Cosmic Multicultural Bucharest in the Pandemic (307):
AIRA’s Asteroid Day 2022 (7)
By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe (astro-photo-poetical chronicle) and Florin Alexandru Stancu (design)
The coordinator of the Bucharest Municipal Observatory (and also researcher at AIRA), Adrian Bruno Sonka, gave two impressive lectures about asteroids (richly pigmented with his unique humor), which included not only the major astronomical aspects, but also the display of some places on Earth impacted by such heavenly bodies.
His lectures inspired me to recite later that day, also at AIRA’s event, an astropoem that I had published in 2000 in the magazine of the Israeli Astronomical Association, Astronomia, in English and Hebrew - translated by the famous Israeli asteroid expert Dr. Ilan Manulis:
BELT OF ASTEROIDS
By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe
Was Planet Phaeton here,
Destroyed by a cosmic disaster?
Phaeton, the son of Helius,
Was a bad charioteer
And Zeus killed him.
Was Planet Phaeton here,
Between Mars and Jupiter?
Every night
Mysterious small planets
Play a ring dance
And compose for us
This tragical story,
Gravitational solidarity.
#poetry