It shows us our solar system’s distant future, which our species will almost surely never witness, thank goodness. Aldebaran has reddened, cooled, and swelled to 22 times our sun’s diameter as it has grown old. When you look at Aldebaran, you see your very own middle-aged star, the sun, as it will look at the end of its life, some five or so billion years hence. Reduce Aldebaran to the size of a soccer ball, and Mars would be the size of half a speck of dust. How are you?”) between you and a Martian would take about 18 minutes to complete.Īldebaran is a heaving ball of thermonuclear energy millions of miles wide. Since radio waves move at the speed of light, a simple exchange of greetings (“Hello, how are you? I’m fine. When you look at Mars, the light you see takes about nine minutes to get to your eyes. The planet and the star look so much alike, but Mars is a tiny, 4,000-mile-wide hunk of rock 100 million miles away right now. Mars is above the Bull’s head between its horns. In the southwest, Aldebaran dominates the V-shaped head of Taurus, the Bull. Higher and in the southwest, the bright star Aldebaran competes with Mars in its orangeness. Then, as darkness fell, I would borrow my old man’s opera glasses and sneak away from my homework to grab a quick look at the sky.Ĭurrently, the resplendent winter sky decorates the early evening. In the mornings before school, I often reveled in the beauty of the sky. Those opera glasses were my first and only optical aid, and they turned me on to the wonder and majesty of the cosmos. Come to think of it, some of the characters in the operas were indeed playing circus clowns, but never mind. They had plastic lenses that distorted the performers on stage into circus clowns. He owned a cheap, three-buck pair of opera glasses. My old man’s opera obsession had a hidden benefit. I am a minor opera aficionado myself to this very day. How could I forget the trips to Cleveland to see the touring company of New York’s Metropolitan Opera? I can still close my eyes and see and hear the Triumphal March from Aida. My old man, kicked out of the ninth grade for fighting, was inexplicably an opera buff. The evenings in February remind me of that misspent youth and, strangely, my father’s opera obsession. I content myself with the evening and morning skies and sleep in between. After a cup or three of coffee, I strode with determination into the day’s activities.Īs old(er) age has crept up on me, I still get up early, but the days of all-night observing sessions are over. I was wide awake at 5 a.m., whether I had slept or not.
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