Year of Meteors

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day features an unusual painting by the Hudson River painter Frederic Church, picturing an “earth-grazing meteor procession.” The meteor was the inspiration for a poem by Walt Whitman, ”Year of Meteors.”

YEAR of meteors! brooding year! 
I would bind in words retrospective, some of your deeds and signs;

I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;
I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia;

(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I watch’d;

I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal’d wounds, you mounted the scaffold;) ...

The old man on the scaffold was, of course, John Brown, who was hanged in December 1859 for treason after the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Researchers at Texas State have tracked down the details of the meteor.

A large Earth-grazing meteor broke apart on the evening of July 20, 1860, creating a spectacular procession of multiple fireballs visible from the Great Lakes to New York State as it burned through the atmosphere and continued out over the Atlantic Ocean.

“Any town that had a newspaper within all those states is going have a story on this,” Olson said. “We have hundreds of eyewitness accounts, but there are probably hundreds more we don’t even have.

“From all the observations in towns up and down the Hudson River Valley, we’re able to determine the meteor’s appearance down to the hour and minute,” Olson said. “Church observed it at 9:49 p.m. when the meteor passed overhead, and Walt Whitman would’ve seen it at the same time, give or take one minute.”

A tourist in Queens

Last weekend, while Jenn was in Ireland, I took the 7 train to Queens to check out the panorama of New York City at the Queens Museum of Art. (Photo is by Scott Gordon Bleicher. Here’s a bigger version.)

The panorama fills a room the size of a high-school auditorium, and you view it by going up a gradually sloping walkway that takes you from Inwood down to Battery Park, past the Statue of Liberty, over part of Staten Island (which you view through a glass floor), then around Coney Island and into the farthest reaches of Queens and the Bronx.

If you’re a tourist I imagine this must be overwhelming, but even if you’ve lived here for a few years the model reinforces the epic scale of the place, your own insignificance, and how little of it you’ve probably managed to see. There are all kinds of trivia to know, but the ones I remember are that the Empire State Building is 15 inches high, and that the major bridges are the most accurate element, each one painstakingly cast in bronze (then apparently painted white—why?).

While I was in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, I took in the other major sites: the Unisphere, the New York Hall of Science with the real rockets outside it, and the modest but pleasant Queens Zoo, featuring the animals of the Americas. My favorite animal was one I hadn’t heard of: a miniature deer called the pudu.

Monet at the Gagosian

The exhibit of late paintings by Monet at the Gagosian gallery is currently one of the best things you can do for free in New York City. (At 522 West 21st Street in Chelsea, the gallery is only half a block away from the High Line park—another of the best things you can do for free.)

The four rooms of paintings begin with the classic images of waterlilies floating in an indefinite, shimmering blue-gray-violet mist, then move on to waterlilies done with bolder colors and brushstrokes. The water in the picture above (the photo doesn’t do it justice) has a streak of cobalt blue you could get lost in.

The last room is devoted to paintings of Japanese bridges and arched trellises of roses. If some of these last works seem heavy, overworked, or even muddy, they underline the achievement of the seemingly airy and effortless paintings that came before. 

Admiral’s Row

For several years I have been visiting Governors Island, where I have enjoyed the ghost-town quality of the empty houses along Colonels’ Row. Yet I have never been inside the Brooklyn Navy Yard, not far from where I live, to see the even more decrepit houses of Admiral’s Row (also known as Officer’s Row).

An article in the Times reminded me of them, and took me to the Officer’s Row website, which features a gallery of haunting images from the houses.

Mourners at the Met

After seeing an article in the Times, I went with Jenn to the Met to the see the procession of 37 alabaster mourners (plus another three in a separate glass case) who have been liberated from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon and are beginning an eight-city tour.

I don’t think I can improve on the Times‘ description:

There is nothing stiff about these figures; their postures are realized with grace and subtlety. One leans forward and raises up his pudgy, beautifully rendered hands in a touching gesture of helpless sadness. Another sings from a hymnal. Some seem to sway, as if to funerary music. Though enveloped by their voluminous, luxuriantly draped and folded cloaks, the invisible bodies within are expressed on the surface, and give each figure vivid sense of animation.

Photography is not allowed, but there’s a nifty website that allows you get a 360-degree view of each figure, from three different angles.