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One of the great pleasures of traveling is new things to draw and paint…except, of course, for when artists travel back home, in which case they get familiar subjects with which they have wrestled for a long time. Such is the case with the subject of today’s featured drawing (which I actually drew last Wednesday). Here is the soybean field on my parents’ farm which lies just to the north of their house and farmyard. Perhaps a soybean field does not sound particularly exciting to you (as opposed to crops of known beauty such as winter wheat or sunflowers), however I have always found its mid-tone blue green to be alluring and weirdly mysterious. When you look at the entirety of the fields, all decked in this same viridian, the effect is something like a green three dimensional lake. And even if the wind does not ripple the soybeans quite as majestically as it plays upon the wheat, there is a similar wave effect (albeit one which is completely beyond my ability to capture with watercolors). I have painted or drawn the soybean field many times, and I feel like August was right time to do so (with everything looking fulsome and verdant). I also got to include the apples on the tree (which was literally breaking beneath their weight), a single wandering pilgrim goose, the purple cone flowers in the field by the pond, and a few pink wisps in the clouds from sunset, which was on its way. Of course the picture sadly fails to capture the true beauty of the scene (although maybe I got a little closer to capturing the allure of the soy), but it was certainly a delight to sit and look closely at this scene which I have been watching for 40 years.
Longtime readers will know that Ferrebeekeeper eschews the popular fascination with Mars in favor of our much closer sister planet, the luminous Venus. Therefore, I was delighted to see the second planet from the Sun making front page headlines around the globe (of Earth) this week when scientists discovered traces of phosphine gas in the strange, dense Venusian atmosphere.
The internet tells us that phosphine is a colorless, flammable, very explosive gas which smells like garlic or rotten fish. Additionally, it is extremely toxic. This stuff is not exactly the must-have gift of the season (well…maybe for Christmas, 2020), so why am I so excited to find it on a planet which may be the best option for an off-world human colony?
Phosphine exists on Earth where it is produced by the decomposition of organic matter in oxygen-free conditions (it is also a by-product of certain kinds of industrial processes). This means that the only known methods of producing phosphine involve living things (I suppose industrialists and anaerobic bacteria both qualify as such). It may well be that phosphine is produced on Venus due to some quirk of the planet’s strange atmosphere or weird volcanism (which is not well understood and seems to be fundamentally different from that of Earth).
In the past we have explored some compelling yet inconclusive evidence of life in the clouds of Venus. Today’s news adds to that evidence, but is still not compelling. The phosphine gas and the cloud bands both demands further study, though (and if we happened to learn more about the opportunities for cloud cities, so be it). I have long thought that a robot blimp probe of Venus’ clouds is the most rational next exploration mission for NASA (no matter how much I love super rovers). Perhaps the phosphine revelation will bring other people closer to this view. Maybe you should drop a quick email or phone call to your favorite elected representative about that very thing (or you could always write Jim Bridenstein–he is the rare Trump appointee who seems to be basically competent).
Speaking of basic competence, I was sad to see many of the liberal arts enthusiasts on my Twitter feed angrily denouncing this discovery and demanding “no more money for space!” (I unfollowed them all, by the way–sorry poetry). Beyond the fact that this discovery was made here on Earth by a clever lady with a simple telescope and a gas chromograph, money spent on space exploration is spent here on Earth. Such expenditures further fundamental discoveries in material science, engineering, aerospace, robotics, and other high tech disciplines. Our world of high tech breakthroughs, the internet, super computers, solar power, nanotechnology, and super safe aviation (among many other things) was made possible by government money spent on space exploration (or did you think some MBA guy running a private company would ever think more than one quarter into the future?). Beyond these reasons though, Venus was once the most earthlike of all other Solar System planets. Long ago it almost certainly had warm oceans teeming with life. Uh, maybe we should have a comprehensive answer about what happened there before we say that government money should only be spent on social initiatives. If you came home to your nice row house and noticed that the house next door had been knocked down, the neighbors were gone, and also the temperature there was 470 degrees Celsius (880 degrees Fahrenheit) and the sky replaced with sulfuric acid, maybe you would ask what happened! (although, to be fair, that very thing seems to be happening now in California, and a substantial number of people say “science has no place in understanding this).
Anyway, commentary about earth politics aside, I continue to be more and more excited about our closest planetary neighbor. Seriously, can you imagine how cool a robot probe-blimp would be?
Meanwhile…three quarters of a billion kilometers away, the Juno space probe continues its exploration of the gas giant Jupiter. The probes orbit brings it to within 4,200 kilometers (2500 miles) of the cloudtops once every 53 days. So far, Juno has made 10 such passes (out of a planned 12 before the mission’s end in July). As the astrophysicists and planetary scientists work to make sense of mission data, NASA has made the raw image data available to the world. Private citizens have used it to create these stunning images of the largest world in the Solar System. Since I can’t even begin to explain the vast atmospheric complexities behind these swirling psychedelic wonders, I will leave them here without comment. Marvel at our huge planetary neighbor with its marbelized super storms and spare a moment to thank Gerald Eichstädt & Seán Doran for putting these amazing pictures together.
OK, we have a lot to get through this week. We have a new president coming along, and even though this charlatan may well usher in the end times, he is certainly known for grabbing ratings (among other things). Also, last week, I promised to write about why I am having trouble with ‘Romance of three Kingdoms.” It is a book about deceit, trickery, and cruelty as the tools of leadership. Perhaps now is a good time to talk about its dark lessons. However before we get to any of that, today let’s take a quick trip off-world to our sister planet Venus (a planet which endlessly fascinates me) where some exceedingly strange developments have been in the works.
Venus is currently being monitored and observed by the Japanese Space Agency probe Akatsuki. On December 7th, 2015, the probe spotted a huge crescent wave 6,000 miles long in the atmosphere of Venus. The probe lost sight of the massive bow shaped phenomena as it moved through its orbit, and, when it returned to position a few days later, the wave was gone.
So what produces a 6,000 mile long super cloud on a planet already known for extreme fast moving clouds of sulfuric acid. Scientists theorize that this was a gravity wave. Gravity waves are not too be mistaken for the gravitational waves of deep space (which are caused by distortion of spacetime from supermassive objects). Instead a gravity wave is a wave propagated within a fluid (like air or liquid) through the effects of gravity. When water flows over a sandbar, gravity restores equilibrium on the other side–which causes a wave effect. This is a familiar pattern in all sorts of fluid dynamics–including clouds passing over mountains. It is believed that the giant crescent wave within the atmosphere of Venus originated from the atmosphere flowing over vast mountain ranges on the surface.
Even if this is not as unfamiliar a phenomena as it might deem when first hearing the name and looking at the pictures, it is very beautiful and it is appearing on a scale hitherto unknown in terrestrial parts (although the supermassive planets have their own bizarre cloud structures which put it to shame. for now lets just enjoy looking at the huge bow shaped cloud on the closest planet to Earth. Thanks JAXA for making this discovery! What will the strange hot caustic atmosphere of Venus do next?
Based on what we are learning from the exoplanet surveys of the past decade, our galaxy is the home of an immense number of Jovian-size gas giant planets. There are countless “hot Jupiters”–gas giants located close to their stars which whip around and around their orbits in ridiculously short “years”. There are frigid slow gas giants and super massive ones—practically brown dwarves– which are larger than Jupiter. There is an endless proliferation of Uranus and Neptune type giants. Imagine them all glittering in strange colors with weird shapes. They are cloaked in alien clouds and covered in mysterious storms. Who knows what lies beneath?
All of these billions of giant planets seem pretty hypothetical to me as I sit here at my cramped & cluttered desk on solid little Earth. Yet they exist. They are out there in numbers too vast to comprehend. However, right now, NASA is conducting the most comprehensive exploration yet of the gas giant we can access. Juno’s mission is just getting underway in earnest, and the largest gas giant in our own backyard should reveal lots about all of the billions which are out of reach.
I am sad that I can neither understand nor convey the loftiness of this crazy ongoing mission. It is an astonishing undertaking—but we are so inundated by with murky political battles and vulgar popular drivel, that it is hard to see the utterly astonishing nature of this undertaking.
Maybe I can put it in perspective somewhat. Imagine back to the year 1609 AD when Henry Hudson was first seeing the river which was later named after him. Before him was an exquisite expanse of islands, bays, and sparkling river. The vast waterway flowed down from unknown mountains into a bay surrounded by lovely islands. The whole expanse was filled with flocks of unknown birds and schools of fish. Beyond the thriving marshes, mysterious forests were filled with moving shadows.
Now multiply that a billion times: replace Henry Hudson with a tiny fragile robot and replace the Hudson River with luminous gas oceans large enough to entirely submerge scores of Earths. That is what is happening right now. As you sit reading this on a little glowing screen, we are making fundamental discoveries about a whole planet.
On August 27, 2016, Juno executed the first of 36 orbital flybys over Jupiter. The doughty spacecraft was only 4,200 kilometers (2,500 miles) above Jupiter’s atmosphere. It sent back the first detailed images of the north pole of Jupiter—and it is unlike the rest of the planet.
The North Pole of Jupiter as seen by Juno [NASA]
To quote Scott Bolton, one of the lead scientists of the Juno mission, “[The] first glimpse of Jupiter’s north pole…it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before….It’s bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms. There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to — this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. We’re seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features.”
Jupiter’s clouds contain whole continent-like regions of air which are different than the rest of the planet’s storms and whirls. We don’t yet know why or how, but we are finding out. As we do so, we are peeling back a layer of mystery which surrounds all such worlds.
Solar Radiation Streaming over the North Pole of Jupiter
Statue of an Apsara Dancing(Unknown artist, Uttar Pradesh, India, Early 12th century)
In both Hindu and Buddhist mythology a group of beautiful & ethereal female spirits inhabit the skies. These elegant beings are known as apsaras. They are lesser goddesses of water and clouds. In classical Indian literature apsaras are often portrayed dancing seductively in the courts of the gods or married to ganharvas—nature spirits who play celestial music for the gods. Both groups of entities are particularly connected with the court of Indra, the god of the skies and storm, and also king of the gods (although that title is less absolute in Hinduism than in other cosmologies).
Rambha Apsara (Kishan Soni, 2012, oil on canvas)
In many myths, apsaras are cast as supporting characters. They are roughly analogous to nymphs and naiads in Greek mythology or angels in Abrahamic myths. Indra constantly felt threatened by great ascetics who amassed titanic spiritual and magical power through physical austerity. One of his favorite ways of dealing with these powerful yogis was to send apsaras to seduce them—which is why many heroes of Indian myth have a sexy apsara as a mother and a crazed hermit as a father! In addition to being masterful dancers apsaras could alter their form at will (although I can’t think of any story where they were anything other than beautiful). They also ruled over the vicissitudes of gaming and gambling.
The apsara Menaka seduces the sage Viswamitra
Apsaras can be recognized because of their tiny waists and their pronounced feminine attributes. Usually they are pictured dancing gracefully, clad (or partially clad) in lovely silk skirts and bedecked with gold jewelry and precious gems. Often they are gamboling in the skies or playing in the water. Additionally apsaras tend to be crowned with gorgeous ornate headdresses.
Apsara (stone relief carving at Angkor Wat)
Sculptures of apsaras are frequently a principle component of classical Indian temples and the gorgeous undulating female forms remain a mainstay of Indian art. These celestial dancers were also particularly esteemed in Southeast Asia. Classical art and architecture from Indonesia, Cambodia, and Laos frequently features the lovely spirits. Recently a controversy has broken out in the Cambodian community involving contemporary paintings of apsaras which some critics deem too racy for refined tastes. Ascetics beware!
ferrebeekeeper 