Cosmic Multicultural Bucharest in the Pandemic (36):
Come on, England!
By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe (astro-photo-poem-essay) and Florin Alexandru Stancu (design)
I hardly photographed Sirius and the Sun on the morning of October 27, 2020, through a “London fog” which inspired me to visit the Anglican Church (made in the 1910s), an initiative of the most beloved woman in Romania’s history, Queen Maria (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom), who had an important role in the Great Romanian Union.
An occasion for me to think of the great English achievements in astronomy: Newton’s law of universal gravitation, Halley’s theories on comets, Bradley’s aberration of light, Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus, Adams’s co-discovery of the planet Neptune, the Greenwich Observatory, Denning’s treatises on meteors and even Horrocks’ first observation of Venus’ transit (a historical moment for which he also wrote a poem).
I also thought of James Cook’s expedition to the Pacific Ocean (when he and astronomer Charles Green observed the transits of Mercury and Venus across the Sun’s disk), and the British colonists who brought the first information about traditions and beliefs of Amerindians, Aboriginal Australians and Maori populations about the Cosmos.
In front of this beautiful building, a small square with the statue of Saint George (the spiritual patron of England) killing a dragon right on a sun radiating white rays, as an invitation to look carefully at the real Sun, who had killed the fog in the meantime…
#poetry