The Ecliptics, Thinking, and the Power of Reframing

Lately, there has been a lot of noise about how many of the visible planet will be lined up.  

Although it is cool to look at, this is no syzygy.  

If you reframe your point of view of stargazing around the fact that you live in a roughly planar solar system embedded a 3D field of stars, you realize that the sun, moon, and planets will all appear roughly along the same line in the sky from our point of view (the 'ecliptic').  

I thought of this last night when I stepped into the backyard and observed Venus right next to the waxing crescent moon.  It wasn't even completely dark out yet but these two were just popping out of the sky, begging to be noticed:

my phone camera did not do this justice

I've been thinking ever since of how lucky I am to be able to have these two points of view:  A raw appreciation for the splendor of this serendipitous sight and the deeper appreciation of how these two point of light are nowhere close to each other and not lined up in any other way.

One morning, I was appreciating the Sunrise and thinking about how I was the one actually moving on a rotating rock at over 400 MPH* ('Earthturn' I've been trying to get my astronomy student to rebrand that old word 'Sunrise').  It was intoxicating and I got a little dizzy which then broke the spell of having that perspective (like realizing you are in a dream will often wake you up).

source: https://physics.uwo.ca/~basu/teach/ast020/notes/nightsky.pdf

Reframing is a powerful tool.  When I think about how hard it is to learn new thing or to actually think clearly, I remind myself that thinking it primarily (entirely?) an emotion-driven thing.  We are constant victims of our emotions.  Most of the time, our 'thinking' is just a way of justifying what our emotions have already 'decided'.  When I find myself baffled by others (or myself!), this perspective gives me comfort.

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

― Richard Feynman

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*rotation velocity of the Earth about its axis (approximate since this speed is dependent on your latitude of course)