Le Verrier's Planet and Mars' Crossing

The big news this upcoming week is our friend Mars makes its closest approach to earth in somewhat modern history. We won't see a dazzling difference but it will be the brightest light in the sky other than the moon and the sun. Our guess is that like Venus (our evening and morning "star") Mars is almost always hanging around and we are spoiled.

We are very blessed in our little Village as we can wander out into the night and see a dazzling set of stars and planets without a lot of city-type lights to hurt the view. Venus is very easy to spot as is Mars and Jupiter - Saturn a bit rarer and the twins of Uranus and Neptune - well we can't see them or if we could we probably wouldn't know it. About the time Greenport came into being in some sort of first-formal way - and a hundred years before we really organized in 1838, a math guy named Le Verrier figured that there was a planet Neptune.  He calculated that it had some gravity to it and it made the other planets wobble a bit and then figured out where to look. Amazing.  We could only read about Neptune when we were kids. What pictures there were showed a fuzzy little ball of light spinning somewhere out there and it never rose or set like Venus or Mars or imposed with a red spot like Jupiter or was ringed like Saturn.

Now we find that this planet Neptune is a wonderous object of regard in our solar system with a dark spot of storms like Jupiters red spot and a faint set of rings like Saturn. It must be an amazing place - one that we will never visit except in our mind's eye or in electronic photos sent with signals so small we have nothing of our own to hear or receive them - a radio station transmitting just out of reach.

We just wonder about it some and having something out there that we know about in some scientific way and yet we will never lay eyes on it without some lens or camera.  I suppose those who visited Atlantis and described it before it sank into the sea carried much the same type of message - describing the wonders of the city - but then telling the listener that "unfortunately you can't see it...".   Neptune is such a teaser. 

One for the bucket list.