Sky & Telescope July 2002 [antikvár]

spectrumSituational Awarenesschuckle whenever I'm with someone who notices the Moon up in broad daylight for the first time. The reaction is invariably a mix of surprise and alarm: "What the ? Something's wrong! How can the Moon be up during the day?!" It's not really funny, though it's sad. Anyone shocked at the sight of the Moon in a bright blue sky is woefully out of touch with the universe around us.I got to thinking about this as I read our cover story on the sinking of the USS Indianapolis by Japanese torpedoes near the end of World War II. As Don Olson and his coauthors explain on page 30, the disaster might have been averted had the cruiser's skipper been more aware of his environment. When a crewman aboard the Japanese 1-58 submarine swept the horizon with his binoculars, he saw the Indianapolis easily in silhouette against the light of the rising Moon. Rather than steering a straight course, Capt. Charles McVay should have zigzagged his ship in the moonlight to prevent it from becoming such an easy target.Olson and his colleagues, masters of what I like to call "astroforensics," have written many times in Sky & Telescope about historical events, literature, and artwork in which the principals' awareness or lack of awareness of the sky played a pivotal role. They've identified the celestial object depicted in a long-lost van Gogh painting (April 2001, page 34), pinpointed the date and time of an Ansel Adams photograph (December 1994, page 82), and determined how tides thwarted the U.S. Marines' landing at Tarawa Atoll in World War II (November 1987, page 526) and inspired a passage in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (April 2000, page 44).All these stories share a common theme: what goes on "up there" can affect what goes on "down here." (I'm talking astronomically, of course, not astrologi-cally.) Astronomy is not at all detached fi-om Earthly concerns. You'd think that everyone would be intimately familiar with the rhythms of the heavens. Instead, surveys reveal that huge numbers of adults don't even know that Earth goes around the Sun once a year.When I show people a star cluster or nebula in my telescope, they often ask how I can find it without a map. I reply by asking how they get to the grocery store each week without a map. The answer's the same for both of us: the route is familiar, as are the landmarks along the way. If you don't pay attention to the sky, you're literally lost in space. Much of the time it doesn't matter. But sometimes, as it did one night in the Philippine Sea 57 years ago, it can mean the difference between life and death.