Sheila the Wonderbink

Jupiter was the first planetary symbol that, blessedly, didn’t saddle me with the tricky business of filling in words around a circle.  It’s also not a symbol that has too many pop-cultural associations, so people either know what it is on sight or have no idea whatsoever.

I started it on Thursday morning, the day before I was supposed to take the work to Chattacon.  Procrastination had once again backed me into a corner and I prayed to make it at least as far as Saturn by the end of the day.  (Fortunately, I made it all the way to Neptune.)

Jupiter

The largest planet in the solar system.

Two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in the solar system put together.

Unsurprisingly, it has been named after the Roman version of Zeus, the king of the gods.

The gas giant planets, of which this is one, are also collectively known as the Jovian planets.

Its twelve year cycle may be been the source of the twelve houses of astrology.

There is a storm that has raged in its skies for centuries, a red eye staring into space that is large enough to envelop the Earth thrice over.

The surface (if it can be called that) does not provide enough friction to slow it, so it spins and drifts at its latitude, though it shows signs of fading by degrees–it does not seem to be quite as large as it was a century or so in the past.

We have been looking in Jupiter’s direction for a very long time.

It is said that the very first transit of Ganymede across the face of Jupiter to be seen by human eyes was by Gan De, who saw it on a clear night without even a telescope to aid his vision, some thousands of years before Galileo Galilei put his telescope to use and saw no less than four distinct lights in the vicinity of Jupiter and came to realize that these objects in fact moved in such a path that it was clear that they circled around Jupiter the way that our moon circles Earth.

He attempted to name them after the Medici brothers, but those names are now nothing more than a quaint historical footnote.

We now know them by the name given them by Simon Marius, another astronomer who also saw these moons around the time that Galileo did.

Marius used the names of lovers of Zeus–Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

They are still known collectively as the Galilean moons.

For a time even Marius’ names were not widely used and instead the moons were numbered in order of their distance from the planet they circled.

This method is still in use to some degree but was disrupted when moons farther inward than Io were found, which rather changed the numbering.

The last planetary satellite to be discovered by the human eye is here–Amalthea (aka Jupiter V) seen in 1892 by Edward Emerson Barnard.

The movements of the Galileian moons disrupted the long-held notion that the Earth was the center of the Universe and that all celestial to be seen spun around it in some way.

(There was much handwaving about ‘spheres’ to account for retrograde motion.)

If Jupiter were any larger, it would have become, in fact, smaller, as the gravitational pull of the mass would have drawn all things into itself.

It is shrinking ever so slowly. At a rate of 2 centimeters per Earth year.

Its composition is quite similar to the substance of the Sun, though in different proportion.

It radiates more heat than it gains from the heat of the Sun.

It also has a magnetosphere that is so powerful and so large that if it were to be visible to our eyes, it would be larger than the Moon in our skies.

Its gravitational pull is strong enough to pull comets from the sky and break them to bits.

Indeed, the last time it happened it was quite the astronomical event.

When the comet known as Shoemaker-Levy 9 came apart and slammed into Jupiter’s atmosphere, nearly every astronomical eye was turned to bear witness.

Telescopes on the ground and telescopes and spacecraft in the sky took note and watched to see what would happen.

One impact alone from Fragment G was estimated to be the energetic equivalent of dropping the entire nuclear arsenal of the Earth six hundred times over.

They saw the fireballs flare and the plumes of the atmosphere and meticulously measured every last bit of it, finding substances like diatomic sulfur and carbon disulfite, which were surprises to scientists at the time.

(Jupiter, one could say, has a tendency to baffle the expectations of commonly held theory.)

We threw our own object into Jupiter eventually–the spaceship called Galileo.

Again, facts were written in roughly in order of what looked interesting, from historical discoveries to the red eye storm to the sheer delightful geekery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 and those who watched to see it collide with the planet.  By this point, I’d gotten better at figuring out roughly how much information to gather in advance in order to fill the 3-inch-by-5-inch spaces designated for the text, which sped the process up considerably.

Prints of this work are available here.

The original is not for sale.

I am not a scientist and have no immediate plans to become one, so when gathering the information to fill in the spaces on the planetary series I’m more interested in the cultural implications of the planets than I am in the statistics of the bodies themselves.  Mars is a good example of this.

Mars

Rusted red planet named for gods of war (Ares, Mars, Nergal, Mangala) or for the element of fire.

Once water may have flowed there. There is the slightest of chances that it may flow still, in limited quantities.

We definitely see polar caps, which do have frozen water but also have frozen carbon dioxide.

A flurry of speculation that the place had intelligent life at one time sprang from a single mistranslated word.

An Italian astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli took advantage of the clear view provided by a perehelic opposition of Mars to create a detailed map of what he could see through his telescope.

He saw a series of dark lines which he called canali, the Italian word for ‘channel’ or groove.

When his findings were translated to English, the word became ‘canals’ and we were off.

Percival Lowell published some three books detailing his theories that the inhabitants had constructed canals to transport water from the polar ice caps in a desperate effort to save their dying world.

H. G. Wells took that notion in turn, and ran with it in what was at the time a novel variation of the popular genre of the ‘invasion story’ using Martians as the invading force.

It was then adapted for radio some forty years later by Orson Welles; the panic that resulted remains legendary.

The popular assertion in the various fictional depictions of life on Mars was that such life was far in advance of our own.

Now what fragmentary evidence we have of any such life suggests that if were ever was life there, it was at best mere microbes that ended up trapped in rock and fosillized. [sic]

It is also quite possible that the traces of what seem to be a form of life may in fact be mere illusion, formations that resemble life but are formed as the rock is formed.

The human tendency in the brain to impose patterns upon randomness had many quite certain that a certain formation in the Cydonian region was a monument in the shape of a human (or perhaps Martian) face.

Upon more detailed examination, it turned out that the ‘face’ on the surface as, as the canali turned out to be, nothing more than an optical illusion.

Mars, of all the planets beyond our own, does seem to have the most of our hopes and fears projected upon it.

There is even a school of thought that one day we will remake the place into the sort of place we can inhabit freely.

We would need to thicken the air in some way, inducing a greenhouse effect in order to make the planet a greenhouse.

Water would have to be dragged in from asteroids and we may even end up building canals to distribute the ice as it melts.

(Would we call those born in subsequent generations ‘Martians’?)

Right now, even as these words are written, we are exploring Mars with robots.

Okay, even if the Spirit rover is currently stuck in soft ground, the matter still remains that WE ARE EXPLORING MARS WITH ROBOTS!

The surface of Mars is roughly equivalent to the surface of dry land on Earth, so these global explorers will map as much of the land as they can.

We now even use the surface of Mars as sort of a supplement to our terrestrial observatories by using the rovers we have on site to look up at the sky from that particular angle.

We have even seen the moons of Mars pass over the sun–the differences in size are such that they are seen as transits rather than eclipses.

The two moons of Mars are called Phobos and Deimos, after the sons of Ares, the Greek god of war (who was, of course, known to the Romans as Mars.)

Even the moons have made their way into our fiction–both Swift and Voltaire made reference to them, and this was even before they’d been properly discovered.

(In their honor, two craters on Deimos were given the names ‘Swift’ and ‘Voltaire’.)

These moons appear to be asteroids that fell sway to the gravitational pull of the planet.

A year to Mars lasts two years on Earth, and the seasons it goes through are also twice as long.

A day there is roughly the same on Earth.

Perhaps that is why we dream of one day moving ourselves there–even as small as the place is, even with fainter gravity and no magnetism to speak of it still, of all the planets in this particular solar system, feels the most to us as if it might be home.

Perhaps one day we will be the ones to cross the divide between these two worlds, as we far so long speculated that one day would be done unto us.

The trickiest part was coming up with turns of phrase that would allow for very short words just where the edge of the image met the edge of the circle.  I seem to have managed.  And, yes, I did shift a bit in tone when I went all enthusiastic about the whole Exploring Mars With Robots thing but what can I say?  It still blows my mind that I can say that out loud and be telling the truth.

Prints of this work are available here.

The original is not for sale.

This one, of course, confuses from a distance because the symbol for the planet Venus is also the common symbol for “female.”  It probably didn’t help that I used the purple ink for this one–though I could have gone the distance and made the thing pink.

Venus

Morning star and evening star.

The brightest night in our night sky, aside from our Moon.

Seen and named by many ancient observers.

The Babylonians called it Nindaranna and a record of its appearances over a twenty-one year period is one of the oldest surviving astronomical documents in existence.

The Mayans had detailed records of its coming and going and called it Chak-ek–the Great Star.

They timed everything from religious ceremonies to wars based on what they deemed auspicious positions.

The Ancient Greeks named it Phosphorus when it was in the morning skyscape and Hesperus when it shone at night.

In China, it is known as Jinxing and it is linked to the element of metal.

India named it after the saint Shukra.

The Yolgnu of Northern Australia mark its rising as a time to speak to the souls of those who have passed on.

The Maasai called it Kileken and it is the subject of a folk tale.

Transits of Venus are rare and strangely precious things.

The voyage to Tahiti embarked on by Captain Cook in 1769 was in part to observe the Transit of Venus from that one spot on the globe.

The mission was deemed of such importance that France’s ships were commanded to hold their fire against Cook’s ships.

The data collected there, in combination with observations from North America and Europe, gave us our first impressions of the space that lay between Earth and the Sun.

The transit of eight years prior showed observers the possibility of an atmosphere on this planet.

An atmosphere so thick, it turned out, that it crushed the many sent probes from the space program of the USSR.

The Venera (the word for Venus in Russian) probes include the first man-made object to land on the surface of another planet.

(Crash-landed, mind you, but still it landed.)

Another of the Venera probes was the first man-made probe to transmit data from the surface.

(Unfortunately, it was stuck so that the only information it was able to transmit was the temperature–65° C or 869° F.)

Another was first to transmit visual images and, later, the first color images from the surface of the planet.

None of them survived more than an hour at most on the surface before rendered mute by the pressures from the atmosphere (and the limits of their batteries.)

The heat of the surface is a result of the Greenhouse Effect as was calculated around 1960 by a graduate student at the University of Chicago.

(His name was Carl Sagan.  Maybe you’ve heard of him?)

It has been thought by some that the greenhouse effect was the reason that the planet no longer has oceans to speak of–that the heat was such to cause the oceans to evaporate into steam that was further broken down into its elements and that much of the resulting hydrogen was lost to the void of space, since it has no magnetic field to deflect the solar wind.

The surface is mostly volcanic and shows no signs of any plate tectonics, as on Earth.

There are two elevated regions which are considered continents (even without oceans to bound them.)

One is called Ishtar Terra and the other is known as Andromeda Terra.

Most of the features on the surface of the planet, in fact, have been given the names of women from mythology and history.

(One exception is Maxwell Montes, named after James Clark Maxwell.  It is, true to form, the tallest of mountains on the surface of the planet.)

The rotation is retrograde from its orbit, unlike most planets in the Solar System.

The orbit is nearly circular, with only 0.01 eccentricity.

A day on Venus measured by the sun would be shorter than a day measured by the rotation.

A year is roughly two days, depending on how it is calculated.

For reasons undiscerned, the intervals between nearness to the Earth (when it passes from evening star to morning star) are the equivalent of exactly five days in solar days there.

No rainfall reaches the surface, though rain can fall, composed of sulfuric acid, it just evaporates well before it ever reaches the ground.

There can be lightning, though, most likely generated by ash from volcanic eruptions.

The thick cloud layer kept the surface from our eyes long enough that many speculated that life might exist there.

Our explorations, at first with radio waves and later with probes, ultimately silenced those notions.

Colonization seems rather unlikely, but anything remains possible with time.

Did I mention that Wikipedia was my friend?  The mention of the Venera probes linked to a detailed entry that listed every mission in the program, when it was launched, how long the probe survived and more.  I generally picked out the facts and information in order of what was interesting to me and got better at sifting through things as I progressed further out into the solar system.  The results would be lousy as an elementary school science report, but they work well enough as the background for this particular illustration.

Prints of this work are available here.

The original is not for sale.

About a month into my art career, I got it in my head that I would enter the art show at Chattacon, a little science fiction convention that I normally go to each year.  I downloaded and read the rules and realized that I’d need something to fit the proper themes of the show.

“I know!” I said to myself, “I’ll do a Word Art piece for each of the planetary symbols!”

Never was the timeworn phrase “easier said than done” more appropriate.  Granted, it did simplify things enormously–I wasn’t forced to rack my brain to come up with ideas and the titles were already in place before I even embarked on writing the words.  (Normally, titles come at the end rather than the beginning, which can make things tricky at times.)  The wonders of Google image search found me a picture of the planetary symbols from a NASA website and a little tinkering with GIMP rendered them the appropriate size so I could trace them to fit the 3″ x 5″ spaces I’d marked out on 5″ x 7″ sheets of paper to fit in a matching set of dollar store frames.

Then I had to actually write the words.  I checked a book out of the library to work from, because I wanted the solidity of paper reference, though I gathered the bulk of the information from the wonders of Wikipedia.  This is far safer than it may seem, since the Internet is not lacking for people passionate about science who will eagerly fact-check and verify nearly every line of such entries.  (As someone wryly observed, the thing about Wikipedia is that it works well in practice but it’s a disaster in theory.)

I wanted the words to be factual, though they were still subject to the mad poetical filter that the words tend to go through when they run from my head to the page, and it is entirely possible that there are some scientific inaccuracies contained within.  As the series progressed, I got better at gathering the information that was of the most interest to me and putting it to use filling in the spaces to define the symbol on the page.

I started with Mercury.

Mercury

The closest planet to the sun. Possesses a magnetic field of 1% of the Earth’s.

This faint magnetosphere allows for a faint sort of atmosphere, as ions from the solar wind are drawn to the surface, only to be lost again over time.

It rotates so slowly that a day lasts two years.

The ancient Greeks named it twice–it was known as Apollo when visible in the morning and known as Hermes when visible at night.

As time passed and more was observed, they came to realize it was the same body.

Heraclides of Greece first suggested that the body orbited the sun.

Observations of this orbit in the nineteenth century noticed there was a shift in the orbit at the point of perehelion advancing ever so slightly over time.

Astronomers set to work and made their calculations according to the Law of Universal Gravitation according to Sir Isaac Newton.

However, the measurement and prediction had a gap between the two figures.

43 seconds of arc was the difference between what should have been and what was.

Urbain LeVerrier of France held that an as-yet-unseen planet, which he named Vulcan, was the source of the deviation.

In the end, the application of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity accounted for momentum as well as mass and the 43-second difference fit in with those numbers.

From certain points on the surface, were observers able to stand there the sun would appear to rise and then to regress, and set once more.

There are shadowed spaces on the poles deep in craters where the sun never reaches at all.

The axial tilt is so small as to approach zero, so these spaces remain in darkness.

There may be water in those darkened areas, sheets of polar ice in place that remain unmelted.

On other parts of the surface, such ice would be vapor in an instant.

The lack of atmospheric gases with sufficient density leaves the surface exposed so that any bit of space debris can strike unimpeded.

So it is that this planet bears a resemblance to our Moon. (It is only slightly larger than our Moon as well.)

The craters are not quite the same, though, as the gravity is stronger so that the dust from the impact settles more quickly.

Several of these have been mapped, measured and named.

The Caloris Basin lies beneath the peak of the sun every second time the planet reaches the point of perehelion.

Others are named for writers, composers and artists of our times past.

The best known is probably Beethoven, but craters here now bear the names of Rembrandt, Matisse, Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Stravinsky.

At the antipode of the Caloris Basin lies an area known as The Weird Terrain.

There are also smooth plains where lava once flowed, as there are on our Moon.

Our efforts to look more closely at the surface have been a bit precarious, as any probe that is sent into that part of the solar system must struggle against the pull of the Sun’s gravity.

We have sent two such probes as these words are inscribed, and more are to follow.

There is still much to be learned, or perhaps confirmed.

The core seems to be liquid iron and the source of Mercury’s magnetism, but we hope to peer more closely and to be sure of this.

For a time, they thought that the planet presented the same face to the sun at all times, as our Moon shows the Earth the same face.

As it turned out, this was because the only times it could be clearly seen from our surface with the instruments at hand were when those faces turned to the sun.

As the instruments were refined, the details became clearer and the slow rotation of the planet was known to science.

We only know the core to be iron not since we have sampled it directly, but as we have observed from the distance and calculated its density and made our conclusions that it is how such a body would behave were that body made of that much iron.

(Will our future include mining companies to brave the heat and retreive [sic] the metal? No doubt such possibilities have already been speculated upon in some space opera novel somewhere in the stacks.)

As these words are written, there are three hypotheses to explain the density of the planet.

One proposes that the original crust and mantle were stripped away by the impact of a passing planetesimal.

Another suggests that the planet was formed from the solar nebula and that the surface rock was vaporized as our Sun contracted.

A third hypothesis suggests that the solar nebula prevented lighter particles from joining the material accreting to form the planet.

More shall be known.

It didn’t sell.  None of them did, perhaps because originals generally don’t sell well at that particular art show (or so I was told as I was checking my work out at the end of the weekend.)  It’s also possible I priced it a bit too high–I’ve since dropped my pricing to five dollars per square inch, having been taught by this that ten per square inch may be asking a bit much for an as-yet-unproven artist.

I did get many positive responses, though, which was encouraging.  I’m considering doing a series of the astrological symbols at some point, though I’ll need to get twelve matching frames together for that, so it may take a while.

Prints of this work are available here.

The original is not for sale.