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[Al Degutis]

On my drive home yesterday I was listening to my just purchased copy of Jimmy Buffett's new CD, License to Chill. I'm not a parrot-head but enjoy some of his songs (then again, maybe I do qualify). While listening to "Trip around the Sun", a duet with Martina McBride, I had a "moment of seeing" of the mental kind... Everyday someone somewhere is celebrating their trip on Earth's orbit around the sun. Pratically everyone does it, though they don't realize that they're celebrating astronomy (at least in part). They call it a birthday. Unfortunately, too many people keep their eye's looking forward and downward (physically and metaphorically) and never look up to revel in the beauty of and ponder the cosmos.

So, on your next birthday I congratulate you on surviving your trip on the Earth as it made another orbit around the sun.

Al

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

I think about that quite often.

Every day we are on a group trip, spinning around on our axis at around 900 miles an hour. Orbiting around our average star at about 70,000 miles an hour, whipped along our own galaxy...probably into a black hole, at perhaps over 1 million miles an hour. Never touching the same point in space twice. Boggles the mind, but it's just a blink in the great scheme of things.

Suppose the earth would stop rotating dead in it's tracks. The winds and water would still continue at 900 miles an hour until it equalized. All would be scrubbed quite clean and no more Jimmy Buffet.


"stepped on a pop top"