Jabir's Observatory

Jabir consulting the planisphere in his Tree House Observatory

A few years ago I built a high platform secured to three redwoods close to my house and have been sleeping up there on warm summer nights. Most of the sky is covered by trees but there is a 15 degree slot in the southern horizon which is open to the sky. Since living outside gives me a continual view of the night sky I decided to turn my tree house into an observatory in the spirit of the medieval Muslims who accurately mapped the stars and gave them Arabic names, most of which persist today.

Sometime in the 1980s I caught wind of the Moorish Orthodox Church through the writings of Hakim Bey and in 1986, in his apartment near the Nicholas Roerich Museum I was initiated into the MOC by Hakim Bey himself and later received in the mail a scroll declaring me an "adept of the seventh chamber". Orthodox Moors are supposed to take Muslim names and since at that time I knew hardly anything about Arabic culture I asked Bey for help. "Well you could do worse than Jabir, the Eighth-Century Arab alchemist," he said. So Jabir it was. To which for euphony and reverence I added 'abd al-Khaliq.

Jabir's Observatory is equipped with two 7 x 50 binoculars, one 10 x 42 monocular, a planisphere , a bunch of astronomy books (including Stephen J. O'Meara's  Observing the Night Sky with Binoculars and A Field Guide to Stars and Planets. Plus a red head lamp to read these books without destroying night vision.

The planisphere is the modern descendant of the Arab astrolabe which was a star-based mechanical computer, the iPad of the Islamic Golden Age. One treatise on the astrolabe (by the medieval star scientist who discovered the Coathanger) lists 1000 uses (1000 astrolabe apps), including telling time, locating the constellations, and finding the direction of Mecca. My planisphere only shows which stars are visible at my latitude and where they are located for any date and time of night.

Recently I've acquired an iPad whose Sky Guide app can mirror the heavens in any location. Hold up the iPad and the stars on the screen are in the same position as the stars in the sky. You can even set the iPad on the floor and look through the Earth at Southern Hemisphere objects such as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Sky Guide is a planisphere on steroids.

Even though I only possess a viewing slot of 15 degrees, each month brings a new zodiacal sign into my observatory window. Late October's hottest attraction is the appearance of Orion and his hunting dogs high in the predawn sky.

In addition to relearning the constellations, I am trying to collect Messier objects which are 110 fuzzy objects in the sky which French astronomer Charles Messier listed as nuisances in his search for comets. Today no one remembers any of Messier's comets but Messier's non-comets are some of the most remarkable and well-studied objects in the night sky. M1, for instance, is the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova explosion recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054 AD. M45 is the Pleiades.

The Coathanger Club

The al-Sufi Cluster resembles a clothes hanger

During these warm summer nights Nick has been sleeping out doors in his tree house and taking this opportunity to get acquainted with the night sky. Surrounded by redwood trees I am limited to observing one slice of the Southern sky: every two hours another sign of the Zodiac appears, beginning (in early September at latitude 35 degrees North) with Sagittarius at 9 PM, Capricorn at 11 PM and Aquarius at 1 AM. But in addition to spotting prominent landmarks such as the signs of the Zodiac I am learning a lot (from both books and observation) about arcane features of the night sky that are known and appreciated by only a few deep sky fanatics.

For instance, in the year 964, the Persian astronomer Abd al Rahman al-Sufi (known as al-Sufi) published a new map of the heavens that improved on the classic Ptolemaic picture. Al-Sufi was the first to record galaxies outside the Milky Way--the Large Magellanic Cloud (visible from Yemen) and the Andromeda Galaxy which is the most distant object (2 million light years) visible to the naked eye.

He also recorded a tiny asterism known today as al-Sufi's cluster or Brocchi's cluster (after an amateur astronomer who studied it 1000 years later than al-Sufi). It is also called the Coat Hanger--well--because it looks like a coat hanger.

Get out your binoculars for a small but memorable non-drug experience under the night sky.

From the wonderful Astronomy Picture of the Day site, here's a picture of the Coathanger.

Which of you will be the first to spot the "Coathanger Asterism"?  initially discovered 1000 years ago by a Muslim astronomer living in Isfahan in what is now called Iran?

The easiest way to spot the al-Sufi Cluster is to locate the Summer Triangle, which is almost directly overhead in the early fall and consists of the three bright stars Vega, Deneb and Altair (all named, like so many other stars in the sky, by words derived from Arabic). The Coathanger lies about 1/3 of the way along a straight line from Altair to Vega, appearing as a bright patch in the Milky Way. Binoculars will be needed to resolve its coathangerish nature.

The al-Sufi Cluster lies in the minor constellation Vulpecula (Latin for Little Fox).

The world is divided into two categories of people, those few who have seen the Coathanger (al-Sufi's Cluster) with their own eyes (pictures don't count) and the majority who will never experience this little star thrill.

Members of the elite Coathanger Club are rumored to greet one another by exchanging the esoteric gesture that identifies a Viewer of the al-Sufi Cluster--a closed fist placed above the back of an out-stretched palm.

Nick has not yet joined the secret society of Coathangers. It's cloudy right now in Boulder Creek. But on the next clear night he intends to leave the rabble behind and to become a member of the society of "Those Who Have Seen the al-Sufi Asterism."

Will you join me in the Coathanger Club? Or will you choose to remain an Outsider?

Sex in Space

"What will become of these galaxies? Spiral Galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427 are passing dangerously close to each other, but each is likely to survive this collision. Most frequently when galaxies collide, a large galaxy eats a much smaller galaxy. In this case, however, the two galaxies are quite similar, each being a sprawling spiral with expansive arms and a compact core. As the galaxies advance over the next tens of millions of years, their component stars are unlikely to collide, although new stars will form in the bunching of gas caused by gravitational tides. Close inspection of the above image taken by the 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile shows a bridge of material momentarily connecting the two giants. Known collectively as Arp 271, the interacting pair spans about 130,000 light years and lies about 90 million light-years away toward the constellation of Virgo. Quite possibly, our Milky Way Galaxy will undergo a similar collision with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in about five billion years."

[From NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) July 21, 2008]

Two galaxies caught "doin' it"
by a telescope in the Andes
Two galaxies inexorably drawn together
by "dat ol' black magic"
by Newton's "gravitational force"
by Einstein's "curved spacetime"
by Dante Alighieri's
"Love which moves the sun and the other stars".