The Winter Sky
Dec. 5th, 2007 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ewein2412Oh my god it’s so DARK!!!!
The street lights flicked on at exactly 3.30 p.m. yesterday afternoon as Mark and I walked home from school. They’re not on now at 9.40 a.m., but it is twilight inside the house with the lights out. And it’s only going to get darker for the next two weeks.
However, this means that the Mills Observatory in Dundee is in full swing. I just cannot gush enough over what a supremely cool place this is. For a start, it is FREE. It is entirely operated by the Dundee City Council, and has been ever since it first opened its papier mache dome to the public in 1935 (though you do pay a tiny fee to see the planetarium show, presumably to subsidize the guy who gives the lecture four times a night). And then, the observatory is ONLY OPEN AT NIGHT IN WINTER. Just about every other tourist attraction in the UK shuts down and hibernates between October and April, so this is very unusual, although it makes sense if you consider that the opposite of dark is light…. in other words, at midsummer it doesn’t get dark enough to look through the telescope, and even in August you’d have to wait till after 10.00 p.m.
The first time we visited the observatory, last March, was a huge success, but since September we have made three foiled attempts to visit: on our first try, the place was closed; then the man who operates the telescope was sick; and finally we got lost and arrived so late we missed the planetarium show. Fourth try lucky. The planetarium is teeny tiny. (I suppose I should say it is "wee.") It is a tent, like a silk parachute on a frame, set up in a room that I would guess is smaller than our living room (I was instantly put in mind of the Great Globe Room in The Lion Hunter). There are about a dozen office chairs set up all around the edge of the dome. We had a lecture on space Clouds (baby stars, nebulae) afterward, but the show itself was just a straightforward view of the sky at the moment and all the interesting things to look for--namely Comet Holmes in Perseus, and Algol the demon star, then Mars and the Geminids in December. The lecturer told us to come back in December and maybe we can see the surface of Mars!
He was lovely--so enthusiastic, pointing out his favorite constellations--he said it never ceases to amaze him to think we are all made of of material that was once a star. “You are all created from the stuff of stars.” He kept talking about these huge time periods, stellar time, as though it happened in an eyeblink. “These are young stars, only ten million years old, we’re quite lucky to see them really”--as though we were around more than ten million years ago or will be ten million years from now! He made me want to be an astronomer.
The first time we visited the observatory, last March, was a huge success, but since September we have made three foiled attempts to visit: on our first try, the place was closed; then the man who operates the telescope was sick; and finally we got lost and arrived so late we missed the planetarium show. Fourth try lucky. The planetarium is teeny tiny. (I suppose I should say it is "wee.") It is a tent, like a silk parachute on a frame, set up in a room that I would guess is smaller than our living room (I was instantly put in mind of the Great Globe Room in The Lion Hunter). There are about a dozen office chairs set up all around the edge of the dome. We had a lecture on space Clouds (baby stars, nebulae) afterward, but the show itself was just a straightforward view of the sky at the moment and all the interesting things to look for--namely Comet Holmes in Perseus, and Algol the demon star, then Mars and the Geminids in December. The lecturer told us to come back in December and maybe we can see the surface of Mars!
He was lovely--so enthusiastic, pointing out his favorite constellations--he said it never ceases to amaze him to think we are all made of of material that was once a star. “You are all created from the stuff of stars.” He kept talking about these huge time periods, stellar time, as though it happened in an eyeblink. “These are young stars, only ten million years old, we’re quite lucky to see them really”--as though we were around more than ten million years ago or will be ten million years from now! He made me want to be an astronomer.
He made Mark want to be an astronomer, too. Mark (who is 7) was particularly impressed with the planetarium equipment and has asked for a star globe for Christmas. No, really, he said in his funny self-conscious shy way: “There’s something I want… It’s a star globe.” He even suggested where you can buy them. Then he came home and put together a P0werpoint presentation entitled "SPACE" which I dearly wish I could share only I can't be bothered to spend two hours figuring out how to do it.
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Date: 2007-12-05 01:54 pm (UTC)I hope you can find time to get out to the Observatory soon. Sounds like fun. ;o)
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Date: 2007-12-05 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-05 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-05 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-05 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-05 02:13 pm (UTC)I went through a brief period of wanting to study space when I was seven. I wanted less to be an astronomer and more to be an astro-physicist (I think I wanted to be Meg's dad from A Wrinkle in Time). I lost that bug until I was in college, and then I was almost bitten by it again, at which point the algebra frightened me.
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Date: 2007-12-05 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-05 02:36 pm (UTC)Can you see the Norther lights where you are?
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Date: 2007-12-05 03:01 pm (UTC)I have a cousin who is married to a Norwegian and spends every other Christmas at her home in Tromso, which is north of the Arctic Circle. They see them all the time there. He calls his mother in D.C. on his cell phone and yells, "MOM, I'M STANDING ON THE PORCH WATCHING THE AURORA AND IT'S AMAZING!"
Someday I may have to join him.
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Date: 2007-12-13 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-13 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-13 04:00 pm (UTC)It would be nice to think of 'sky creatures', perhaps, swinging amongst them...
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Date: 2007-12-05 05:02 pm (UTC)That's wonderful. I love winter stars.
Hello!
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Date: 2007-12-05 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-06 05:13 pm (UTC)On our honeymoon in Edinburgh, we played Quizzo with a couple Scottish women, one of whom said her mother was home with "the wee one." Charmed us, since on the side of the pond the word's mainly in "This Little Piggy Went To Market." :-)
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Date: 2007-12-10 08:57 am (UTC)Culturally, also, it is another country. I remember being stunned, and delighted, that everyone dances the old country dances. They learn them in school. At any formal dinner where there is a band or a DJ, at some point during the evening everyone will start dancing "The Dashing White Sergeant" and "The White Cockade." Also, it is the only place I have ever lived where the men dress more colorfully for formal dinners than the women do!
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Date: 2007-12-10 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-07 10:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 08:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 11:09 pm (UTC)We saw the Andromeda Nebula again, too.
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Date: 2007-12-11 10:47 am (UTC)Re the Google Earth/Sky, when you've got the latest version, if you click on 'Help', then 'Tutorials', then choose the one about Sky, it takes you to a little video on YouTube, here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMhGpzyFdhE. Very interesting.
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Date: 2007-12-11 12:10 pm (UTC)The most spectacular view of the full moon that I've ever seen was thru one of the tourist telescopes at the top of the Camera Obscura in Edinburgh! It was right after sunset so still a bit light, and the moon was just rising--this was the first and only time that I could see the moon's irregular edge, its mountains in silhoutte. It was a very unexpected pleasure as the ticket taker had only charged us half the entry fee because it was getting dark and she didn't think we'd get much of a view--of the city, of course--she wasn't expecting us to look at the moon!
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Date: 2007-12-12 10:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-11 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-12 10:32 am (UTC)Re: Hello!
Date: 2007-12-10 09:11 am (UTC)I'd say The Winter Prince refers to both of them... part of the reason I like it as a title is because it's so ambiguous. In the actual rhymers' pageant it's a role that they've both played (although Lleu's playing of it is impromptu). You might be interested to know that I thought of the title before I thought of including the "play within the play" or indeed the fictional character called "The Winter Prince." Including the play brought a lot of themes together.
Medraut is technically 30 during the last summer/winter of The Winter Prince. It's very old for the narrator of a YA novel and my editor at the time insisted (probably rightly) that I draw attention away from his age. There's one point where he says he was seven "nearly twenty years ago" and in the original manuscript it said "more than twenty years ago." If you do the math you reckon he must be no more than 27 but maybe it's a slip of the tongue...
I am particular about the ages of characters and I can tell you exactly what year everything takes place in. I am sort of idiotic this way. I'm having to fluff it a bit in the book I'm writing now, because some of the links don't match up, so I'm just pretending that one or two of my previous narrators can't count.
Thank you for stopping by, and for your kind words.
cheers, e
Re: Hello!
Date: 2007-12-14 12:55 pm (UTC)The play was inspired by a Mummer's Play that they used to do in the Folklore Dept. at Penn as a surprise to the first year grad students. The players would come bursting into one of the early December introductory folklore classes, and they just Blew Me Away my first year. I think I took part in three productions myself after that--it seems to me that there were 2 characters that got killed and brought back to life and I played them both, and also "the Lady," who gets left out of my very simplified version. I wrote the version for TWP not thinking I would actually include it in the book, but just so I could reference it--and then it turned out too wonderful to leave out. I wrote it in December, while I was also *acting* in a version of it.
We used a Yorkshire play in the Folklore dept., and I based my own version on that & the song "Rise Up Jock" and the version of the play used in the first Christmas Revels tape organized by John Langstaff and Susan Cooper. If any of that resonates with you, which it may not.
Incidentally, there was a question on Mummers' plays on my doctoral exams. It's one of these themes that keeps coming back to me.
I miss it. It was the VERY BEST THING about being a folklorist at Penn.
sorry this is such an incoherent response--I have too much to do. But I love talking about the construction of books.
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Date: 2007-12-10 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-17 10:52 am (UTC)