Dear Forum friends,
Don't get worried now. You don't need to remember all this. It's just for fun, you know. If you get the basic ideas about these words you will know where to find them if you want them again some time. :-)
We are going to have a gibbous moon soon. Do you know what a "gibbous moon" is?I didn't either. I had some idea that it was pretty spooky. The sound of the word is even spooky to me, for some reason. A gibbous moon is a moon that is more than half full, but less than full. It is a bit distorted in shape. I came to hear of a gibbous moon because of the Geminid meteor showers. (Incidentally, do you know what the word "spooky" means? Just in case you don't, I'll tell you: it means eerie, or haunted, suggesting the presence of ghosts. I think you don't like this topic, so we will move on.
Geminid: now there's another of those Greek words that harks back to the Greek ancients and their gods. It comes from the word Gemini. If you know anything about astronomy, or even astrology, you will know that it is the constellation named "the Twins". It is the third sign of the zodiac. Taurus is the one before it. Ha ha, I'm a Taurus. I think my twin brothers are Geminis. :-) For whatever it's worth to know these things, and I think it's worth very little. :-)
A few years ago David (Canuck) and I went out at night to see the meteors. He drove up to a ski mountain nearby that has a pretty name: Crystal Mountain. It is quite high and the ground was snowy, but it was a quiet night with few lights to take away from the beauty of the stars. There was no wind, and no other traffic. We turned off the car lights and lay down in the snow side by side in front of the car facing down the mountain so that we had a wonderful view of the sky. We wanted to inspect the stars with no strain on our necks. We had a great time talking about the stars and stuff, and pointing out the meteors to each other. Sometimes I miss my brother. He was supposed to come home in December and January this year as it was the only time he could get holidays. He has a new job and will be teaching all summer this year, but I don't think he is going to make it Ben keeps asking me "have you heard from David?" because Ben wants to have David's car all ready for him to take the trips he likes to take whenever he comes home. David loves to go out into the wilderness or to visit friends and family.
The annual Geminid meteor shower is set to peak on Dec. 14th. A bright gibbous moon will interfere with the shower. Even so, sky watchers who go outdoors during the hours before dawn on Sunday could see dozens of Geminids. I suppose you in China will have that gibbous moon, too, and the meteor showers. Will you try to go to some place dark enough to watch them? Some years they are spectacular. Other years there may not be as many to see. Sometimes we call these kinds of stars "shooting stars", and sometimes "falling stars". You are supposed to make a wish on a falling star, you know. Imagine all the wishes you can have during a meteor shower! I wonder how it will be this time? Will the skies be full of them this year?
Are any of you interested in the stars, and astronomy? I don't know a lot about it, but I remember that my father always used to point out the star formations known as The Big Dipper (or The Great Bear), and the three stars of Orion's belt. When I was a little girl and my brothers were toddlers (toddlers are little children who have justed learned to walk and still stagger around,) our whole family (Mom, Dad and three kids,) used to lie down on blankets on the front lawn on some summer nights, look up at the stars and talk. That was why David and I watched the stars on the mountain that way. We lived in the city of Hamilton then, yet our street was dark enough and quiet enough, to go out on the front lawn and enjoy it at night. The street lights had covers on them that looked like pleated coolie hats which directed their light downward toward the ground beneath the poles. That's where you need it, anyway.
Today we have a lot of "light pollution" because the lights aren't properly shielded and shine up into the heavens, as well as down. It isn't easy to see the stars any more in many places. Such a great loss to humans! Not to be able to see the deep, dark heavens filled with sparkling, shining stars in countless numbers. I used to imagine they were pinholes in the floor of another bright world. Thunder, I imagined was the gods rolling empty casks, I remember, and lightning was rents and tears in the same floor. Maybe if you were quick enough you might see what was up beyond the dark sky. You never could be quick enough, of course.
"Orion" in Greek mythology was a beautiful giant and mighty hunter, loved by Eos and slain at Delos by Artemis. Maybe I'll tell that story here one of these days. In another legend he pursued the Pleiades for five years, until Zeus placed him among the stars with his dog Sirius. That is why the constellation is noted for its group of three bright stars in a line. They are his Sword Belt, or Girdle, and for its two bright stars, Betelgeuse and Rigel. You can see that the Greek gods names are used a lot by astonomers.
I think I should explain here that the Pleiades were the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione, sometimes called Aethra. They were sisters of the Hyades. They killed themselves through grief over the death of their sisters the Hyades, and were set by Jupiter as a group of stars in the heavens. Their names were Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Alcyone, Celaeno, Sterope and Merope. They are a loose cluster of many hundreds of stars in the constellation Taurus, six of them are visible to ordinay sight. The brightest is Alcyone. Merope is the "lost Pleiad", and she hid herself from shame for having loved a mortal.
Do you know that there is a big group of huge world oil companies nicknamed "The Seven Sisters?" Maybe their name comes from the PleiadeS? If you look straight up from the lip of the Big Dipper you can see the Pole Star, also known as The North Star, which is the navigator's star. Imagine how many sailors in little ships on the dark ancient ocean have scanned the heavens to find that bright star to guide them true and well through the night.
I think a gibbous moon sounds spooky to me because in spooky stories they sometimes talk about "gibbering ghosts". Isn't it strange how we like to scare ourselves a little with our imaginations? OK, OK, I know you don't want to hear any more about that, so I will close now.... ;-> Maybe my mind is still back at Hallowe'en. That's the old way to spell it, now they leave out the apostrophe and it is Halloween. I like the old way because it preserves the original meaning which was Hallowed Evening. The Feast of All Hallows.
I hope you were interested! :-) Your friend, Mary
