted with respect to the celestial equator.

The other planets’ orbits are in almost the same plane as our orbit. So what we see from Earth is that the other planets stick pretty close to the ecliptic. From the outside, looking in, looking at the solar system edge on, they stay almost in the same plane, sometimes a bit above and a bit below:

So when we draw the celestial sphere, we can draw the ecliptic on it. This line is the line the Sun appears to move along in the course of a year. The constellations this line goes through are the zodiac. Sort of. It actually goes through Ophiuchus as well as the “astrology sign” twelve, between Scorpius and Sagittarius, but no one is an Ophiuchus. (Actually since Ophiuchus is the “Serpent Bearer” Steve Irwin could have qualified. Unfortunately he was born at the wrong time of year.)

There are four key points on the ecliptic. Two of them are where the ecliptic intersects the celestial equator, they are the equinoxes, one the vernal equinox and the other the autumnal equinox. As the sun (appears to) move(s) along the ecliptic (counter clockwise in the diagram above) over the course of a year, it will cross from south of the celestial equator to being north of it at the vernal equinox, then from north to south at the autumnal equinox. The other two points are unlabeled on the diagram; those are the ones where the sun is furthest north or south from the celestial equator, these are the solstices. The December solstice is near the left edge of the diagram, the June solstice is near the right edge.

The solstices are where the Sun is at its minimum and maximum declination, respectively. (Stop and think about that, until it’s clear.) This is why the Sun is low in the sky at noon in December, and much higher at noon in June (or vice versa for southern hemisphere folks).

Those four points define the beginnings of the seasons. For example the center of the Sun’s disc will cross the vernal equinox at 3:01 PM Mountain Daylight Time [you guys in the Eastern time zone can do the conversion for a change instead of making us people in flyover country do it] on March 20th, 2025. That is the beginning of northern hemisphere spring. More immediately and relevantly, at 2:20 AM Mountain Standard Time on December 21 (a week from today), Winter begins; the Sun is, at that moment, at its lowest declination, or (another way of saying the same thing) its greatest southern declination. It’s pretty close to that declination right now.

I haven’t yet talked much about the celestial sphere equivalent of longitude, and deliberately so; I needed to discuss the ecliptic first. Because it turns out the vernal equinox is the “reference longitude” on the celestial sphere. It’s the zero line.

Only we don’t call it longitude, we call it “right ascension.” And traditionally, we don’t measure it in degrees, we measure it in hours, 24 to the circle–fifteen degrees make up one hour. And in minutes, 60 to the hour, and seconds, 60 to the minute. (Unfortunately degrees are divided up into 60 minutes and the minutes are devided into 60 seconds, so now we have two different kinds of “minutes.” A minute of right ascension is four minutes of the 360 degree circle.

(Sometimes right ascension is measured in degrees, that’s probably going to become the standard someday.)

Why is it called right ascension? I don’t know. This is a puzzler, because as seen from the Earth the numbers go up to the left, as you face south. (We are “outside” the sphere in the next diagram, in a sort of “God’s Eye View,” so they go up to the right. Maybe God named it right ascension.)

So here’s that first “celestial sphere” diagram, with the declination and right ascension lines and ecliptic, and solstices, and equinoxes, drawn onto it. The really bright “Sun” is at the Vernal Equinox. The one farthest to the right as you look at the diagram is the June solstice, the one on the far side of the globe is the Autumnal equinox, and all the way over on the left, is the December solstice.

Here is a map, plotted as if declination and right ascension were planar coordinates, of the sky, with the official boundaries between constellations noted. Note that the ecliptic is a sort of “roller coaster” track. The sun moves right to left along it over the course of a year.

[Side note: Notice, by the way that the Sun is actually in Pisces at the vernal Equinox…not just about to enter Aries, as the zodiacal signs’ association with calendar dates would imply. That is a result of the procession of the equinoxes having been able to act for a couple of thousand years since astrology was invented. In fact, we will eventually reach a point where the Sun will be just leaving Aquarius at the vernal equinox. That is what “the Age of Aquarius” means.]

So why on Earth is right ascension done in hours? To answer that, we need a bit of history. Before there were atomic clocks, how did we determine the time, and do so with some degree of precision?

Remember that transit telescope? You use one of those. You then watch for a specific star to cross the center of the telescope; when it does that it crosses your celestial meridian. You look up the right ascension of that star…and read off hours, minutes and seconds. That’s what time it is.

Well…not really. More work must be done. What you have is the sidereal time; the time with respect to the stars. (At this moment, you set a special sidereal clock to that time; if it’s accurate you don’t need to set it again for a while. Note though that a sidereal clock seems to run fast; it goes through one “day” in 23 hours, 56 minutes, and some number of seconds I’m too lazy to look up.) You have to do a bit of computation still. Sidereal time only matches your local solar time if the Sun happens to be at 12h right ascension. So you get to do some subtraction, where the sun is versus where that star is, and NOW you have your local solar time. Then you gotta correct for the fact that the Earth’s orbit is elliptical which means the sun’s motion along the ecliptic speeds up and slows down, to get your mean solar time (that involved looking something up in a table that someone else calculated, saving you the skull sweat). THEN you have to correct for the fact that you’re not in your time zone’s central meridian. That’s a simple addition or subtraction. And then…add a gratuitous fricking hour if you’re on daylight saving time.

THIS is why people used to call the observatory to get the precise time.

Mintaka, that belt star in Orion, is at 5h 32m right ascension. So, if it’s on the meridian right now, exactly south or north of you, the sidereal time is 5h 32m. Note though someone to the west or east of you is not seeing the star cross at the same time you are. You are your own personal time zone when it’s sidereal time!

Or think about it a different way. On the first day of (northern hemisphere) spring, the Sun is at RA 0h. When it crosses the meridian (i.e., at solar noon where you are), the sidereal time is 0h, which is sidereal midnight! Half a year later, the first day of fall, the Sun is on the other side of the sky, and it crosses your meridian at 12h sidereal time. Which means that at that time of year the Earth is facing the opposite direction (with respect to the stars) at noon, than it was on the first day of Spring. Sidereal time is actually a measure of which way the Earth is facing, with respect to the stars, not the sun. Solar time is a measure of which way the Earth is facing, with respect to the Sun. (If you find that confusing, you’re not alone. One of the Flerfer talking points is designed to exploit that confusion.)

Telescopes (and cameras) can be mounted on an equatorial mount.

There are two ways for this to pivot, one around the bar with the weights on it, for declination, and the other at 90 degrees to this, through the part that shows as diagonal lower left to upper right. That part of the mount should be set up parallel to the Earth’s axis of rotation, that way pivoting on that will change the right ascension the telescope is pointing at. This one has a cap at lower left, because there’s actually a small telescope inside the mount. You use that small telescope to ensure that you’ve pointed that axis directly at the north celestial pole; then you’re good to go. That axis is often motorized, too, so it will cause the telescope to turn as the sky turns. This is advantageous for long-exposure photography through the scope. That’s the advantage of this kind of mount, and the advantage of this coordinate system; as the earth rotates, a telescope can stay pointed at the same place simply by rotating through right ascension. There are other designs, too, like a fork mount:

The fork pivots around the black dot at its bottom for right ascension, declination is managed by the two joints joining the telescope to the fork. For extremely heavy telescopes you get an English or Yoke mount:

And finally the horseshoe mount, used by Palomar. If the telescope is actually pointing through the horseshoe, it’s looking very near the north celestial pole.

So here we are; we understand the celestial sphere, we understand the ecliptic, we understand how they tie together to define the seasons. As one last parting shot here, I’ll point out that the celestial poles are necessarily on the celestial meridian.

How do you as an observer standing somewhere on planet Earth, fit in? I’m showing a whole sphere of stars, but at any given time we can only see half of that sphere; the nighttime sky is half of the celestial sphere.

Remember these diagrams are for illustration purposes only. The real situation is the sphere should be drawn very large (oh, say a mile across) and the Earth should look like a pinhead. Even that isn’t enough, but it’s a lot closer.

What do you, standing in some particular spot, actually see? How does the equatorial celestial system relate to your local horizontal coordinates? I’m going to assume the northern hemisphere (as the people who draw the diagrams usually do), and so here’s the usual diagram.

There’s the viewer, standing somewhere in North America. It’s oriented so that he is standing vertically, which gives quite a tilt to the equatorial celestial sphere. Projected onto the celestial sphere is the viewer’s horizon.

In this diagram we are pretending the Earth is not moving, but rather that the sky is; an object on the equator appears to move clockwise, as you’re facing south. Turn around and face north, and the celestial sphere appears to be rotating counter clockwise around the pole. That pole is almost at the north star, Polaris.

The pole is above the horizon by a certain angle. What is that angle?

That turns out to be easy. If you were standing at the north pole latitude 90 degrees North, the celestial pole would be directly overhead, which is to say, 90 degrees above the horizon. If you happened to be on the equator, latitude 0, though, the north celestial pole would be sitting due north, on the horizon, i.e., 0 degrees above the horizon.

So in essence the altitude above the horizon of the celestial pole, is equal to the north latitude of the observer. This is true in the southern hemisphere as well, almost; the altitude of the south celestial pole is equal to the south latitude of the observer. Notice that the stars will appear to circle the south celestial pole in the clockwise direction (this is probably easiest to see if you imagine the paths around the opposite pole marked in the middle diagram below).

This is why the globe earth model predicts that the stars will appear to spin clockwise in the Southern hemisphere. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter where you are standing (Africa, Australia, South America); you will the SAME stars rotating about the same pole. This is impossible on the flat Earth, since people facing south are facing in completely different directions on the disc world. The stars cannot simultaneously be circling around a point due south to all viewers, when the direction “due south” is different for every viewer.

One more thing: Notice in the right hand diagram, that some stars will never set; the ones fairly close to the celestial pole run in circles that are small enough they don’t dip below the horizon. In fact, it’s those stars within a certain angle of the pole, and that angle is also the same as your latitude. Conversely facing south, there are stars that will never rise above the horizon, again a circle of stars centered on the south celestial pole, and being within “your latitude” degrees of the south celestial pole.

When at the North pole, you can see every thing in the north celestial hemisphere, all of the time, but can never, ever see anything in the south celestial hemisphere.

And this applies not just to the stars but to the Sun. During the six months the Sun is in the northern celestial hemisphere, it too can be seen all of the time; the north pole therefore has six continuous months of daylight. Once the Sun goes into the south celestial hemisphere, you get six months of night. Similarly, the south pole has six months of daylight when the Sun is in the south celestial hemisphere, and six months of darkness otherwise.

For places on Earth near to, but not at the pole, there is some period of time less than six months long during which the Sun’s declination is high enough that the Sun does not set, and you have a twenty four hour sun. At Union Glacier, the site of the Final Experiment, the latitude is 79.75 degrees south so any time the sun’s declination is 10.25 degrees south (or further south than that) Union Glacier has 24 hour sun.

When on the equator, absolutely everything will be visible for half of the sidereal day, but if it’s something close to either pole, it won’t get that high in the sky. The celestial poles themselves will be sitting right on the horizon.

Here’s one more diagram showing, for three different declinations, an object’s apparent path across the sky, for someone at 35 degrees north latitude.

The object is the sun, at the two solstices (declination +/- 23.5 degrees) and on the equinoxes (declination 0).

When the sun is at a high declination, it rises in the northeast, climbs high in the sky, is at its highest as it crosses the meridian directly south of the observer, then sets in the northwest. When the sun is at equinox, it rises directly due east, climbs somewhat high in the sky, culminating at the meridian, then sets precisely to the observer’s west. Finally when the sun is at a low declination, it rises in the southeast, doesn’t get too far up in the sky, but does reach a maximum at the meridian, and then sets in the southwest. Note that different fractions of the total sun path are below the horizon. Most of the Dec. 21 path is below the horizon, which is why the daytime is so short in winter. Conversely the summer path is mostly above the horizon, which makes for long summer days. The sun is covering the same ascension angle in the same time, it’s just that more of the total arc is above the horizon in the summer, and less in the winter.

In the southern hemisphere imagine all of those sun paths leaning the other way, with the south celestial pole above the horizon. Now the December 21 path is the one that has most of its length above the horizon. The sun rises in the southeast, swings around to a high spot north of the observer (and, of course, on the meridian), then sets in the southwest. This is another concrete prediction of the Globe Earth; the flat earth has the sun circling around a point well north of the observer, so the sun should start in the northeast, come closest north of the observer, then set in the northwest. At no time in the Flat Earth model is the Sun ever to the south of the observer, certainly not at sunrise and sunset (provided the observer is further south than 23.5 degrees south latitude).

So here we are. This is how celestial coordinates work. And they do work.

I found this whole kerfuffle about the 24 hour moon to be a “teachable moment.” That’s a Leftist mislabeling of “perfect moment to try to indoctrinate people” but I actually mean “teachable moment.” Flerfers reading this will, I hope, accept it as possibly the first coherent/comprehensive explanation of the topic they’ve ever read (assuming it is coherent), then they can decide for themselves whether it makes sense (though I hope they take into their accounting that it works and can predict, e.g., sunrise and sunset with perfect accuracy).

This one ran a bit overlong but I hope it was illuminating.

44 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes until the Once And Future President, Donald John Trump, is restored to the office that was Rightfully his the last four years.

Not that I’m counting, mind you.

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

January 6 Tapes?

Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

Day of Infamy

One thing that many are counting is the 83rd anniversary of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

When I was a kid it seemed like every account of World War II didn’t just call it an “attack” but rather a “sneak attack.”

It seems that we were as outraged by the “sneak” as we were by the “attack.” What made it a sneak attack was that it happened with no declaration of war by Japan. Here we are at peace with each other and WHAM!! our Pacific fleet is burning or already at the bottom of the harbor. (We can argue whether Roosevelt knew it was going to happen and let it happen, or whether we just got caught napping…either way the effect on the public was the same. I do think Roosevelt was on some level happy that we were in the war; he had up to that time wanted to help the allies a lot more than the American people did.)

If the telling in Tora! Tora! Tora! is to be believed (and I tend to believe it), the Japanese didn’t intend it to be a sneak attack. They intended to pass their declaration of war on to our government and then attack almost immediately, but slow decoding of the dispatch prevented that from happening; the attack happened before the message was delivered.

Whether that would have made a difference in the level of resolve we felt, is another question entirely. And so we have a straight line from this–the photograph taken from one of the Japanese aircraft just after the start of the attack, educating us on the folly of bottling up our fleet and parking our aircraft too close together:

To these two photographs, taken from two different aircraft, the Enola Gay and the Bockscar after they did a couple of “physics package” demos to complete Japan’s education in the folly of their foreign policy:

We had learned the lesson Japan had taught us on this day in 1941.

We are excellent teachers as well as studentsl we reinforced our lesson for the Japanese by repeating it. But we did a slightly different demo the second time–plutonium instead of U-235–in order not to be too repetitive.

The lesson stuck. Japan hasn’t been a problem on that scale, since.

And now, on to the Deep State, which needs a salutary lesson of its own.

News Flash

Today, it is still the case that Joe Biden didn’t Win.

I realize that to some readers, this might be a shock; surely at some point things must change and Biden will have actually won.

But the past cannot actually be changed.

It will always and forever be the case that Joe Biden didn’t win.

And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss it as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.

As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.

And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.

So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things: I continue to carry the banner once also carried by Wheatie. His Fraudulency didn’t win.

Let’s Go, Brandon!!

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $2,650.10
Silver $30.69
Platinum $954.00
Palladium $1002.00
Rhodium $4,850.00
FRNSI* 127.199-
Gold:Silver 86.351-

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $2,634.20
Silver $31.11
Platinum $936.00
Palladium $982.00
Rhodium $4,850.00
FRNSI* 126.429+
Gold:Silver 84.674-

Gold down and silver up. This is good news for silver, which has been rising relative to gold, finally recovering somewhat from the disproportionate beating it took since the election.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

The Final Experiment

…starts in one week.

Eric Dubay of the two hundred proofs contradicting himself, at one turn insisting he’d love to go to Antarctica to see for himself, and when offered the opportunity, refusing to concede that he had ever said so.

Disgraceful behavior from the Flerfers. Predicted by the globers. Will Duffy initially didn’t believe they’d turn on their own like this (as the globers said they would), but finally just had to come out and call them on it.

In related news, one of the globers had to back out for medical reasons. The Final Experiment is actually getting a special campsite at almost 80 degrees South–one where no terrain will occlude the Sun– and now they were below the threshold (nine) that the company doing the logistics actually needed for the special camp. So Duffy had to find someone to take the open slot.

And who stepped up? A full-blown, Hollywood-grade documentary producer named Jonathan Mariande. He will make a documentary of the trip.

AND MARIANDE IS A FLAT EARTHER.

This will make it even harder for the Flerfers to tap dance around what happens.

It must be great to be a charlatan and make money off of suckers…until the truth outs. Then suddenly you see your life turning to garbage. Sorry, no sympathy from me.

It Came From Deep Space

If there’s one thing almost all of the moons of the outer solar system…and all of the TNOs…share in common it’s that they’re largely made out of water ice.

Honestly if anyone tries to sell you on the idea that space aliens are going to come here to steal our water, just laugh in their faces.

They don’t even have to come almost all the way to Earth just to filch water from our TNOs, they certainly have similar things in their own systems. Water is the most common heteronuclear molecule (i.e. composed of more than one kind of atom) in space.

Which makes sense. Half of all of the “stuff” in the universe that is not hydrogen and is not helium, is oxygen. And after being blasted out into space in a planetary nebula or supernova, the first thing an oxygen atom is likely to find (once thing settle down enough to let it hang onto eight electrons) is a hydrogen atom, or even a hydrogen molecule, because there are seventy grams of hydrogen for every gram of oxygen…which means 1100 hydrogen atoms for every oxygen atom. There’s plenty of helium around too but that’s fluff from a chemical standpoint. So the first thing that lone oxygen atom is going to find isn’t another oxygen atom to form O₂, but hydrogen, to form OH then another to form H₂O. Badda-bing! Water.

This notion of most solid things being made largely out of water ice is foreign to us, because Earth is almost purely rocks (which, OBTW, generally contain plenty of oxygen) and (deep, deep down) iron-nickel. If Earth actually had its share of water, it’d be Water World, with no rocks within hundreds of miles of the surface. It would look like Europa would look, if Europa melted. (Europa probably has more water in that subsurface ocean than Earth has in total, in spite of being much smaller than Earth.)

Where did our water go? It got blown away by heat. When the Earth first formed it was a molten mass; the water certainly vaporized, and at those temperatures Earth’s gravity would not hold it. Then the stream of energy and particles from the Sun would simply have whisked it away. (In fact we still lose a tiny bit of water vapor this way from our atmosphere even at our current temperatures.)

The next natural question is…OK, it’s not necessarily the next natural question, but this is my post and I’m going to go there anyway: So what would happen if one of those mostly-ice objects somehow ended up getting close to the Sun? The same thing.

You don’t have to take my word for it. This actually happens, a lot. Have a look.

Yes. Comets are basically bodies from the outer solar system that somehow end up getting into an orbit that brings them closer to the Sun. They spend billions of years “out there” just minding their own business, when some other body–perhaps another comet, or a planet, maybe even a rogue planet (one that has escaped its parent star) wanders through and perturbs its orbit, and it drops towards the Sun.

It’s now in a highly elliptical orbit. Depending on where it came from the comet may be regarded as a “short period” comet if it came from the Kuiper Belt or the scattered disk–places I talked about last time–or it may be a “long period” comet if it came from further out.

Further out?

It’s the existence of so many long-period comets that has convinced astronomers that the Kuiper Belt and scattered disk are not the outermost parts of the solar system. Instead it’s thought that these long-term comets originate from a very sparse and gigantic zone called the “Oort Cloud” (pronounced like “port” without the “p”) named after Jan Oort who first proposed it. (Note the third Dutch astronomer who has had a major role in this series on the solar system.)

These orbit anywhere from 2000 to 50,000 AU, though estimates of that upper end vary; I’ve seen numbers as high as 200,000 AU for the upper bound, and so will you by the time you finish this.

For reference, the nearest (other) star to our solar system is at a distance of 268,551 AU (or 1.3 parsecs or 4.25 light years). [Which should tell you how ridiculously far apart stars are in comparison to the sizes of solar systems…much less the sizes of the stars themselves.]

We have never, ever detected an object that is in the Oort Cloud. Too far away, and too small. We only know about it from backtracking comets. And because of these “ambassadors” from the Oort cloud, we know a fair amount about the objects in the Oort Cloud, as a class. We can’t send a probe to them, not in this lifetime, but they sometimes come most of the way to us.

History

Comets have been known, and feared, since ancient times.

The night time sky is mostly changeless. Oh, the stars shift a bit westward from one night to the next, but after a full year, you’re back where you started from; that in fact is a direct consequence of our yearly orbit about the Sun.

We see planets and the moon moving around, but they are at least somewhat predictable (even by very ancient peoples); they tend to stick being near a band about the sky called the ecliptic. In fact the Sun stays on the ecliptic though that’s a bit harder to see since you can’t see the Sun and the stars at the same time. The point being the planets were predictable and though some people tried to do “woo” with planetary positions, people in general weren’t scared of them.

There were also shooting stars, but even though those are quite unpredictable, they’re fairly frequent.

But a comet? Comets are big, spectacular, hang around for months, and completely unpredictable. There could be a big one next year. Or not. Thus they tended to be regarded as bad omens.

And then came Sir Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley.

Isaac Newton, I’ve discussed enough. He was able to show that a force that could be described mathematically (and thus, precisely) was responsible for the orbits of the planets. At that point they became viewed as essentially a clockwork. His work was published in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, thanks in part to Edmond Halley’s funding and encouragement.

Halley had already made observations of a comet that showed up in September of 1682. He used that data to show that that comet, too, was in an orbit fully consistent with Newton’s gravitation, but rather than a nearly circular orbit, the comet was in a highly elliptical orbit–one with an eccentricity of 0.96658, where 0 is circular and 1.0 is a parabola or line segment. And the orbit has a period of 76 years. Its semi-major axis (i.e., halfway along its length) is 17.737 AU, its nearest approach to the Sun is 0.59279 AU (inside the orbit of Venus), while its furthest distance is 35.14 AU, beyond the orbit of Neptune (which wasn’t known yet!).

Halley published this in 1705, along with data on other comets.

But here was the key implication: There’s be another comet in 1682+76=1758, but it would actually be the comet of 1682, returning.

And sure enough, sixteen years after his death in 1742 at the age of 82, a comet showed up…and it was in the right place, following the right path. That comet is now known as “Halley’s Comet.” (“Halley,” by the way, rhymes with “Valley,” at least that’s the way most people with that name pronounce it today. We’re not 100% sure that’s they way they pronounced it back then, it might have rhymed with “Holly.” Or it may actually have been Hail-ee, as it is commonly pronounced by non-astronomers.)

[Note, by the way, that the animation shows Halley’s comet orbiting clockwise. Yes, it’s retrograde just like irregular satellites are. But if you think about it other than minimum distance this looks an awful lot like an irregular satellite.]

Halley had predicted a comet. And thus, comets became something explicable. Sure, we couldn’t predict when the next long term comet would show up, but the short term ones we could predict like clockwork, and either kind, once visible, would follow predictions as to their path across the sky.

Well, mostly. The difficulty is, that an orbital calculation assumes the object isn’t under any kind of thrust. But when a comet is near the Sun, it’s constantly outgassing as it warms up…and those jets of gas act like random rocket burns. But now we knew what comets are, and that took all of the supernatural “woo” out of them.

And the terror. Well, mostly; but 1910 is a special case of panic caused by scientific illiteracy.

Once comets became an irregular but nevertheless normal phenomenon, astronomers started looking for them. Any unexpected, diffuse blob in a telescope could turn out to be a comet in the early stages of warming up and outgassing. Charles Messier (1730-1817), in fact, made it a hobby to look for comets, and made a catalog of objects–ones that were nebulous in appearance but were not comets–that had fooled him, so that he could check against it in the future to weed out false alarms. This is now known as the Messier catalog, and although it’s by no means comprehensive (it has 110 objects in it), it’s famous. Many objects in the sky are known by their Messier numbers, for example M 31 in Andromeda (the “Andromeda Galaxy”) or M 1, the Crab Nebula. Amateur astronomers even hold “Messier Marathons” during the one month of the year when they are all visible sometime, somewhere, between dusk and dawn, trying to get all of them. (On my one attempt, I got all but 15 or so of them.) Messier did discover 13 comets, and co-discovered a fourteenth.

Now that we knew what we were looking for, we have found Halley’s comet in records from 240 BCE, in Chinese chronicles. And then in 164 BCE in a couple of Babylonian tablets…actually fragments of tablets. And again in 87 BCE in more Babylonian tablets. (And it may be depicted on Armenian coins.)

The appearance of 12 BCE was recorded in China. It likely passed pretty close to Earth then. It so happened that in Rome, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa died at that time, so the Romans took it as an omen of his death. It is also sometimes cited as a possible Star of Bethlehem (though it seems a bit early for that to me).

There is a possible record of the appearance of 66 CE, the Chinese recorded its appearance in 141. Then we apparently missed one, because the next one is 374, then 451 (heralding the defeat of Attila the Hun). Past that point, we can find every single appearance in the records. The most famous of these was in 1066, meaning someone was going to have a very bad year. Well, it was either going to be Harold (if he lost the English throne) or William (if Harold stopped him from seizing the British throne). It’s convenient that no matter what happens, the comet will turn out to have been an omen! And of course we know that Harold lost out to William the Conqueror, bringing the French language with him. (And English spelling has sucked ever since.)

The comet is depicted on the Bayeaux Tapestry, telling the history of the Battle of Hastings:

Speaking of the Star of Bethlehem, in 1305 Giotto di Bondone produced a work, the Adoration of the Magi, which depicts the star of Bethlehem as a comet. How did he know what a comet looked like? He had seen Halley’s comet in 1301, and that time, it was visually spectacular.

As it turns out, one of the probes that visited Halley’s Comet in 1986, was named Giotto after this artist.

In 1835 the comet appeared, and Mark Twain was born two weeks after its closest approach to the Sun. It was during this apparition that German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (who also developed the Bessel functions–very eclectic stuff) suggested that jets of evaporating material might supply enough force to alter a comet’s orbit.

In 1909 Twain stated that he “came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'” And sure enough, Twain died on 21 April 1910, the day after the comet’s closest approach to the Sun.

In 1910, we had the benefit of spectroscopy and photography. We could tell from the light, what the comet was made of. One thing found was the toxic gas cyanogen. Earth was expected to pass through the tail of the comet, so a panic ensued with people afraid all life on Earth would be snuffed out, and thus buying gas masks and “anti-comet pills” that were useless (a better record than COVID “vaccines”). The fact of the matter is that a comet’s tail is so diffuse it had no effect.

Here’s the comet in 1910, taken from the Yerkes Observatory, at the time home to the largest telescope in existence. (It still is the largest refracting telescope in existence.)

Based on my grandfather’s recollection, it was a spectacular appearance. Or perhaps he was remembering a different comet; the Great Daylight Comet of [January] 1910, which could be seen even in daytime!

Speaking of comet tails…now would be a good time to discuss the structure comets. Or it may be a bad time. But this is my post, so we will.

The Anatomy of a Comet

At the very heart of a comet is the nucleus. This is the icy object that–when it’s out in the Kuiper Belt, Scattered Disk, or Oort Cloud, just minds its own business, it’s a bunch of ice, dust, and rocks, mostly water ice but also carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane and ammonia. They range from 100 meters across to possibly as much as 30 km across. Often they are called “dirty snowballs.” Comets that have passed by the Sun multiple times in the past will tend to have more rock and dust at their surfaces–any ice there boiled off during a previous visit. They are very dark in color, reflecting as little as four percent of the light that reaches them.

Surrounding the nucleus is the coma, it’s basically the sum total of all of the stuff that is outgassing from the comet, and any dust that is being carried along with the outgassing. It can be thousands or even millions of kilometers across.

Here you can see the nucleus of the Hartley comet, complete with very active jets of material:

The tails form…yes, I said “tails”…when the coma material interacts with either solar radiation or the solar wind. One tail will be curved and will consist of the dust and other (relatively) heavy particles. The other is the gas tail, pure gases, and that one will always point directly away from the Sun; these are lighter things that are pushed away instantly by the pressure of the solar radiation.

The gas tail glows because the gases become ionized…in other words it actually emits light. The dust tail, on the other hand shines by reflected sunlight (like planets do).

Tails have been known to be 3.8 AU long… that’s over half a billion kilometers.

The one statistic that I clearly remember reading a lot when I was younger was how rarefied a comet’s tail is. For all of the visual appearance, it’s a near perfect vacuum (just not as close as space normally is). But I haven’t been able to nail it down on the internet. Suffice it to say it’s very, very sparse.

Here’s an animation

So, comets are huge, when they’re active.

Comets that pass by the Sun multiple times will eventually run out of ice to have vaporize. They may then resemble asteroids, or the object may have no cohesion and become swarms of small objects–dust particles, mostly. Those can eventually cause meteor showers on Earth when the Earth eventually passes through them. There are a number of these over the course of a year, generally named for the constellation the meteors seem to radiate from as seen from the ground. Typically there are good and bad years for meteor showers, depending on whether Earth is cutting through the center of the swarm or not.

Categories of Comet

As alluded to above, comets are roughly divided between short period and long period. Short period, or to many astronomers, just plain “periodic” comets are generally those whose period is less than 200 years. Usually, but by no means always, they orbit in at a low inclination, close to the ecliptic, the plane of the planets’ orbits, and in the same direction as the planets. This is an important clue. Short term comets are generally former long term comets that passed too close to one of the planets and had their orbits perturbed. Many will be sub-grouped into “families” based on the outermost extent of their orbits; that’s thought to be an indication as to which planet did the deed. In the case of Halley’s comet, since its orbit extends just a bit past Neptune’s orbit, it’s believed that Neptune perturbed its orbit. The largest of these families is (no surprise) the Jupiter family. There are also comets that orbit within the asteroid belt…they have the right composition, but very little outgassing happens that far away from the Sun.

Long Period comets can have periods of thousands or even millions of years. Those latter are our evidence for the existence of the Oort cloud. Comets C/1999 F1 and C/2017 T2 (PANSTARRS) have a semi major axis of 35,000 AU and a period of six million years. If you missed them when they first showed up, you’re basically out of luck as far as seeing them the next time. You’ll have to wait for them to reach their maximum distance from the Sun…over a light year (!), then come back.

But some comets are literally never expected to come back; those are the single-apparition comets.

If the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud seem a bit bewildering here is another diagram for comparison…actually it’s three diagrams, one each of the asteroid belt, Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud. These are not drawn to any kind of scale; for instance in the last diagram the planet orbits and Kuiper belt are much too big; and as always the planets themselves and even the Sun are drawn much too large (they should be much less than one pixel in size).

Other Famous Comets

There are over 3,500 known comets. Most never get bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, but some become famous for one reason or another. Halley’s comet, of course, is the undisputed celebrity.

9P/Tempel was discovered in 1867 by William Tempel, and has a 5.6 year period. We lost track of it in 1898 and assumed it had disintegrated, but it was rediscovered in 1967. It turned out that its orbit had been perturbed, and that is how we lost it; it wasn’t where we expected it to be. We have sent probes to this one.

Kohoutek (C 1973 C1) in 1973 was a fizzle. Early estimates of how bright it would get made it seem as if it would be one of the brightest comets of the century, but then…big nothing! And it faded from sight by the end of January 1974. It’s hard to predict how bright a new comet will be, because we rarely have a good feel for how much ice it has, how deeply it’s buried, and so on. On a comet’s second trip, though, we will have a past history to go off of.

Kohoutek is a classic long term comet. Its measured eccentricity was between 0.9999 and 1.0. A 1.0 orbit is an escape orbit (barely), so we don’t expect to see Kohoutek again any time soon. Current estimates are that it is in a 75,000 year orbit. It passed only 0.14 AU from the Sun, meaning it went inside the orbit of Mercury.

Hyakutake in 1996 passed very near Earth (about 15 million km) over the north pole and was readily visible late at night (rather than being buried in twilight. I went outside the city away from the lights to see it as it traversed the Big Dipper and it noticeably moved in just ten or fifteen minutes. This was an unusual opportunity, comets are usually brightest (as seen from Earth) near the sun so it’s unusual to see a bright comet in a truly dark sky.

The comet came in from “below” the plane of the ecliptic (bottom center), crossed the plane of the ecliptic then over our north pole on March 22, zipped through perihelion (closest approach to the Sun, then dropped below the plane of the ecliptic and exited, lower right. Unlike with Kohoutek, this probably isn’t Hyakutake’s first visit; it’s in a 17,000 year orbit with an excentricity of “only” 0.99989.

The Ulysses spacecraft–one studying the Sun–passed through Hyakutake’s tail.

Hyakutake, however, was overshadowed by Hale Bopp, just a few months later in 1997. Hale Bopp is actually the comet I used at the beginning of this post. I unfortunately never got a good look at it. At most I saw some fuzz at twilight, and then it would set. I could never get far enough away from the city fast enough at sunset to get a good look at it. Apparently it came into its own later, after I had given up on it. So for me Hyakutake was “the” comet.

So I really missed the boat on this one, but I’ll get another crack at it in abut 2400 years. This is by no means a short-period comet but it has a significantly shorter period than Kohoutek and Hyakutake, and its orbit has a semi-major axis of a mere 177 AU.

Shoemaker-Levy 9 This one, no one would ever have cared about (other than Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker, and David Levy, the co-discoverers of it the comet. They discovered it in 1993…and it had already broken into 21 pieces, probably sometime in 1992 when it approached Jupiter (yes…tidal forces!). But then when they plotted its orbit, the astronomers realized two things: the pieces were actually in orbit about Jupiter, not the Sun, and also that they were going to make direct hits on Jupiter in July of 1994! (Hard to believe that was thirty years ago!)

By the time it hit, Shoemaker-Levy 9 was in twenty one pieces and every one of them hit Jupiter.

The comet fragments were up to 2 km in diameter…meaning before it broke up it was actually pretty big.

How would Jupiter hold up getting pummeled like this?

The bad news is the pieces hit just into the dark side of Jupiter. That means we couldn’t see the actual moments of impact from Earth. Hubble got retasked to look; The Ulysses probe got retasked…and the Galileo orbiter was 1.6 AUs out, but it could actually see the impact site. NOTHING was more important than this.

One of the most famous pictures in astronomy is of the black holes the impacts left in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The largest piece, G, hit with 6,000,000 megatons of of energy. It took months for the atmosphere to recover from the hits. Some of the blemishes were the size of Earth.

Perhaps we will leave such smoking holes in the Deep State, shortly.

This was particularly poignant for Eugene Shoemaker. He almost got to go to the Moon on Apollo 17 as the geologist, but for medical reasons never got to do it. He was however the head of the geology program for many years..

But one of his big “things” was warning people about the dangers of possible future asteroid and comet impacts. He spent time studying Meteor Crater in Arizona, he discovered that the Ries in Germany was an old impact crater (that wasn’t hard. It turned out that St. George’s church in Nördlingen was built out of rock that clearly had been altered by the force of an asteroid impact (it’s very distinctive; no volcano or other Earth-bound force can produce it). After that all he had to do was find the right quarry in order to bag his…er…quarry.

Geologists and astronomers had pooh-poohed his warnings, but Shoemaker-Levy 9 vindicated him completely. Now we’re quite aware of the very real danger of being hit by one of these objects. We’ve had two significant…but still very small…pieces hit since 1900, both in Russia: 1908 Tunguska and 2013 Chelyabinsk.

Exploration

When recounting the history of Halley’s comet, I stopped at 1910, not 1986. That’s because we were able to send probes…yes more than one…to the comet because we had plenty of advance notice. In fact we sent five probes. The European Space Agency sent Giotto, the Soviet Union sent Vega 1 and Vega 2, Japan sent Sakigake and Suisei.

NASA didn’t do a damned thing. However they did send a mission, ICE, to another comet the year before, and therefore the first mission to study a comet was an American probe. Another six missions have been sent to other comets since, including one lander and one deliberate impact:

Deep Space (launched 1998) used an ion drive for manuevering. It had two targets, it missed its first target and managed to reach its second target.

Stardust (launched 1999) actually captured dust from Wild, one of its target comets, and launched a capsule that returned that dust to Earth. So we got to put bits of comet into test tubes in a lab here on Earth. The other comet was…well let me hold that until later.

CONTOUR (launched 2002) was intended to study two comets but failed. Plan B was to head to yet a third comet, but the spacecraft couldn’t be contacted. Can’t win ’em all.

All missions up to that time were flybys, but we actually set up an orbiter, Rosetta, launched by the European Space Agency in 2004. It orbited 67P Churymov-Gerasimenko in 2014 and attempted to land. In the meantime, it took pictures, like this one.

Rosetta had company; ESA had launched two probes on the same day and Philae‘s purpose from the start was to land on the comet. It actually ended up bouncing multiple times, and ended up in partial shadow, limiting its useful lifetime. Philae was last heard from in 2015.

Finally there was Deep Impact, launched in 2005. Yes, one of the two big “asteroid hitting the Earth” movies from 1998 bore that name, but neither Wikipedia page references the other, so there’s not even a “name inspired by…” connection that I can find. The goal here was to study the internal composition of a comet, so the probe actually launched an impactor, and then photographed the light flash. That was comet 9P/Tempel (a fairly well known comet, though not as famous as Halley’s comet). The main craft went on to take the picture of Hartley I showed above.

Tempel is actually a fairly well known comet, it was first observed in 1867 by William Tempel, and has a 5.6 year period. We lost track of it in 1898 and assumed it had disintegrated, but it was rediscovered in 1967. It turned out that its orbit had been perturbed, and that is how we lost it; it wasn’t where we expected it to be.

Here is a composite image based on photographs taken by Deep Impact before the impact.

Here is a photograph taken by the impactor, before it became like a bug on a windshield, on July 4, 2005.

If that’s a bit boring. how about an “oh, SHIT!” GIF?

Or as seen from the main spacecraft:

The impact speed was 10.3 km/second and delivered energy equivalent to 4.7 tons of TNT. We predicted that the crater would be about 100 m across. Only in 2011 did we find out…thanks to a flyby by Stardust, that the crater was roughly 200 m across.

The Impactor bore a CD with the names of 625,000 people encoded on it.

Smack! in Popular Culture

What would happen if one of these hit the Earth?

Well, it would suck. A 1 km wide body hitting us would make every hurricane and earthquake in history put together look like nothing; the entire planet would be affected.

Consider that a long term comet will be moving at pretty close to solar escape velocity. Which when it hit the earth would be about 42 km/sec. Earth would be moving at 30 km/sec. The typical scenario is a right-angle collision, basically Earth getting T-boned by the comet; that’s a collision speed of 51.6 km/sec. Under very unusual (but not impossible) circumstances where the comet’s closest approach is 1 AU and it happens to be headed in exactly the opposite direction to Earth’s motion it could be a head-on collision at 72 km/second, but that’s so unlikely that it’s only worth contemplating if you are so tired of winning that 51.6 km/sec isn’t enough to adequately ruin your day.

An object of, say, 1km in size popping in at that speed would be catastrophic, especially if it hit the ocean. Humanity would probably survive–a death toll of 90+ percent is not 100 percent, but the survivors might find themselves blown back into the stone age…and the lasting effects would make “climate change” look like a mouse fart. Make the asteroid or comet much bigger and…we probably wouldn’t survive.

Tempel, by the way, averages about 6km across. Fortunately it doesn’t cross our orbit and if it did, it wouldn’t be at quite that high a speed.

This doesn’t mean we haven’t contemplated both comet and asteroid strikes. We know an asteroid strike either killed off the dinosaurs, or helped do so. We have those two movies from 1998, Deep Impact and Armageddon. Deep Impact was from a scientific basis a much better movie but it didn’t have Bruce Willis in it.

We also have fiction. Lucifer’s Hammer (1977) was a book by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. They’re both good authors, and they are even better when they work together. It details the discovery of a comet that’s going to come very close to Earth, and follows a number of different people before, during and after the impact. The survivors fight to maintain civilization in the face of torrential rains that lasted for months, hordes of other survivors reduced to barbarism, and the incipient ice age triggered by the impact. Highly recommended.

And then it turned out that the original concept of the novel was that alien invaders had deliberately caused the impact, this time with a moonlet brought from Saturn. For whatever reason their editors had rejected that concept, but Niven and Pournelle had the last laugh; in 1985 they published Footfall, quite possibly the best alien invasion novel ever. And yes, the aliens dropped one in the Indian ocean, killing billions. Also Highly recommended.

Where Our Water Came From

Not every cometary collision is a bad one though. I mentioned at the beginning of this post that Earth lost its water back at the beginning, so the question arises, how is it we have any now? We believe that it was mostly brought in by comets, shortly after the planet cooled. There were a lot more of them back then, and Earth did its part to reduce the numbers.

Nemesis?

In 1984, it was suggested that we might be a binary star. Some very faint red dwarf could be orbiting at about 95,000 AU, outside of the Oort cloud (depending on which estimate for its outer bound is correct), and perturbing comets’ orbits, eventually leading to huge numbers of comets reaching the inner solar system. This would make sense if the red dwarf were in an elliptical orbit, and doing the perturbing only when closest to the Sun. There seemed to be a 26 million year recurring pattern of mass extinctions (not as big as the dinosaur killer or the Great Dying at the end of the Permian, but mass extinctions nonetheless).

With an effect like that, the hypothetical star has been named Nemesis.

Surely we’d know already if we were a binary star? I mean, come on. We don’t see this except on movie screens.

Not necessarily! Most stars are red dwarfs, they’re incredibly faint. None of them are visible to the naked eye at night. None of them, not even the closest one we know of now, Proxima Centauri. So one of these would not be obvious. We’d only be able to tell if we happened to look at the right one and measured its distance and speed. There is a systematic survey being made of red dwarfs, starting with the ones that appear brightest and working their way down. Conceivably, we could get a “hit.” If it’s close enough we could even conceivably send a probe, but it’d be by far the biggest space project ever, and we wouldn’t live to see the pictures.

But as of now, Nemesis is considered very unlikely. Many astronomers think we may once have had a Nemesis but it could have been lost when another star came relatively close sometime in the past.

The End?

That’s comets in a nutshell. Many are denizens of the outermost marches of the Solar System.

As usual I could only scratch the surface of the topic.

This is, I believe, the last of the series on our solar system.

58 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes until our Once and Future President, the Rightful President of the United States, is restored to his proper office.

Not that I’m counting, mind you.

[Assumes 0001 publication time. Wordpiss will be wordpiss and it’s unlikely to happen at that time.]

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.

And MTG is there to help make it stick.

January 6 tapes. A good start…but then nothing.

Were you just hoping we’d be distracted by the first set and not notice?

Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?

Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?

What are you waiting for?

I have a personal interest in this issue.

And if you aren’t…what the hell is wrong with you?

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,563.30
Silver $30.30
Platinum $947.00
Palladium $974.00
Rhodium $4,950.00
FRNSI* 123.000-
Gold:Silver 84.597+

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, Kitco “ask” prices. Markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $2,716.90
Silver $31.41
Platinum $973.00
Palladium $1,034.00
Rhodium $4,950.00
FRNSI* 130.430+
Gold:Silver 86.498-

The attention is on gold. It has recovered over $150 of the losses it took right after the election, just since last Friday. Alas, silver has not kept up, and the gold:silver ratio has gone up almost two points. Platinum still struggles to climb out of the gutter, while palladium seems more dynamic. Rhodium did move around a bit, but ended up where it was last Friday.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

Reminder: Most Flat Earther Influencers are Liars

Most Flat Earther influencers like Flat Earth Dave and Eric Dubay have said for years that they want to go to Antarctica during southern summer and watch the Sun set…which would prove the globe model isn’t right. The globe model not only predicts the Sun will not set in Antarctica at and around the solstice, it predicts the Sun’s path through the sky will circle the observer over the course of a 24 hour day, going from north to west to south to east of the observer. (At the south pole itself, some of those directions are meaningless since every direction is north; but just move a millimeter from the pole and they mean something.)

They’ve been given the chance to go to Antarctica for free and now all of the sudden refuse to do it; they are even ostracizing the few among their number who have agreed to take the trip, accusing them of having sold out and being shills in advance of them coming back and reporting what they have seen,

That should be enough to tell any reasonable observer that they already know what the travelers to Antarctica will see…and it won’t be good for Flat Earth. Which is why I am not calling them ignorant or deluded; I am calling them liars. They know the Earth is not flat, yet they make a shitload of money claiming it is.

Lying. Sacks. Of. Shit.

However, I don’t call all of them liars. I give some praise to those few who are going; they apparently do actually believe it (which is not good on them)–negating the “liar” aspect–but more importantly they have the intellectual courage to test their beliefs, even in the face of ostracism from the knowing con-men on their side.

Beyond Neptune

Of course everyone knows what’s after Neptune.

Pluto.

But that’s not all of the story by any means.

The Discovery of Pluto

I told the story last time of the discovery of Neptune. But as astronomers observed and tracked Neptune in the last half of the 19th century, it appeared that Neptune didn’t account for all of Uranus’s unexpected motions.

The first thought, of course, is that there’s yet another planet out there. Percival Lowell decided to try to do something about it beyond thinking.

Percival Lowell had founded the Lowell observatory near Flagstaff, AZ in 1894, largely to observe Mars, but in 1906 he started searching for Planet Nine. He kept on looking with the help of William H. Pickering, using calculations by Elizabeth Williams. Nothing was found and Lowell passed away in 1916. (As it turns out his photographic plates did have “hits” on Pluto for March 19 and April 7th, 1915, but they were faint and didn’t get noticed. Planet Nine was expected to be big. There are fourteen other known instances of Pluto showing up, unrecognized, on observatories’ photographic plates from 1909 on; these are called “precovery” photographs.)

Percival Lowell’s widow, Constance, got into a ten year legal battle with the observatory, so the search stopped. But once the legal cloud had cleared, the director, Vesto Melvin Slipher (the first to see redshifts in galaxies) gave 23 year old Clyde Tombaugh the job of resuming the search. Tombaugh’s method consisted of taking photographs of the same area of the night sky a few days apart and putting the photographs (which were on glass plates) in a blink comparator, which would project one plate, then the other, and repeat. Any object that had moved in the meantime would seem to jump back and forth.

On February 18, 1930, Tombaugh spotted something on plates from the 23rd and 29th of January.

As you can see, the photographs were often not exposed to the same brightness, so anyone using a blink comparator would have to deal with the image getting brighter and dimmer, brighter and dimmer…while looking for the one object that was completely not there (not just dimmer) in one photograph or the other. (And it seems as though many things in the left photograph are not visible in the right hand photobraph. So perhaps Tombaugh simply looked for something that showed in the faint photo on the right, but not the brighter one on the left.)

A lower quality photo from the 21st helped confirm that Tombaugh wasn’t just seeing spots in front of his eyes. The observatory took more photos over the next few weeks to really nail the case down. Finally, on March 13, they telegraphed Harvard Observatory with the news.

The new planet orbits the Sun in 247.94 years, in an inclined and eccentric orbit. That period puts it into a 2:3 resonance with Neptune; it orbits twice in the amount of time it takes Neptune to orbit three times.

What to name it? They got thousands of suggestions, including Minerva, Pluto, and Cronus. Minerva had been used for an asteroid already, Cronus was being pushed by someone who was both unpopular and egocentric…so Pluto it was. (Cronus is also the Greek name for the titan who fathered Zeus and other Olympian gods…in other words it’s the Greek counterpart of the Roman Saturn.) Pluto/Hades was the god of the underworld. As a bonus, the first two letters are Percival Lowell’s initials. The name was approved by both the American Astronomical Society and the Royal Astonomical Society and the name became fixed on May 1. No jacking around with the name as had happened with Uranus for decades.

But right off the bat something didn’t add up.

One estimate from 1915 was that Planet Nine would have to be seven times as massive as the Earth. But a very early estimate after Pluto had been found, in 1931, had its mass as low as Earth’s (so, too low by a factor of 7). As more and more estimates were made over the years, Pluto’s estimated mass kept dropping; in 1948 Kuiper estimated it at 0.1 Earth masses, in 1976 it was lowered again to 0.01 Earth masses. But these were guesses based on Pluto’s size, which was estimated from how bright it was. It was never more than a dot of light on a photographic plate or film.

In 1978, we discovered Pluto had a moon, Charon…and with a moon we could determine the mass quite solidly, so the estimate dropped to 0.0015 Earth masses. And the latest number from 2006 is 0.00218 Earth masses. (I actually remember this happening. And now Pluto has five known moons.)

Charon, by the way, is the last of the medium-sized moons. Saturn has four, Uranus has four…and Pluto has one.

And we finally nailed down Pluto’s size, 2377 km in diameter. Our own moon is 3475 km across, and there are other moons larger than it. Mercury is also far larger than Pluto.

This is just way too tiny to be the planet we were looking for.

Furthermore, Voyager 2 in 1989 caused the estimates for Neptune’s mass to be dropped 0.5% and the “remaining discrepancy” in Uranus’s orbit now disappeared; Neptune accounted for it all.

So Pluto’s discovery was ultimately a stroke of luck. We were groping around in a dark room with a blindfold on, looking for a cat that wasn’t there…but we had found the mouse that was.

But now, just about everything about Pluto (and not just its size) made many wonder if it really should be considered a planet. Pluto is in a very un-planetery orbit. The other eight planets had reasonably circular orbits (Mercury being a bit of an outlier) all in nearly the same plane: the ecliptic (which is defined by the plane of Earth’s orbit). Pluto’s orbit is inclined 17 degrees to the ecliptic; no other planet came anywhere close to that. Furthermore, its orbit was very eccentric, not circular (e=.2488). In fact, with a semi-major axis of 39.482, that meant Pluto’s closest approach to the Sun was 29.658 AU.

That’s closer than Neptune. Pluto was actually at that point on September 5, 1989. For the entire twenty year period from 1979-1999 Pluto wasn’t the outermost planet, Neptune was.

[DIGRESSION: There is, by the way, little to no danger of a collision between Neptune and Pluto. If you look at the two orbits in 3D it becomes apparent that Pluto crosses the plane of Neptune’s orbit pretty far away from the actual orbit of Neptune. Here’s an animation of one Plutonian year from an oblique angle. The vertical white lines show how far below or above the plane Pluto is at any given time.

You can watch the animation and note that Neptune is at about 4 o’clock in the diagram at the start of the animation, and that’s where Pluto is furthest from the Sun. At the end of the animation, Neptune is at 10 o’clock; in other words it has orbited 1 1/2 times while Pluto orbited once (that’s a 3:2 resonance). At no point will the two planets come near each other, and since this pattern repeats, they won’t ever unless something causes an orbit to change.]

END OF DIGRESSION and back to the main thread: So Pluto didn’t look like any other planet. Nor did it act like any other planet. But if Pluto were all there was out there, most people would go ahead and consider it a planet.

But as it happens. there’s quite a lot “out there.”

The Centaurs

In 1977, Charles Kowal discovered Chiron, an asteroid, roughly 200 km across…but one with a difference. It was nowhere near the asteroid belt; it was well outside of it. That was a first, and barely a hint of things to come. Chiron is named after a centaur; and we would discover more such bodies. There’s a whole class of them now and that class is called the “centaurs.” It turned out there were “precovery” images of Chiron going clear back to 1895. And it turns out to have a ring!

There is a registry of so-called minor planets. When there is an initial observation, they’re given a “provisional designation.” (The scheme is a bit complicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_designation_in_astronomy#Minor_planets but the first part is obviously the year of the first observation). Sometimes it gets an unofficial nickname, if it’s particularly interesting. Once we have enough data to establish an orbit, the object is given a number in the order they are discovered–and sometimes it gets a name too. (There are hundreds of thousands of objects that never got past the provisional designation stage.) Minor planets are simply numbered in order: Ceres is formally “1 Ceres”, then there is 2 Pallas, 3 Vesta, 4 Juno, and so on. It used to be just asteroids, but as we will see a lot more different kinds of things are on the list. These objects have the following in common: they orbit the sun directly, but aren’t planets, and aren’t comets.

[WARNING: Have a barf bucket handy for this one: Believe it or not there’s an object nicknamed (but not permanently named) “Biden,” provisional number 2012 VP₁₁₃. And it got that name because Biden was the VP that year. However it’s been 12 years and they weren’t able to verify it so it might not be a real minor planet, in much the same way that Biden today isn’t a real president.]

When Chiron was first discovered, it got the provisional designation “1977 UB.” Once its orbit was established, it was regarded as the 2060th “minor planet” to be discovered, and now it’s formally known as 2060 Chiron. There are now over 44,000 known centaurs. And it’s speculated that Saturn’s way-out-there ninth moon, Phoebe, is a captured centaur. In general centaurs are far too likely to encounter one of the outer planets and so their orbits are not considered stable in the long term.

Buried in Planets?

Fifteen years later, things started to get crazy. We started finding more and more stuff way out there. The first was 15760 Albion (provisional designation 1992 QB₁).

Here is 15760 Albion’s orbit (it’s a very slo-mo gif, so you’re not seeing things, it does move). It is in a roughly 291 year orbit. Shown in red are the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

It actually looks like a planet’s orbit; it’s even spaced about right. Unfortunately, it was only a bit over 100km across, not even remotely big enough to have forced itself into a round shape. Not a planet.

A concerted effort was made to scan the entire ecliptic for very slow moving dots of light, to see if there were other things out there.

And there sure were. Lots of small stuff. But then we started finding big ones too, ones big enough to be rounded, and many, if not most, of these objects have moons!

In 2002, we found 50000 Quaoar (named after a deity worshiped by an Indian tribe that lived in what is now the LA area), orbiting between 41.9 and 45.5 AUs, in 289 years. Its diameter is 1,090 km. OK, that’s sizeable enough to get one’s attention! And it has a moon.

Then we found 90377 Sedna, discovered in 2003, which has a gigantic 506 AU (that is not a typo, yes five hundred and six astronomical units) orbit (that is 76 billion kilometers). That’s the semi-major axis (half way across the long way). This one is a highly eccentric orbit, so it’s not that far away from us at the moment; if it was we’d never be able to see it. Right now Sedna is 83.5 AU away (still twice as far as Pluto), near its nearest approach to the Sun at 76 AU. Its furthest distance is 937 AU! But be prepared to wait a while for it to get there. Its year is 11,400 of ours, and you’ll have to wait about half that long for it to get halfway around its orbit. So far as we know, Sedna does not have a moon. We can see no detail at that ridiculous distance, but it is colored distinctly red (my guess: tholins). And Sedna is very roughly 900 km across, which is again sizeable, not dismissable as a piece of rubble. Sedna does not have a moon that we can see, which as you will see is unusual.

In 2004 we found 90482 Orcus, 900 km or so in diameter, 30.3 to 48.1 AUs out orbiting in 245.1 years (almost exactly the same as Pluto). Also, it has a moon.

OK, this is starting to get ridiculous. But we’re just getting started!

Also in 2004, there is 136108 Haumea, announced a year later and its status not fully settled even then because…well because it’s 2000km across! That’s getting close to Pluto’s size. (As a side note, Haumea is distinctly rugby-ball shaped. We think. Again we don’t see much more than blobs in our images.) And (wait for it), it has two moons.

But the absolute, oh-shit-we-have-a-problem-here discovery was announced the very next year, 2005, based on observations from late 2003 and later. 2003 UB₃₁₃ was more massive than Pluto, though it appears to have a smaller diameter. The new object was “nicknamed” Xena (as in the Warrior Princess), and it took a while to settle on a permanent name. It turns out to have a moon, nicknamed Gabrielle after Xena’s sidekick. “Xena” orbits between 38.3 and 97.5 AUs, in 559 years. This object was actually announced by some YSM outlets as the tenth planet! Well, why not? If Pluto is a planet, this object certainly should be!

Because some people argued that indeed it was a planet, it took a while to get a permanent name and number. Why give it a number and have it turn out to not belong on the minor planet list? So “Xena” had to wait, for we were fully embroiled in discord.

And just for icing on the cake, on the same day that “Xena” was announced, the discovery of what would eventually be called 136472 Makemake was announced…and that was just two days after Haumea was announced. 136472 Makemake orbits between 38.1 and 52.8 AUs in 306 years.

Well. What a mess. Are they planets? We’d better figure this out because we’re getting buried here.

Rounding Up the Trans Neptunian Objects

I’m going to jump ahead here, a tiny bit. I’ll get back to the planet question soon.

I’m going to discuss the classification system we use today for these objects so (non-spoiler spoiler alert) Pluto will here be treated as one of these objects, not as a planet.

These objects all live beyond Neptune. But astronomers like to group things (you saw that with the moons of the gas and ice giants) and these objects, plus the zillions of much smaller ones in similar places that I haven’t mentioned, ultimately got “bucketed” into categories.

The Big Bucket is “trans-Neptunian object” Other than the centaurs, all of the objects I’ve discussed this time are trans-Neptunian objects (generally abbreviated “TNOs”), because they’re minor bodies outside of the orbit of Neptune.

But then we have sub-categories. The “Kuiper Belt” is those objects between 30 and 55 AUs from the Sun (as a reminder, Neptune is at roughly 30 AU). There are thousands of known Kuiper Belt objects, and the best estimate is that there are over a hundred thousand objects here over 100km in diameter. In fact there is far more “stuff” out there than in the asteroid belt. However, asteroid belt objects are typically rocks or metals, while the Kuiper Belt is mostly volatiles–iceballs, with some rocks in them.

The Kuiper Belt in turn has three classes of objects. The “classical” Kuiper Belt objects (cubewanos) are in reasonably circular, “regular” orbits, like Albion. There are a bunch in 2:3 resonance with Neptune (like Pluto), called plutinos, and others in a 1:2 resonance with Neptune, called twotinos. Orcus, Pluto, Haumea, Quaoar and Makemake are all Kuiper Belt objects. Orcus and Pluto are plutinos, the others are cubewanos.

This leaves Sedna and “Xena” unaccounted for. The other major category besides Kuiper Belt Objects is the “Scattered Disk Objects”, irregular-orbiting objects well beyond the Kuiper belt. “Xena” and Sedna fit here.

Here’s a handy-dandy chart. Or a confusing one, depending on your point of view, showing these categories, as well as the centaurs. In red across the top you will note designations like 2|3 and 1|2 for resonances with Neptune. And, oh by the way, Sedna is such an outlier it’s off the right hand edge of the diagram.

Gerard Peter Kuiper

Gerard Peter Kuiper, 1905-1973 (photo from 1964), was a Dutch-American astronomer. Americans trying to pronounce his name butcher it as “KAI-per,” rhyming with “piper.” The original Dutch pronunciation is indescribable to us except with the international phonetic alphabet: ˈɣɛrɪt ˈpitər ˈkœypər. He was the doctoral adviser for Carl Sagan, discovered Miranda (smallest moon of Uranus) and Nereid (third largest moon of Neptune), carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars, and Titan’s atmosphere. He speculated that a large disk of of ices had condensed into smaller bodies, but would long since have been disrupted by Pluto (which was thought at the time to be massive). Well, he was half right; because Pluto is puny the objects are still there and the belt containing them is now named the Kuiper belt in his honor.

Discord

OK, back to “Are these planets?” The year is 2006. New Horizons launched on its mission to Pluto on 19 January of that year, and now it was time to evaluate the matter of whether it was on its way to a planet or not.

There was no formal definition of a planet. We knew them when we saw them. Except now we didn’t. Or rather everyone knew, but not the same as other people.

Alan Stern was (and still is) a principal investigator of the New Horizons probe (i.e., he is in charge of one of the instruments on that probe). Stern’s resume in the space program is as long as my arm. Time magazine even named him one of the 100 most influential people in 2007.

Stern was, and still is, an adamant defender of Pluto as a planet…and yes, he knows that means all these other objects, plus more to be discovered in the future, would be planets too.

His proposal: Divide planets into three subcategories. First, the classical planets, Mercury through Neptune, eight total. Then dwarf planets; that would include all of these big TNOs including Pluto, and Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. The third category, though, is the “satellite planet.” These are the round moons orbiting other objects: our Moon, the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter, the seven round moons of Saturn, the five round moons of Uranus, Triton orbiting Neptune, and Charon orbiting Pluto.

These would all be planets, because they are massive enough for their gravity to have forced them into round shapes. (And this is one reason I’ve made a big deal about round versus not round.)

Including the moons seems a bit odd. But Stern’s position is very straightforward. He cares about the intrinsic properties of the object (it’s size and shape) first and its extrinsic circumstances, i.e. what orbit it’s in, second. If the object is round, it’s a planet, whether it dominates its orbit, or even if it orbits something else. Once it’s settled as a planet, then you decide whether it’s also a satellite, or big enough to “own” its orbit, and put it in the appropriate sub-buckets.

The IAU Makes Sausage

When the International Astronomical Union met in August of 2006 this matter was on the agenda and…well, we know the story. Alan Stern lost.

There is an aphorism that, like sausages, those that love law should not watch it being made. And that’s apparently true here as well.

The first proposal was: “A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet.”

In addition to the then-nine objects recognized as planets, this would have added Ceres, “Xena,” and Charon, the moon of Pluto. So we would immediately have twelve planets. In addition to this there were twelve candidate objects (including three asteroid-belt objects) that would likely fit once we knew more about them (including many of the ones I’ve talked about). Indeed there were claims (by Mike Brown who discovered Sedna and “Xena”) that we could have fifty three additional planets added almost immediately to this list of 12, and likely many more, perhaps 200, once we looked for more objects.

You may wonder why Charon would make the list, even though it’s fairly small as such things go. Why Charon and not Ganymede? That is because Charon and Pluto are close enough in size that the center of gravity of the Pluto-Charon system is actually outside of Pluto, unlike with every other moon in the solar system. That caused many to regard Pluto/Charon as a double planet…which of course would make Charon a planet.

Anything not spherical would be “bucketed” into Small Solar System Bodies (SSSBs). In addition, the “pluton” class (named for Pluto) would be used for things with highly eccentric or inclined objects. So this proposal drew one fairly clean line, if it’s round (and it’s not a star) it’s a planet, otherwise it’s an SSSB.

Although the relevant committee endorsed this, most of the IAU didn’t like this proposal; it was too ambiguous distinguishing between classical and dwarf planets. It failed a straw poll, 18-50 of a subgroup of the IAU.

So the second try, proposed by Gonzalo Tancredi and Julio Angel Fernandez:

(1) A planet is a celestial body that (a) is by far the largest object in its local population[1], (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [2], and (c) does not produce energy by any nuclear fusion mechanism [3].

(2) According to point (1), the eight classical planets discovered before 1900, which move in nearly circular orbits close to the ecliptic plane, are the only planets of the Solar System. All the other objects in orbit around the Sun are smaller than Mercury. We recognize that there are objects that fulfill the criteria (b) and (c) but not criterion (a). Those objects are defined as “dwarf” planets. Ceres, as well as Pluto and several other large Trans-Neptunian objects, belongs to this category. In contrast to the planets, these objects typically have highly inclined orbits and/or large eccentricities.

(3) All the other natural objects orbiting the Sun that do not fulfill any of the previous criteria shall be referred to collectively as “Small Solar System Bodies“.[4]

Definitions and clarifications

1. The local population is the collection of objects that cross or closely approach the orbit of the body in consideration.
2. This generally applies to objects with sizes above several hundred kilometers, depending on the material strength.
3. This criterion allows the distinction between gas giant planets and brown dwarfs or stars.
4. This class currently includes most of the Solar System asteroids, Near-Earth objects (NEOs), Mars-, Jupiter- and Neptune-Trojan asteroids, most Centaurs, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), and comets.^[32]

This would have demoted Pluto to a “dwarf planet” which, despite the name including the word “planet,” was not a subcategory of planet; a difference between this and Stern’s proposal.

This went to open session, and the main point of contention was between the “static” and “dynamic” physics positions. The static position was similar to Stern’s; the emphasis would be on the intrinsic shape of the planet. “Dynamics” is a reference to the orbital properties.

There was one more draft, then the Plenary Session of the IAU met, and debated some more. And this is the result:

The IAU…resolves that planets and other bodies, except satellites, in the Solar System be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:

(1) A planet [1] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

(2) A “dwarf planet” is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [2], (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.

(3) All other objects [3], except satellites, orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as “Small Solar System Bodies“.

Footnotes:

[1] The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
[2] An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories.

[3] These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.

And just to be clear, a “dwarf planet” was not, despite the name, a category of planet; they passed an additional resolution to make it clear.

[I have seen clips of the actual vote, hands raised in the auditorium. I can’t find one now, or I’d include it.]

So the planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The dwarf planets (a subgroup of the Small Solar System Bodies), most likely includes: Ceres, Pluto, Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, Haumea, “Xena”, Makemake…and one other, Gonggong. This is a fuzzy line and there are others already known that arguably belong on this list.

The Aftermath

And so that was it for Planet Pluto. To put the nail in it, within days Pluto was given a minor planet number just like any asteroid or Kuiper Belt object: 134340 Pluto. It’s now marked as a “Small Solar System Body.”

The reaction was intense. The public of course hated this and still does.

But it’s not just the public. Many planetary scientists (not just Alan Stern) also disagree.

This issue will be revisited some day. Personally I like Stern’s suggestion better than what we got. Or perhaps the best suggestion is to just drop the word “planet” entirely since it seems to have emotional ties. Should every round object that’s not a star be a “world”?

This is NOT the first time we’ve reassessed the concept of a planet, by the way. The other times that I know of are:

1. Any permanent wandering object in the sky was a planet; that included the Sun and the Moon, originally. Once it turned out the Moon orbited the Earth, and everything else orbited the Sun, that made the Sun “special” and the Moon a mere satellite of a planet, Earth.
2. With the discovery of moons around other planets (the Galilean moons of Jupiter in 1610, but also the satellites of Saturn and Uranus), we started seeing the term “Planetary Satellites” (which Stern re-used) used for them; that term continued to be in use well into the 1700s if not later. It’s now often used for the big seven moons (the Moon, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan and Triton); the ones I’ve been calling “large moons.”
3. The asteroids were considered planets at first: Ceres, then we had Vesta, Juno and Pallas. They were all small and in the same general location, though so they quickly got reclassified as “minor planets” or even “asteroids.”

If you relish irony, after that flurry of discoveries in the mid 00s, only one more solid dwarf planet candidate has been discovered, and that in 2007: 225088 Gonggong, which varies from 33.8 to 101.2 AUs from the Sun, orbiting in 554 years, with a diameter of about 1230 km (give or take 50 km). It has one known moon.

…And Back to “Xena”

As for “Xena”, that same meeting settled its status, and the permanent name 136199 Eris was chosen. Eris’s moon was named Dysnomia. Eris is round. Dysnomia might be.

Eris was a Greek goddess, the personification of strife and discord. Dysnomia means “lawlessness” which (interestingly) might be a reference to Lucy Lawless, who played Xena.

What perfect names for the objects that triggered such a furor!

(Next time, we’ll look at the TNOs themselves, most especially Pluto [it’s by far the best known] in more detail.)