Posted by Davin Flateau on 13 Mar 2006 at 4:13 pm.
Filed under General.
You’ve got to hand it to the folks at Google - their geekiness knows no bounds. If you’ve ever gone to Google during a holiday or during a popular event (like the recent Olympics), you’ve probably noticed that they modify the google banner in the spirit of the event. Hearts on Valentine Day, green clovers on St. Patrick’s Day, that sort of thing. Some homages are a little more obscure, but clicking on the banner usually takes you to a search on the subject they’re celebrating.
But today, March 13, they showed that they have at least one astro-geek on the front lines. This was today’s banner:
(click on it to take it where the google banner does)
This one may take a little explaining to non-astro geeks, since even the link destination really doesn’t give much of a clue as to what the banner’s referring to, other than “Mars.”.
The image is of a huge telescope on the Earth — one that would be pretty impossible to build considering NASA’s shrinking budget for science (and would you really need a tripod if the scope was that big?). It’s pointing at what looks like Mars with two aliens (again, ridiculously huge — everyone knows aliens are much smaller than that) on the surface. One alien’s reading a book (my guess is that it’s the latest issue of Scientific Martian about why earthlings keep trying to hit them with chunks of metal and plastic), and the other alien is lazily staring up into space.
Google is celebrating the 151st birthday of Percival Lowell, amateur astronomer and Martian obsessive. Lowell’s combination of enthusiasm and money led him into one of the most infamous scientific misadventures of the time - the canals on Mars.
Lowell spent much of his life studying Mars through telescopes, focusing on the long, straight features that were visible in the eyepiece. The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, a contemporary of Lowell’s, first described these features as “canali”, Italian meaning “Channels”. But a bad translation from italian to english changed “channels” into “canals”, an error that implied that they were constructed by some intelligent being.
This sparked Lowell’s decades-long obsession with Mars. In a sense, he became the world’s first SETI astronomer, searching Mars for the story of the extra-terrestrials behind the construction of these “canals.” He concluded that the canals were huge aqueducts, bringing much needed water from Mars’ polar caps to the dying desert world. This image sparked the imagination of science fiction writers ever since, populating the planet with evil Martians with envious eyes from War of the Worlds, and mischievous, skull-challenged invaders from Mars Attacks!
Of course, Lowell was wrong about the canals - they’re an optical illusion of the various darker and lighter features on the surface. No life has existed there, past or present, as far as we can tell.
But Lowell’s legacy reaches past his canal canards. His establishment of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona was instrumental in the further study of Mars and other astronomical objects, culminating in the discovery of Pluto by Kansan Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. It remains an active research facility to this day.
In googling around today, I came upon this description of Pericval’s namesake, the famous Knight of the Roundtable from King Arthur.
Percival the Welshman (Percival le Galois), raised by his widowed mother deep in the forest, has never seen a knight, or a sword, or even a horse. He is ill-clad, unlettered, and entirely lacking in the chivalric graces expected of a knight, yet his innocence leads him to the Grail that has eluded so many of Arthur’s greatest knights.
Lowell, an amateur astronomer, working from outside the scientific establishment with his wild theories, earned the scorn of the professional astronomical community for his conclusions. But his enthusiasm for discovery lived on, with his observatory eventually discovering the 9th planet of the solar system, as well as living as an important research facility into the 21st century.
Happy birthday Percival. And thanks for the reminder, Google.
Stars Over Kansas » Google on Mars Take 2 on 14 Mar 2006 at 1:17 pm: 1
[…] In yesterday’s post, I meant to write a followup and mention that Google used Lowell’s birthday to launch Google Mars, a way cool way to learn about Mars. Go there now and start clicking and zooming on stuff! […]