The astronomical adventure

[pameladean]

Yesterday was a glorious day. Not terribly warm -- I was so lulled by the bright sun coming in the windows of my office that when I took Ari out I wore only a sweater, which was a mistake. Then I bundled up well and truly for my walk to the post office to mail Eric some copies of Lois Bujold's first five books, and became too warm at once. It must, after all, be spring.

I kept looking nervously at the western sky, but it remained calm. Despite a momentary bogglement when carbonel and minnehaha K's joint ISP bounced my email back at me, all was arranged in plenty of time, and K appeared promptly at 6:15, while I was poking leaves away from the place where the white crocuses are. K expressed envy at the idea of having crocuses. She has rapacious bunnies in her yard. I have bunnies, but they don't seem to understand about crocuses.

I hadn't seen either carbonel or K in a group smaller than six for a long time, indeed, in K's case, possibly never. We all started talking almost immediately and kept it up pretty much indefatigably for the next four hours.

I enjoyed the drive east on 38th Street, back towards my old neighborhood, and carbonel's too, in the mellow late-afternoon light. K eventually delivered us into a hilly neighborhood full of fascinating huge houses that she said was "worse than Tangletown," but she didn't get us lost; she navigated by the Witch's Hat Tower and found parking, and we went up the last steep bit of hill on wooden steps, and across a very pleasant picnic area all strewn with oak leaves, to the base of the tower. The area around it is paved, and on the western side there was a railing, for which carbonel and I were grateful later, and three benches, two occupied already.

I'd never quite gotten the name of Prospect Park before. When I hear that word, I think, "California Gold Rush." But, of course, the park is called that because, from it, you have a splendid prospect. Bits of the University of Minnesota, all of downtown Minneapolis, and, as K found out by using my binoculars, Augsberg College and the lighting array for its playing fields. The river was mostly hidden by nearer buildings, but it gleamed here and there.

The moon had been up for most of the day, so we used the binoculars to look at that, and at the view generally, talking up a storm the whole time. Topics, then and later, ranged from Minicon programming through the impending wedding of K's daughter, skunk cabbages, gardening, gossip, various family matters, the perfidy of the Minneapolis zoning regulations and possible effects on my household's attempt to refinance our mortgage, gossip, what minnehaha B is up to, diet, exercise, food, cats, gossip, who is coming to Minicon, RSI, and, well, actually, also astronomy. Oh, yes, and carbonel had colored her hair, and we admired it. I wouldn't have noticed in that light, since she'd put in red, but it was noticeable enough indoors later on.

The day was so clear that the sunset proceeded very quietly, passing from rich red through orange and a striped period with pale blue, green, orange and red, with the red at the horizon. I found Venus a little before then, and we all looked at it through the binoculars. They are not astronomical ones, they're for bird-watching, but Venus showed a disk even through them. Lights came on in the downtown buildings, streetlights came on, more building lights came on, and then just to keep us alert, the lights of a large pale nearby building went off just below us. Mars came out, along with a few stars, so we had a brief debate about it. Somewhere in there we also found Jupiter, clear on the other side of the sky. Saturn was later on.

Airplanes kept coming out of the west; K described the flight path for us, and said it was always fun to listen to people describing the landmarks and getting them wrong. I complained about the airplanes at one point, but K said she liked them, they gave her hope that this one would actually be Mercury.

The other people had all left by then; carbonel and K had a brief discussion about whether they had been smoking dope or merely burning incense, and we agreed that, as K said, it would have been quite nice if they had just quietly come up here to smoke dope. carbonel had had a better view of them, though, and didn't think they had.

Orion's belt finally appeared; I'd been thinking I saw it with averted vision for a bit, but K caught it when it was finally committed to sticking around til it set. K was also the one who first saw Mercury. carbonel had tried to eyeball where ten degrees above the horizon would be (more than I'd be able to do), and it seemed too high for that, so we went on looking, and getting colder. Nothing else appeared in that part of the sky. We decided in time that it probably was Mercury, and that, viewed through the binoculars, it showed something different from the pinprick that stars made.

When I talked to Eric later, he reminded me that the constellations Mercury is in at the moment do not have any bright stars in them, so if we saw something, if we were able to see something in that part of the sky, it had to be Mercury.

We adjourned to the place we'd discussed that wasn't the Village Wok, carbonel and K having very generously offered to take me to dinner. We went on talking at full speed while ordering and consuming seafood asparagus, spicy eggplant, stir-fried pea tips, and pork with five spice salts. The talk was so immensely pleasant that we went on doing it outside my house for probably fifteen minutes. I refrained from inviting them in because I was supposed to be getting a telephone call and then writing, but the entire evening was completely delightful.

Pamela