constellations-certainly the Big Dipper, maybe the Little Dipper, too, and boxy Orion with his bright belt and sword, and the five-star zigzag of Cassiopeia.
We learn to distinguish between stars and planets by whether they twinkle or shine, for stars are so distant that they appear as mere points of light in the sky, and that light is easily bent and bobbled by turbulence in our atmosphere, while the planets are close enough that their radiance passes through air with scarcely a diversion or refraction, and so planets will bluntly, unwinkingly shine. Indeed, with an ordinary backyard telescope and under the right conditions, you can see the cheeky spheroid faces of our siblings in the solar system-Jupiter and its red spot, which is really a giant gaseous hurricane big enough to engulf three Earths and which has lasted for at least four hundred years; Saturn and its hallmark Hula-Hoops of ice, dust, and rock: tangerine Mars and moon-white Venus. But even our most powerful telescopes cannot resolve the disk of an extrasolar star, no matter how massive the star may be; all stars are too far away to be sized and analyzed as anything but points of light.
We stare and stare at the night, looking for something, anything, to make sense of the thundering silence-voiceover, pantomime, anagram, Vulcan mind-meld. Can't you just say something?
Don't you hear us? Here we are! And as we stare, we see a streak of light. a wild platinum cat scratch piercing the mute tuxedo screen, and we're thrilled, each time, and filled again with goofy hope. A shooting star! I saw a shooting star! Did you? Well, just keep looking.
You'll see one, too. Oh, we know they're not stars.
They are meteoroids, space debris, the bits of interplanetary rock with which our solar system is littered; and though most of them are quite small, no bigger than a marble, they careen parabolically through space at such high speeds that when one of them hits Earth's atmosphere, the force of friction sets the rock ablaze, and Earth-bound viewers for thousands of miles around can watch the combusting rock bid us all a bright good-night.
With their tragicomic displays delivered inlive-stream feed, meteors are especially easy for us modern humans to love and humanize, yet as Earth makes its squashed circle pilgrimage around the sun, the other stars and planets also appear to march across the nighttime sky. And the moon, as it wheels around Earth, swells and shrinks and swells again, not randomly, not like a yo-yo dieter, but in meticulous clockwork slices. The ancients missed not a trick or a tock. Like our nursery jingles and semiotic bunny board books, the earliest artifacts of civilization highlight our long-held fascination with the lights on high. Some 35,000 years ago, a sculptor-skywatcher living in what is now the Lebombo Mountains of southern Africa carved twenty-nine evenly spaced notches into a baboon bone, each groove likely representing a phase of the moon. Other artisans of the Pleistocene left behind similarly tooled eagle bones in sites not far from the famed Lascaux cave paintings in France. Ancient Chinese scholars engraved astronomy charts in bones and turtle shells, recording the paths of stars and planets and identifying hundreds of constellations. The dour megalithic monument of Stonehenge and the Mayan city of Palengue are thought to have served as astronomical observatories, their structures aligned to make dramatic use of the sun's light on the summer solstice, a sacred day in many cultures. For our seven-day week we can thank the ancient Babylonians and Greeks, who carefully observed the behavior of the sun, moon, and five quirky
"stars" that we now know to be planets-the five planets that can be seen with the naked eye and that are so comparatively close to us they fairly glide across the sky, noticeably shifting their position against the stellar backdrop from one night to the next What connection does the author make between constellations and the phases of the moon?
1. They both reveal the randomness and chaos of the universe.
2. They both appear to twinkle when viewed through a telescope.
3. They both helped scientists understand the phenomenon of shooting stars.
4. They both appeal to humans' desire to make meaning from patterns and to keep records.
1 answer
The correct connection the author makes between constellations and the phases of the moon is:
4. They both appeal to humans' desire to make meaning from patterns and to keep records.
The text discusses how ancient civilizations observed and recorded celestial events, highlighting the human fascination with the stars and the moon, and how this desire has led to the creation of art and records, such as the notches on bones and the construction of monuments.
