15 November 2005

Tonight a met a friend and went to see the movie Zathura. It wasn't my favorite movie but I wasn't expecting that going into it. I had seen the trailers and figured this would be a movie the bad astronomy guy (http://www.badastronomy.com/) would be writing about although he hasn't gotten around to it yet.

Zathura is a board game these two brothers play. Whenever they make a move they get a card kind of like Monopoly. Whatever the card says happens to them for real. So when the first card says 'you are in a meteor shower take evasive action' the living room ends up looking like a block of Swiss cheese. Later the house goes into orbit around a planet that looks like Jupiter but has a prominent ring like Saturn. There are so many blocks of matter in the ring structure you could walk around it jumping from block to block. The front door is opened and later large chunks of the house get blown away by aliens but there is no explosive decompression. The characters even go outside without breathing equipment. And when they are getting sucked into a black hole one of the boys is getting pilled into it while the other appears to be pulled away from it.

This is definitely a kids movie.

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After the movie I walked up to Grand Central Terminal the weather being very mild and not raining. I love GCT and often go there to stare at the star studded ceiling and watch the commuters scurrying for their trains and subways.

The illuminated stars in the ceiling were not illuminated tonight. When they refurbished the terminal they replaced the individual star lights with a fiber optic system because it would be easier to maintain. I don't know if that system has broken down or if someone just forgot to throw the switch. It looks like nobody is assigned to look up though.

We have always been told that the stars are painted as they would look if we were way out in space looking down on them, that is that the constellations are backwards on purpose although nobody now knows what that purpose was. But that story is not entirely true.

Orion is painted with his back to us to be sure, but the stars are in the right places. Rigel is still in the lower right corner and Betelgeuse still in the upper left. Orion still raises his club in the arm attached to Betelgeuse and the other arm extends out from Belatrix holding the Golden Fleece or the lion's skin, depending on which version of the legend you embrace. Orion's belt still slopes upward from left to right and his sword still hangs from it on the left side. I have seen some early star atlas illustrations that depict Orion similarly (I believe the Atlas of Hevelius was one) but don't know if they reverse the stars as well as showing his back.

Pisces, on the other hand, is depicted backwards. The fish made up of the stars of the circlet is on the left side of the string while the triangle is on the right.

I don't know enough about the rest of the constellations to comment on them but can say that there is inconsistency in the way the constellations are depicted.

And there is another reason why the constellations would not look as depicted from off earth. All of the stars of a constellation are not at the same distance from earth. So If you looked at the constellation from above the stars that are farthest away from us here on earth would be closet to you out in space. This would create a different perspective effect and the constellations wouldn't look anything like what we see here. The closest I can come to describing the effect is that the constellation would be turned inside out but I am sure that concept is nowhere near what would actually be seen.