Category: CE 2022

Over the past year, we’ve shared several topics related to the arts and science fiction –

We’ve looked at SF Art and hopefully come away with an appreciation of some extraordinary talents.

I hope my piece on Astrophotography inspired you to look up and admire the cosmos.

We’ve shared some Thespian arts and robot actors, including a reprise of the Boston Dynamics robots.

Most recently, I shared my choices for an SF Playlist, which I can report is now in the overplayed category; I’m enjoying every selection, every time.

It’s time now to close out the year with SF Poetry. A recent session of the St. Charles Writers Group (sponsored by the St. Charles Public Library, St. Charles, IL) considered the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Along with reading and discussing his poetry, we were challenged to compose a poem of our own in his style. So, of course, I elected to try an SF Poem and came up with The Case of a Mounting Sorrow.

That effort got me thinking about what SF Poetry might be out there. I, of course, fired up the Google machine and checked it out. I was surprised to find there the usual “best of” type lists but not an extensive catalog of SF Poems. Not sure of their “search engine optimization” efforts, but here are three lists that popped right up:

              Poetry for Science Fiction Fans

              Five Pieces of Poetry Science Fiction Fans Will Love

              Crabmonsters and Sentient Darkness: Ten Great SciFi Poems [sic]

The topics covered ranged from space travel to monsters, dragons, and interplanetary colonization, which is pretty much what Science Fiction covers. A few poems were on multiple lists—David Bowie’s Space Oddity, for example.

As varied as the topics are the forms. The list includes song lyrics, epic poems, haiku, and unique structures. Even if you’re not an SF fan but enjoy poetry as art, I would commend the verses to your attention.

I have to admit the Edgar Allan Poe exercise was not my first attempt at SF Poetry. For a limerick exercise, I composed Lunar Gravity: A Limerick in Three Parts (inspired by my yet-to-be-published novel). In celebration of National Poetry Month, I penned a short epic, The Voyage of the Argo. Add to that the Poe piece, The Case of a Mounting Sorrow, and it’s time for a poetry section.

That brings us to a new feature at www.wstevewilson.com – SF in Verse. Check it out and watch for the holiday entry, Santa to the Rescue, dropping next month in time for Christmas.

So, what do you think? Do you have some favorites? Do you like science fiction poems, or are they not your thing?

Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thanks for stopping by.

From the beginning of the space age, fans have been agog at the pictures sent back from probes or captured by space-based telescopes. Some may remember December 1973, when Pioneer 10 sent back pictures of its flyby, released by NASA in this montage, celebrating the 40^th anniversary, with Jupiter growing ever larger and then shrinking in the frame.[Credit: https://www.space.com/23833-jupiter-closeup-photo-pioneer-10.html]

Following up on Pioneer, the first probe to leave the Solar System, Voyager 1, sent back remarkable pictures of the outer planets. Saturn deserves special mention in this compilation of the planet and several of its moons, courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. [Credit: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-voyager-took/saturn/]

Or maybe the pictures of the cosmos from Hubble are what astound us, epitomized by the image of The Pillars of Creation. And with the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope due to be revealed in the next few days, there is much to be impressed with. [Credit: https://esahubble.org/images/archive/top100/]

So, you’re maybe asking, “That’s great, Steve. Nothing new. What’s your point?”

The phenomenal community of ground-based Astro-photographers, that’s the point. Around the world, there are amateur astronomers (although I believe there are pros in the group), are using modern, sophisticated telescopes and cameras, coupled with image processing software to produce some incredible images. I came across them on Twitter and look forward every day (and all day) to see what they’ll produce next. Some even are chasing an image that will exceed what Hubble can do—all the best of luck.

 If you use Twitter, I suggest starting by following Grant Petersen @GP_O11. As you discover other artists, follow them. You will not be disappointed.

So, let’s explore some of the remarkable work that this community produces.

To the right is Saturn imaged during the day. I just love the bluish tinge and am impressed with the technology that goes into this image. [Credit: Grant Peterson @GP_O11]

To the left is an image of The Pillars of Creation within the Eagle Nebula. How does it stack up against the Hubble image above? [Credit: @AJamesMcCarthy]

Finally, some dramatic images from around the Solar System:

Remarkable how different the big ones are in infrared [Credit: Dr. James O’Donoghue @physicsJ]

And closer to home, our own Moon. [Credit: James Willingham @JamesWillinghan]

I hope you join in and search out these remarkably talented Astro-photographers. They will amaze and astound you.

Leave a comment and let me know if you’ve discovered anyone you’d recommend.

Thanks for stopping by.

[Disclaimer: I’ve referenced several Twitter users. My purpose is only to highlight their Astro-photography. Any other opinions or tweets are their own and are not endorsed by wstevewilso.com]

Some of you will find I’m a bit late with this post. After all, the Super Bowl was over a month ago, and The Book of Boba Fett might be old news to avid fans. But I just got my Disney+ subscription, so I’ll use that as my excuse.

What’s this got to do with Robots? We’ve seen robots in movies as far back as the silent screen. Check out Metropolis someday.

(Image Credit: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58aabe1e9f74561f4dc712dd/1507906542732-XP7ZCJR35GW0PQIMRWR5/metropolis-film.jpg?format=2500w).

Bring that forward to Robby in Forbidden Planet

(Image Credit: https://amzn.to/3esCKrk).

And lest I get pilloried as fallen away by my fellow Star Wars fans, we can’t forget C-3PO, R2-D2, and BB-8.

(Image Credit: https://media.comicbook.com/2015/11/c3po-r2d2-bb8-160206.jpg )

So why a post on robots in the movies? Who knows how many movie robots there are? They’ve been around for a long time. They’ve become pop culture icons and have found their way into our hearts and homes. (Confession: I have an R2-D2 kitchen measuring spoon kit in my home office!)

I was watching the Super Bowl and loved the Sam Adams commercial, why you might ask. Because of the Boston Dynamics robots that were clearly the stars. They almost looked human and should maybe earn their creators a Clio.

Any other time that just would have been fun—but moving on …

Then I watched the first episode of The Book of Boba Fett. And what to my wondering eyes did appear, but a small flock of Boston Dynamics robots being herded down a dusty street on Tatooine. What? Sure enough, I scrolled back there they were: a flock of robots. (I’ve heard some chatter about fans objecting since the robots aren’t of the Star Wars universe. But read on.)

Watching Episode 1 prompted me to consider the difference between a robot created for a movie that may have a human actor inside (C-3PO, R2-D2, at times) or not (BB-8, Robby The Robot) and a robot cast in a movie to play a role. This was the case in The Book of Boba Fett. This raises the question, did The Book “violate” the unwritten Star Wars droid rule, or did the filmmakers cast the Boston Dynamics robots to play a part, as they would any role? Hard to say since IMDb does not list them in the cast credits but does mention them in the trivia section.

Can robots be actors? Should they get screen credit? What about those sought-after Screen Actors Guild cards? And, what about an Oscar? Wouldn’t that be something— “I’d like to thank the sheet metal crew, the programming staff, …”

Please leave a note and let me know what you think.

Thanks for stopping by.

[Disclaimer: Please accept my apologies for any ads that pop up before the linked videos. They do not reflect my position, nor do I endorse any of the products—it’s just a YouTube thing I can’t get around.]

[*Thanks to Robert Thomas / Itaal Shur for a great first couple of lines to Smooth (Video is 4 minutes)]

It was a remarkable year in space last year, getting off to a great start with Perseverance/Ingenuity in February and ending with James Webb in December. Both missions continue to astound, pushing the boundaries of science and technology and sending new knowledge to us Earthlings. Check out my last post from 2021 (From Perseverance & Ingenuity to James Webb: Bookends to a Remarkable Year).

[Graphics Credit: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2016/09/Artist_representation_of_the_JWST]

But it’s confession time—I completely missed posting about the Parker Solar Probe and its incredible trip through the Sun’s corona. Time to rectify that oversight.

NASA’s launch service partner, ULA (United Launch Alliance), launched the Parker Solar Probe (3-minute video) on August 12, 2018, aboard a Delta IV rocket. For the first time, NASA will try to sample the Sun’s corona and get within 4.3 million miles of the Sun’s surface. By comparison, the Earth is about 93 million miles from the Sun.

[Image Credit: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/R6B3mLDNuiAerSpArXjvKE-1024-80.jpg.webp, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory]

The engineering and materials science needed to protect the probe had to address not just the heat of the Sun, but hypervelocity dust particles, hard radiation, intense magnetic fields, etc. Mission scientists expect to sample the Sun’s corona and measure the boundary known as the Alfvén critical surface, which marks the end of the solar atmosphere and the beginning of the solar wind. Earth is generally protected from the solar wind, but it has weathered the Moon’s surface and studies suggest it stripped the atmosphere from Mars.

But we enjoy its effects as the Northern Lights.

If you are interested in learning more about the Parker Solar Probe, I would suggest:

Wikipedia (that ubiquitous source)

Space.com

NASA/Parker Solar Probe

One last topic for this post—speed! The mission scientists expect the probe to reach speeds of over 430,000 mph. Fast, you say? Sure—to the Moon and back in an hour and ten minutes. At its closest, to Mars in a little over 4 days. Of course, you’d need a way to slow down.

The point is, the Parker Solar Probe is the fastest man-made object in the Solar System at the moment. Its speed is fast enough to express in a small, but not trivial, percentage of the speed of light, .064% in fact. At that speed, and its close approach to the gravity of the Sun, the probe will appear to us to slow down time about .7 seconds in 1000 hours. Imagine, NASA has sent a probe that will travel fast enough to experience an effect theorized by Einstein over 100 years ago and which Science Fiction writers have been using ever since.

[Image Credit: https://nasa.tumblr.com/post/626435108717608960/bend-your-mind-with-special-relativity]

What an amazing accomplishment. Let me know what you think.

I know I’m looking forward to an exciting 2022.

Thanks for stopping by. Happy New Year.

[Disclaimer: Please accept my apologies for any ads that pop up before the linked videos. They do not reflect my position, nor do I endorse any of the products—it’s just a YouTube thing I can’t get around.]