Introduction

R. M. Sinclair

National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA, U.S.A.*

* Presently: Chevy Chase, MD, U.S.A.

1. THE ORIGIN OF THIS MEETING

The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena (INSAP) was an experiment. None of the elements that made it up was original; what was new was the idea of combining in one meeting a broad range of studies of human reactions to astronomical phenomena. The idea of INSAP first came up a few years ago when I was discussing with Ray White and George Coyne the limits that should be placed on a specialized meeting in archaeoastronomy [1] that Ray and I were planning. As we broadened the limits we saw that we had suddenly come across a quite different idea for a meeting--one that would look at the full range of influence of astronomical phenomena on human activity.

George Coyne turned the idea into a practical plan for a meeting to be held under the auspices of the Vatican Observatory. The Organizing Committee was formed, we all joined in making the final plans, and it was held near Rome at the Villa Mondo Migliore (across Lago Albano from Castelgandolfo, the home of the Vatican Observatory). Some of the papers presented appear here in this special issue of Vistas in Astronomy and others more related to art will be in a parallel issue of Leonardo. (Due to lack of space only part of the papers could be published in their entirety. Most of the other contributions appear as abstracts, complete versions of which are available from the authors.)

It became clear early on that our original idea was simply too broad for a four day meeting. So we limited the topics to four themes: the influence of astronomical phenomena on literature, art, myth and religion, and history and politics, and planned on I day to explore each topic. Because the papers actually submitted wandered a bit from this outline, the meeting followed these themes only approximately.

For all the best laid plans that committees make, the success of a meeting is determined by the people who attend. In this we were most fortunate to have a fine and diverse group of attendees. The papers presented at the meeting reflect this diversity. The common bond between attendees--astronomers, historians, artists, musicians--was that each had a strong interest in one aspect of the broad study, and each had something different to say about mankind's long and deep fascination with the lights in the sky. This common interest was the bridge that led to many contacts, both formal and informal, during the meeting, and gave a common ground for discussion bounded by the reality of astronomy. No question was considered embarrassing as long as it was answered seriously. Since this meeting represented one intersection between religion and science, we can but quote John Paul II: "For the truth of the matter is that the Church and the scientific community will inevitably interact; their options do not include isolation." [2]

One day of the meeting was spent on a tour of the Vatican City gardens, a visit to some of the gems of the Vatican Museums, and a tour of the Papal Library and Archives. This allowed the attendees to see what opportunities there were there for future research visits. Indeed, several of us did return to the Vatican City after the meeting for further work.

2. THE POWER OF ASTRONOMICAL PHENOMENA

The fascination with astronomical phenomena has been a strong and often dominant element in human life and culture [3]. A measure of its importance is to try to imagine our world forever cloudy, without the image of the Sun in the day or the Moon and stars at night, and then picture what would happen if the clouds parted and they suddenly appeared. This is a gedankenexperiment [4] in which we turn off all such phenomena, let mankind develop, and then turn them back on. The idea of course is not "new": it comes from an early story by the late Isaac Asimov: Nightfall [5]. Asimov postulated a world in which darkness came only once every few thousand years. On those rare occasions the stars came out briefly with dramatic consequences for the people there (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Cover of Astounding Science Fiction, September 1941, illustrating the story 'Nightfall,' copyright 1941 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.; copyright renewed 1965 by Condé Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines. Photography courtesy of John L. Brown.

Asimov in turn acknowledged his debt to R. W. Emerson, who wrote in his 1835 journal "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, men would believe & adore & for a few generations preserve the remembrance (of what) had been shown." [6]

Like many of Asimov's other stories, Nightfall was remarkably prescient. Ed Krupp tells that the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles got several dozen phone calls immediately after the earthquake of January 17, 1994. The quake occurred at 4:31 a.m., and knocked out the power to much of the city. People fled their houses into the dark streets and many noticed for the first time the night sky unobscured by city lights--and some thought this strange sight of a star-filled sky was somehow connected with the earthquake [7].

3. THE NATURE OF ASTRONOMICAL PHENOMENA

What are these phenomena that have so fascinated mankind? Let us ignore for the moment what we now know of the Universe, and speak only of what man saw with the naked eye and learned over a time scale of some generations in pre-Copernican times: a fixed Earth about which the Sun, Moon, planets and stars seemed to wheel endlessly. Comets and meteors disturbed the regularity, and other less frequent events perplexed the observers. To a large extent, this is the same range of phenomena that still fascinates man today. Let me summarize briefly what these naked-eye astronomical phenomena are, and rank them in order of the importance usually given them.

First, there are the repetitive phenomena, whose cycles determine our time and calendar. All these phenomena are strongly latitude-dependent; they are quite different near the poles than they are in the tropics.

3.1. Strong

• The Sun dominates life on Earth. Its apparent motion sets the day and the year. It is hard to imagine people who do not give the highest place to the images and figures based on the Sun.
• The Moon is accorded a similar place of importance by man, even though its actual physical effects are limited to defining the month, providing nocturnal light for part of each month, and dominating the ocean tides. I believe this is a case where the emotional impact outweighs the physical, perhaps because the Moon in apparent size and motion is so like the Sun. Indeed, in the polar regions during the long winter with little or no Sun, the full Moon 'becomes' the Sun each month, climbing as high in the winter sky as the Sun does during the polar summer, with some unexpected results [8].

3.2. Medium

• At first glance, the planets are much less obvious than the Sun and the Moon and their importance throughout history is a bit of a puzzle. Perhaps their very motion against the background of the fixed stars is disturbing, or perhaps this importance harks back to an earlier time when moving objects in the sky were to be feared. Nonetheless, man has deified the planets and often made them objects of worship and fear.

3.3. Weak

• The fixed stars provide a rich carpet across the night sky. There are too many for any one to dominate, and the patterns that man has made of them and called constellations are (with a few exceptions) neither clear nor unique. The variety of constellations formed throughout history from the same stars shows that these stars have provided a pointy Rorschach test for mankind. The Milky Way has been given a diffuse importance, befitting its diffuse character. A few individual bright stars, and some asterisms of no particular visible distinction (notably the Pleiades), have proven important to many people, perhaps because of the timing of their seasonal appearance or disappearance. The faint patch of zodiacal light was largely ignored.
• Other dim blobs in the sky (such as nebulae and galaxies) did not attract much attention in pre-telescopic days, even though they now tell us much more about the nature of the cosmos than the planets and visible stars ever did.

Second, there are the unexpected transient phenomena, which by their rarity and element of surprise have long been of great importance to man.

3.4. Strong

• Eclipses of the Sun and Moon are among nature's great spectacles. Those of the Sun are rarer and more dramatic; those of the Moon are more subtle but more common. Both have affected history significantly. The fear of a solar eclipse is understandable, since what is seen is so rare as to be completely outside people's experience. And it is understandable that some peoples feared that an eclipse might be 'permanent', heralding the death of the Sun and perhaps of the world [9].
• The rare supernova is equally dramatic, when it suddenly appears out of nowhere to outshine the brightest star (and once, it is thought, even the Moon) for a month or two.
• Comets have gotten a bad rap because of the dread and wonder they have traditionally inspired [10]. Comets do nothing to mankind today to account for this, so perhaps this is a hangover from earlier days when comets may have been not only more frequent but were more obviously associated with showers of meteors.

3.5. Medium-to-weak

• The aurora borealis is, strictly speaking, a geophysical phenomenon, and not astronomical in the sense of the others discussed here. But this distinction was not realized until the 18th Century. We think of the aurora borealis as a polar phenomenon: it is largely confined to far northern latitudes, when in the long winter nights the sky blazes with folds of color. It is best seen in winter along the northern auroral ring, which passes over Fairbanks (Alaska) and the far north of Scandinavia. The aurora figures prominently in the folklore of the peoples living near or north of the Arctic Circle. The Lapps even have traditions of using the aurora to light their winter travels. But the aurora is not that rare in mid-latitudes, and is occasionally seen as far south as the equator [11].
• There is also a symmetric aurora australis, but it is seen by many fewer people (and less often and less dramatically than the aurora borealis) because of the absence of traditionally inhabited land near or beyond the Antarctic Circle. This aurora does figure in the traditions of the original inhabitants of Australasia. The aurora australis is best seen today by the few small hardy bands that winter over at several research stations in Antarctica situated along or near the southern auroral ring.
• Meteors today scarcely attract attention, but are only silent, harmless scratches of light across the night sky. Once a decade or so, a single meteor is bright enough to attract unusual attention but even then inflicts at most minimal damage [12]. Meteor showers occur annually as the Earth moves through various streams of debris associated with past or present comets. A few of these showers have been particularly dramatic in the past; one (the Leonids in 1833) at its peak had some tens of thousands of meteors per hour, and the flashes of light were bright enough to wake people. Other showers are quite localized in time, and are observed to last for only a few hours. Meteor showers attract little interest today, perhaps because we have not had any recently on the scale of the dramatic ones of the last few centuries [13]. For all their brilliance, virtually all the stuff of meteor showers are small particles that don't reach the Earth's surface.

Meteorites (i.e., meteors that reach the ground) are usually small lumps of rock or iron that give us our only tangible fragments of extra-terrestrial matter. They have been treated with great respect and even worshiped through the ages [14]. They have in some cases proven to have practical value. For example, the iron meteorites that fell at Cape York on the northwest coast of Greenland some thousands of years ago provided the Esquimaux there with a source of cold-workable iron for tools and harpoon points. Consequently these people never had a 'real', stone age [15].

We know, however, that perhaps once every few millennia quite sizable objects do hit the Earth. Tunguska and Meteor Crater remind us what can happen without warning, albeit rarely. Also, an object was once seen to hit the Moon, and several potential impactors have been detected passing between the Earth and the Moon [16]. Although present experience shows that such catastrophic hits of Earth are rare, the chance of serious harm to mankind is not negligible, and is indeed comparable to other, more normal hazards [17].

Of course, aurora and meteors occur in the daytime as well, when they have been invisible until recent advances in instrumentation have made it possible to observe them routinely.

When we talk of astronomical phenomena, we usually make an assumption of uniformity in the past, that the long-term average of these phenomena has always been much the same. We can say with certainty that this is true for the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars because we can track their motions back for millennia. Plus ça changeait, plus c'était la mème chose. But we do not know with the same certainty that the bombardment of Earth from space has been the same as we now observe it to be. Several papers at this meeting [18] make a good case for 'coherent catastrophism'--that the flux of comets and cometary debris hitting Earth has shown periodicities of order millennia in the past as Earth moved in and out of streams of fragments. The present rarity of sizable 'hits' may not always have been the case.

Some of the evidence comes from old records and traditions, that suggest strongly that the sky some millennia ago was so different as to lie completely outside our present experience. Early records speak fearfully of the sky being alive with meteors, much as we have occasionally seen during rare showers; were there many more small ones, there could be as many more big ones. At those times bombardment from the sky would have been a real hazard. Tunguska-sized events may have been common enough to make people fear the skies as something to watch with dread, to worship, and to propitiate. (The most extreme example is perhaps that of the Mesoamerican civilizations [19] that patterned themselves around a fear of the skies that we can scarcely fathom. These cultures seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot as regards astronomical phenomena at some point in their past.) The idea of repeated passage through 'danger zones' in the Solar System would explain much of the fear and worship of the sky that we still see in place today, albeit diluted. It is otherwise hard to understand this dread of the sky, since there is no historical record of anyone actually being killed by a meteorite [12] or threatened physically by a comet.

Those studying myths and legends, and early art, could profitably work with astronomers (and vice versa) to learn more about this little-understood aspect of the history of mankind and of the Solar System. Historians and anthropologists who do not include astronomical phenomena in their work, and who do not understand how dangerous the Solar System can be, are likely to interpret texts or traditions about things "seen in the sky" or "falling to Earth" as references to "heavens" or "warfare of the gods" rather than descriptions of actual physical events. When used with understandable caution, human history does offer a way to probe the astronomical record on a time scale of millennia [20].

One place where ancient records have proven of use in astronomy is in finding planetary positions and identifying eclipses several millennia ago, and comparing these with what present-day calculations would predict to have occurred. This comparison allows us to fine-tune the description of the Earth's rotation, and even allows us to distinguish between various theories of gravity.

[Our modern picture of astronomy is far more complex. The study of those things we can't see with the naked eye has shown us that we live within astronomy, and in many ways our fate is determined by astronomy--although not in the sense of pre-Copernican days. The seemingly solid, lonely planet Earth is actually only one member of a small family of planets, dominated by an average star in an average spiral arm of an average galaxy in an average cluster of galaxies. Much as this whole picture seems as tranquil as clockwork, it is full of hazards. The space between planets, and even between stars, which seems so empty at first glance, is actually a dangerous place. Sir Isaac Newton first showed in 1687 that comets perform long, looping orbits that could cross those of the planets. In 1801 Giuseppe Piazzi at the Observatory of Palermo discovered the first and largest of a whole family of stony fragments that form the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (He named this minor planet "Ceres" after the pagan patron saint of Sicily.) Occasional asteroids are displaced from their orbits in this belt into Earth-crossing orbits. Comets are broken up by the forces of the Sun and planets, and degenerate into streams of fragments that can also cross Earth's orbit. It was realized by 1800 that Earth is being hit by these fragments. On a longer time scale, nearby stars can dislodge cometary material from interstellar space and put it into Sun-bound orbits. And on an even longer time scale, on the order of tens of millions of years, it has been postulated that the passage of the Sun and its brood of chicks through the galactic spiral arms can increase the cometary bombardment of Earth many fold and lead to the mass extinctions that have in the past put life on this planet onto entirely new tacks [21].]

One final thought on astronomical phenomena. We usually think of them as beyond man's control, and our reactions purely passive. But technology has made it possible to perturb and even create things on an astronomical scale. Artificial satellites shine in the evening sky, looking much as the moons of Mars would as seen from the surface of that planet. We have traveled to the Moon and seen "Earthrise" there. We have created aurorae with high-altitude nuclear explosions. And these explosions themselves could be seen throughout the Solar System. Rather than wait helplessly for the unexpected impact of large-size fragments of asteroids or comets, it is quite within the range of present-day technology to detect and deflect incoming impactors of a dangerous size and possibly avert catastrophes that once were implacable and unavoidable [17] [21]. As a final touch, there is one mock-serious proposal to increase the brightness of the Moon 20-fold by coating it with a highly reflective substance [22].

4. THE RESPONSE TO ASTRONOMICAL PHENOMENA

How have people responded to astronomical phenomena? Some idea of the variety and depth of this response can be gotten from the talks presented at this meeting. We broadcast word of INSAP fairly widely through various professional channels (principally astronomical), and these notices in turn found their way to other people that we might not have thought would be interested. (I believe there was a limited mention on the Internet, but no one seems to have come via that route.) So although the attendees included a number of the usual suspects, most of those who found their way to INSAP were outside the circles of archaeoastronomy and ethnoastronomy and the history of astronomy. We wanted to have a meeting small enough to have plenty of time for informal discussion, and we chose the Villa because its isolation would help engender a feeling of collegiality. We were however able to issue invitations to the great majority of those who inquired, using self-selection to determine interest rather than a priori definitions. Not all who came presented papers or posters. We let some come as observers, and welcomed their contributions to the formal and informal discussions.

The results were interesting. The single theme that most presentations focused on was the effect of astronomical phenomena on the cultural and philosophical development of mankind. The papers in this issue and in the parallel issue of Leonardo cover a range from particular examples to broad studies of cultural patterns. Some papers focused on the work of particular writers and artists, and others on aspects of the history and development of astronomy.

INSAP showed yet again that we ignore the response to astronomical phenomena at our peril when we study any of man's activities. Yet many books and meetings on history and anthropology and art make no reference at all to astronomy. Let us hope this meeting will help change that.

5. THE USE OF ASTRONOMICAL SYMBOLS TODAY

In preparation for this meeting and to satisfy my own curiosity, I looked for one response to astronomical phenomena--the portrayal of such phenomena in visual art--because I expected to find strong images there. I started with a walk-through tour of the major art museums of Washington, D.C., to see how artists had responded. I was quite surprised by what I found in this particular cross section of art. Virtually all fine art of the past few centuries ignores things astronomical. The Sun--the normal source of light--is usually behind the observer. Occasionally the Sun's rays are seen coming from a Sun masked by a cloud. Sometimes a crescent Moon graces an evening sky. Rarely, as a tour de force an artist will show a rising or setting Sun, or a rising full Moon, but a gibbous Moon is never portrayed.

Even rarer are attempts to capture the aurora. Stars never, in what I saw. Nothing in this somewhat pallid response would have prepared me for the shock of van Gogh's "The Starry Night" [23], which comes as a complete surprise to me every time I see it. Here is a unique and forceful portrayal of a sky blazing with stars and a crescent Moon (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. The Starry Night, by Vincent van Gogh, 1889. Oil on canvas (73.7 x 92.1 cm). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

When I looked at a simpler art in these museums, however--by untrained or primitive artists--I found astronomical themes much more commonplace. Suns and Moons abound, and enter into complex symbolism. One example is a painting that invokes eclipses of the Sun and Moon to illustrate a passage from the book of Revelations (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. The Lord will deliver his people across Jordan; And the Moon became as blood; And There Shall Be Earthquakes (Rev. 6: 12-13 (detail), by Howard Finster, 1976. Enamel on fiberboard(76.4 x 75.1 cm). Courtesy of the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C./Art Resource N.Y.

As Amy Sandback remarked at INSAP, some of this is art intended to come to grips with astronomy, not just to portray it.

One special type of painting does focus on things astronomical, although it is more often found hanging in planetaria or observatories than in museums. These are paintings and drawings made to record such phenomena as aurora [24], meteors, and eclipses in the days before they could be accurately recorded photographically. These were often scientific recordings, but the artist was free to set the scene dramatically. A parallel path is paintings of astronomical views no one has yet seen, such as close-ups of different types of stars and planets portrayed as realistically as astronomical knowledge allows. This 'space art' is often used as scientific illustration, and at its best gives broad scope to an artist's imagination. Examples are the illustrations for novels such as those by Jules Verne, or the paintings by Chesley Bonestell (ca.. 1950) showing what it would be like to land on the Moon. Carried one step further, this can be the 'science-fiction art' used to illustrate novels and magazines of that genre [25].

It was on the streets and in the stores of Washington that I came across a much richer, popular use of astronomical symbols. Once I started looking, I found a barrage of Suns and Moons and stars and comets on T-shirts and billboards, on museum placards and in museum stores, in gift shops and on sets of dishes in department stores. These symbols are often happy and cheery, and have a childlike sense of wonder to them even while conveying other messages as well.

One symbol--the ringed planet, Saturn--has been preempted to signify the occult, the mysterious, or the beginning of a science-fiction or fantasy film. This popular fixation with a ringed planet as mystery symbol is unusual in that Saturn's rings cannot be seen without a telescope, and were first glimpsed by Galileo only in 1612 (and their ring nature first realized by Huygens in 1659). There is thus no old tradition of a ringed planet. The present use of this symbol started within recent times, and very few people who accept its use have ever actually seen Saturn through a telescope.

Except for Saturn, the present day symbol system stands in a direct line of an age-old tradition. Herdeg explored the use of Sun symbols through the centuries, and showed the continuity of image and symbol [26]. His work, though, with its round and rayed Sun symbols and its classical solar chariots, did not anticipate some contemporary responses (Fig. 4).

There is certainly room here for more study. I have mentioned a few works (Boime, Eather, Herdeg, Krupp, Olsen and Schechner Genuth), that explore the use of particular astronomical phenomena in art or in popular motifs. Perhaps it is time for comprehensive books on Astronomy in Art and on The Popular Use of Astronomical Symbols. I wish any would-be authors success!

6. CONCLUSIONS

What did this meeting accomplish? Each of the eighty or so attendees brought a personal interest in one aspect or another of man's fascination with astronomical phenomena. No single recipe or rule emerged from the meeting that would bridge perceived gaps between sciences and humanities; rather, the result was a better appreciation for the attendees of the diversity of human response to the skies, and a better sense of the importance of including astronomical phenomena in any study of man's culture and history. Astronomy is not yet a component of the mainstream of studies of history or prehistory, classics, or art. Yet INSAP showed forcefully how much of man's works and thoughts cannot be understood without primary reference to astronomy.

The meeting was a first-of-a-kind. Although it had a few consequent rough edges, I feel it was a success. One thing that did emerge was a new-found sense of identity among those who attended. I found it most interesting to see the aspects of astronomy that fascinated the others. Perhaps there could be a second meeting in this tradition. If so, I wish its organizers well, and I hope they are able to maintain the same 'open admissions' policy that we could.

In closing, I would like to express my own gratitude to my fellow organizers, and in particular to George Coyne and Ray White. Without their constant interest and work this meeting would never have been a success. The staff of the Vatican Observatory are to be thanked for their cooperation and hospitality. No matter how difficult our demands, they somehow always found a way to meet them. The Villa Mondo Migliore took us in as an unusual group of guests and made our stay there most pleasant. I thank John David Mooney and his assistants for their creation of planned and impromptu art works to honor the meeting. And finally I thank all the attendees, many of whom heard of the meeting through ways we did not expect, who came from afar to Castelgandolfo and made the time there a fascinating one for all of us.

References

[1] Archaeoastronomy began as an independent field of study when a few astronomers started combing the archaeological record for evidence of pre-historic astronomically related constructions, hence the name. (In Britain, where the field first achieved a certain definition, it was known as astroarchaeology.) It still consists mainly of the study of those things in the human record that astronomers (and others interested in astronomy) find interesting, and can argue are reactions to astronomical phenomena or are based in some way on astronomical observations. It usually looks for its material in prehistory (via archaeology) or in primitive societies (via anthropology). It does admit of some recent generalizations, such as the approach of this meeting. Archaeoastronomy had its origin and much of its continued self-definition because of a disregard for the nature and power of astronomical phenomena by many of those studying human society and history. Nature abhors a vacuum, and astronomers (both professional and amateur) filled the intellectual void.

[2] John Paul II (1988) Introduction. In: R. J. Russell, W. R. Stoeger and G. V. Coyne (1988) Physics; Philosophy, and Theology. A Common Quest for Understanding, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, USA.

[3] For a survey of the universality of this element, see E. C. Krupp (1991) Beyond the Blue Horizon: Myths and Legends of the Sun, Moon, Stars, and Planets. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

[4] A gedankenexperiment is a mental exercise (a thought experiment) in which one considers an experiment that is perhaps impossible to achieve in reality, but the very act of thinking about it makes you see things in a new light. The idea is old, but it was formalized, named, and used as an important tool by the German physicist Ernst Mach about 1905.

[5] Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1941, pp. 9-34.

[6] R. W. Emerson (ca. 1840) The Trancendentalist, Chap. I (Nature). There is the same idea in a Hebrew prayer:

Were the sun to rise but once a year, we would all cry out: How great are Your works, O God, and how glorious!

I'm sure there are other and even earlier such speculations, and I would appreciate being told of them.

[7] E. C. Krupp (Dec. 1994) "Cosmos on parade: a year, more-or-less, of sky jinks and earth tremors, part one, eclipses and earthquakes." Griffith Observer 58(12), pp.1-17.

[8] R. M. Sinclair (Jan. 1987) "Moonlight and circadian rhythms." Science 235, p. 145.

[9] S. Milbrath (1995) "Eclipse Imagery in Mexica Sculpture of Central Mexico." Vistas Astron. 39(4), p. 479-502.

[10] For a summary of the views of comets in classical and medieval times, see S. Schechner Genuth (1997) Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); also, see R. J. M. Olson (1985) Fire and Ice: a History of Comets in Art (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC).

[11] The name aurora borealis was apparently first coined by Galileo in 1619, observing from 44° north latitude. I myself once saw an impressive aurora in New Mexico (36° N), and that particular display was seen as far south as 30° N. There are a number of interesting biblical and classical references to the aurora in R. H. Eather (1980) "Majestic Lights. The Aurora in Science, History, and the Arts." American Geophysical Union, Washington, D.C.

[12] C. E. Spratt (1991) "Possible hazards of meteorite falls." J. Roy. Astron. Soc. Can. 85, 263-280.

[13] C. P. Olivier (1925) Meteors. Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore; A. C. B. Lovell (1954) Meteor Astronomy. Clarendon Press, Berkeley.

[14] J. G. Burke (1986) Cosmic Debris: Meteorites in History (Chap. 7). University of California Press, Berkeley.

[15] A. P. McCartney (1991) "Canadian Arctic Trade Metal." In: Metals in Society, R. M. Ehrenreich (ed.),8, Part II, pp. 26-43; V. F. Buchwald and G. Mosdal (1985) "Meteoritic iron, telluric iron, and wrought iron in Greenland." Meddelelser om Groenland Man and Society 9, 3-29.

[16] See the paper by J. Wlodarczyk (1995) "From starry sky to physical universe: astronomical imagery in Polish romantic poetry." Vistas Astron. 39(2), pp. 629-637:

Give me a comet smaller than the moon,
A golden squadron tinkling from its tail,
And let it skim the forests...
Then shall I fetch unknown angelic things
And stand, wings open, on that star that sings.
(From "Give me a mile of land" by Juliusz Slowacki, ca. l840);

On June 30,1908, shortly after 7 AM (local time) an object entered the atmosphere above Siberia and after leaving a long fiery trail exploded above a particularly desolate forested region near the Podkammenaya Tunguska River, a region empty save for a few families of nomadic hunters and herdsmen. This was most likely a stony fragment approximately 60 m in diameter, possibly associated with comet P/Encke. This event released roughly 15 Megatons of energy. The region of devastation exceeded 2000 square kilometers. There is one report of the flash of the impact being seen some 5000 km away; the atmospheric effects were certainly seen the next few nights through much of Europe and Asia. Had it hit a more populated region or an ocean, we would have a very different view today of celestial hazards. Meteor Crater in Arizona was formed by a similar impact of an iron meteorite about 50,000 years ago; like Tunguska, it too could have devastated a metropolitan area or an entire coastline. Yet another object was observed to hit the Moon on the evening of June 18, 1178 (old style) and leave a crater 20 km in diameter (J. B. Hartung (1976), "Was the formation of a 20-km-diameter impact crater on the Moon observed on June 18, 1178?" Meteoritics 11, pp.187-194); it could equally well have hit Earth. So we have two dramatic impacts in the historic record, and one in near prehistoric times. This does not include the recorded near-misses by asteroids, such as the three observed to pass between the Earth and the Moon in two years (1991-1993) (D. L. Rabinowitz et al. (1993) "Evidence for a near-Earth asteroid belt." Nature 363, 704-706).

[17] C. R. Chapman and D. Morrison (1994) "Impacts on the Earth by asteroids and comets: assessing the hazard." Nature 367, 33-40.

[18] M. Bailey (1995) "Recent results in cometary astronomy: Implications for the ancient sky." Vistas Astron. 39(2), pp. 647-671.

S. V. M. Clube (1995) "Punctuational crises and the Spenglerian model of civilisation." Vistas Astron. 39(2), pp. 673-698.

W. B. Masse (1995) "The celestial basis of civilization." Vistas Astron. 39(2), pp. 463-477.

[19] M. León-Portilla (1995) "On the meanings of the celestial bodies in pre-hispanic Mexico." Vistas Astron. 39(2), 451-461; S. Milbrath (1995) - Reference [9], above.

[20] It is true that the late Immanuel Velikovsky used much of the same data to construct his own theories (see, for example, his Worlds in Collision, Doubleday & Co., New York City, 1950) but by blandly ignoring what is known of the physical sciences he worked himself into a sterile dead end.

[21] C. R. Chapman (1989) Cosmic Catastrophes. Plenum Press, New York.

[22] D. Jones (Dædalus) (June 1993) "Waxing Moon." Nature 363, 404.

[23] A. Boime (1989) Vincent van Gogh: Die Sternennacht. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main.

[24] R. H. Eather (1980) Majestic Lights. The Aurora in Science, History, and the Arts. American Geophysical Union, Washington, D.C.

[25] R. Miller (1996) "The archaeology of space art." Leonardo 29(2), pp. 139-143.

[26] W. Herdeg (ed.) (1962) The Sun in Art: Sun Symbolism of Past and Present in Pagan and Christian Art, Popular Art, Fine Art, and Applied Art. Graphis Press, Zurich.

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Go to the First INSAP Conference page
Go to the Second INSAP Conference page
Go to Editor's Note by R.E. White
Go to introductory note and welcome by G.V. Coyne, S.J.
Go to "Table of Contents" for Vistas in Astronomy 39(4)
Go to Amy Sandback's Prologue to the Leonardo papers
Go to "Table of Contents" for Leonardo 29/2 papers
Go to an album of photos taken during the First Conference

This page modified on: 25 March 2007