Mercury,
Mar/Apr 2002 Table of Contents
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Courtesy
of National Parks Masada.
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by
David H. Levy
With
nowhere to turn but the heavens, a thousand people face tragedy
under an ancient sky.
From
the time I became passionate about astronomy in 1960 as a 12-year-old
growing up in Montréal, Quebec, my interest has had
a strong spiritual component. It hit one evening while walking home
from the synagogue on Kol Nidre, the eve of the Jewish Day of Atonement.
I looked up at the gibbous Moon, and started tossing about names
of the maria that I could see on Earths sole natural satellite.
I wondered how many other people had bothered to gaze at the Moon
on such a special night. Then I realized that because the Jewish
calendar is based on the orbit of the Moon, people have seen the
Moon in the gibbous phase for every Kol Nidre evening for thousands
of years. A small revelation, indeed, but for me it was a powerful
hint that my interest in astronomy could have a spiritual dimension.
As
the years passed, there were other such moments, one each during
all the 58 eclipses of the Sun and Moon I have witnessed, one for
each of my 21 comet discoveries, and one that happened on the night
of November 5, 2000, when my wife Wendee and I joined fellow amateur
astronomer Ilan Manulis on the summit of a mesa called Masada. Masada,
Hebrew for "foundation" or "fortress," soars
440 meters above the lowest inhabited land on Earth, on the western
shore of the Dead Sea. Eitan Campbell, deputy director of Masada
National Park, accompanied us. On our night at this magical place,
the Moon was in its gibbous phase, and Jupiter and Saturn were close
to each other, a few months past the latest of their 20-year great
conjunctions.
We
walked toward the ruins of an almost 2,000-year-old synagogue, set
up my telescope, and looked at Jupiter and Saturn. I knew that on
an April night in the year 73 AD, 960 terrified people also looked
at Jupiter and Saturn not far apart in the sky and a year ahead
of one of their great conjunctions. They were not in the constellation
of Taurus as we saw them in 2000; Jupiter was in Libra and Saturn
was in Sagittarius. Back then, the precession of Earth would have
allowed Masadas inhabitants to see Alpha and Beta Centauri,
the Southern Cross, and Eta Carinae, possibly the most stunning
sight in the entire sky, but a sight unavailable to us on our night.
Finally, on that particular April night, the Masada observers would
have seen a full Moon over their heads, while on our night the gibbous
Moon looked much as it did on any Day of Atonement.
What
was so special about those people who faced the sky from this mesa
so long ago? The historical events on Masada took place between
66 AD, when a small group of Jewish extremists called Sicarii took
over the mountaintop at the start of the Jewish revolt against the
Roman Empire, and ended on the 15th of Nissan in the year 73
the night of Passover when 10,000 Roman soldiers led by Flavius
Silva ended a long siege by storming the site.
Wendee
and I wanted to visit Masada at night because only then could we
feel its majesty. As a scientist, I was interested in seeing the
site, the buildings, and the artifacts for myself. But in science
it is also important to get a first feel for what you are about
to experience, including what the night sky looked like as the Jewish
inhabitants faced a terrible choice between slavery under the Romans
camped below, or freedom in the sky above. They chose freedom that
night, and died by their own hands.
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