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Mercury, July/August 1999 Table of Contents

Jay, I have noticed a rather bright object in the western sky just after sundown and was curious what it is. It doesn't seem to move in the fashion I would expect for a planet or a star and is much brighter than most stars anyway. Is it one of our satellites or the space station?

This is a message I received a few days ago from a colleague in my university's chemistry department. Venus, that planetary vixen, had worked her magic again. Such a bright object could not be natural - it must be artificial. But, indeed, nature often does compel us to notice it.

A nagging suspicion about this was brought to full-bodied conviction a couple of years ago as I walked down from the summit of Cerro Calvario into Copacabana. My travel companion, Señor Hugo Mancilla, was a native of La Paz, and we had traveled together to this small Bolivian town on the edge of Lake Titicaca. Now, having witnessed a sunset over that mystical lake, we walked slowly, carefully in the chilly, plunging darkness. Low in the west hung Venus, one of a number of pleasant sky markers that always make me feel at home, wherever I am.

"What is that?" asked Señor Mancilla, his right arm paralleling my line of sight.

"That is the planet Venus," I replied. It seemed as though I could just make out his fingers in the gloom now, continuing to point toward the planet.

"No, that is not Venus." I could hear the slide of fabric as his arm dropped quickly back to his side. "You cannot see the planets."

Señor Mancilla, like the majority of people I come into contact with, was cosmically disenfranchised. I have experienced this so much: People feel that what goes on in outer space - in that realm of planets, stars, colliding galaxies, and Jar-Jar Binks - is out of our view and certainly out of our experience. We hear from robotic spacecraft of oppressive conditions on Venus or belching Io volcanoes, but we have no truck with such things. They are there, and we (thankfully, it would seem) are here. Yet Venus is real, and we can see it.

Trying to juggle my Maglite and travel journal, while at the same time pointing to objects and speaking excitedly on that cold evening, I tried to bring Hugo into the cosmic fold.

"The bright stars near Venus, those are Pollux and Castor in the constellation Gemini... And above, there is Mars. That bright star is Denebola, and that higher up is Spica." I held my small flashlight between my teeth as I sketched constellations, my breath ragged from excitement and an elevation of over 3800 meters. In my broken Spanish I talked of myth and skylore and tried to bring in some of my knowledge of the local Aymaran Indians.

Every now and then I would catch a glimpse of Hugo glancing from my jittery sketches to the sky. His mouth opened slightly as he got to know a bit of his relatives up there.

Last night Venus blazed high in the western sky, in a taunting embrace with the young crescent Moon. I remembered Señor Mancilla's outstretched hand as I looked at my own - tiny bits of Venusian light flowing over his fingers. "I will tell my wife and children," he sighed as we pulled our coats around us tighter, "but they will not believe me." I could just make out his face turned toward Mars high overhead, and then he chuckled quietly.

"Ahhh, I will make them believe me," he whispered.

James C. White II, Ph.D., Editor