I’ve been into astronomy most of my life, going as far back as my preadolescence when my uncle showed me a couple of constellations in the Adirondack sky. As an intense fan of science fiction – both books and those big budget effects movies of the 70s – I gravitated to those galactic wonders (forever?) just beyond our reach. Though the Space Race was over for all intents and purposes by this time, like any all-American boy I wanted to be an astronaut.
Well, that didn’t happen, obviously. But my interest in the sciences fired, and I did well all through my school career (with the exception, for some odd reason, of biology). Anyway, I took two semesters of Astronomy at Rutgers, aced both, and enjoyed every minute of every lecture, no matter how inaudible or bored the professors. My subscription to Astronomy magazine lasted over a decade. Santa brought me a cheesy telescope, with which, through much effort and perseverance, I studied the Moon, of course, as well as spotting the tiny images of Mars, Jupiter, ringed Saturn, the nebula in Orion, and, most satisfyingly, Venus.
But I didn’t spot Neith. In fact, despite what I thought was my vast and comprehensive knowledge of all things astronomic, I had never heard of Neith, until two days ago.
Giovanni Cassini, one of the pioneers of the telescope way back in the seventeenth century, first spotted Neith while making observations of Venus. This is back in 1672, and he found it again fourteen years later. He calculated the new moon to be about a quarter the size of Venus. A formal announcement followed, and that started something akin to a global celestial Easter egg hunt over the next hundred years.
Others claimed to have spotted the elusive alleged satellite, thirty-three sightings in all, some by quite prominent astronomers, the most familiar of which would be Joseph Louis Lagrange in 1761. It’s orbital plane and period and phases were calculated by various stellar scholars. But not all were convinced. Many were unable to spot the elusive object. William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus and perhaps the greatest astronomer of the time, failed to find it. Some claimed to have seen it during a Venusian transit of the Sun, trailing its parent planet across the solar sphere. Others observing the same event squinted in eyepieces in vain.
Eventually, the existence of Neith came to be doubted more and more, and belief in such an object was held in lower and lower regard. The last alleged sighting of the shy satellite by a respectable observer, was in 1892, by the astronomer Edward Barnard.
What could Neith have been, if not a satellite second-cousin of our Moon?
The earliest plausible explanation came from the strangely-monikered Father Maximilian Hell, a Jesuit and director of the Vienna Observatory in the mid-eighteenth century. He suggested that Neith was an optical illusion. The light from Venus, seen through the magnification lens, was so bright as to be reflected in the eye back into the telescope, resulting in something of a double image.
Sounds good, sounds probable, but over a century later a Belgian astronomer speculated that Neith was actually another planet which orbited the sun in such a manner as to periodically appear in conjunction with Venus. The result was the illusion of a planet-moon system. The astronomer, Jean-Charles Houzeau, was responsible for the name “Neith” (after an Egyptian goddess) in 1884.
This whole business prompted the Belgian Academy of Sciences to roll up its massed sleeves and get to work on the problem. They studied every recorded sighting of the furtive planetoid and discovered, to their satisfaction, that each event could be explained as a misreading or misviewing of background stars. This seemed to quell the controversy, Dr. Barnard’s sighting a few years’ later notwithstanding.
But my favorite explanation has to be this: Neith, or the object purported to be a natural satellite one-fourth the size of its planet, Venus, is actually … an alien mothership, doing reconnaissance work in our neck of the galaxy.
S P O O K Y …
Well, that didn’t happen, obviously. But my interest in the sciences fired, and I did well all through my school career (with the exception, for some odd reason, of biology). Anyway, I took two semesters of Astronomy at Rutgers, aced both, and enjoyed every minute of every lecture, no matter how inaudible or bored the professors. My subscription to Astronomy magazine lasted over a decade. Santa brought me a cheesy telescope, with which, through much effort and perseverance, I studied the Moon, of course, as well as spotting the tiny images of Mars, Jupiter, ringed Saturn, the nebula in Orion, and, most satisfyingly, Venus.
But I didn’t spot Neith. In fact, despite what I thought was my vast and comprehensive knowledge of all things astronomic, I had never heard of Neith, until two days ago.
Giovanni Cassini, one of the pioneers of the telescope way back in the seventeenth century, first spotted Neith while making observations of Venus. This is back in 1672, and he found it again fourteen years later. He calculated the new moon to be about a quarter the size of Venus. A formal announcement followed, and that started something akin to a global celestial Easter egg hunt over the next hundred years.
Others claimed to have spotted the elusive alleged satellite, thirty-three sightings in all, some by quite prominent astronomers, the most familiar of which would be Joseph Louis Lagrange in 1761. It’s orbital plane and period and phases were calculated by various stellar scholars. But not all were convinced. Many were unable to spot the elusive object. William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus and perhaps the greatest astronomer of the time, failed to find it. Some claimed to have seen it during a Venusian transit of the Sun, trailing its parent planet across the solar sphere. Others observing the same event squinted in eyepieces in vain.
Eventually, the existence of Neith came to be doubted more and more, and belief in such an object was held in lower and lower regard. The last alleged sighting of the shy satellite by a respectable observer, was in 1892, by the astronomer Edward Barnard.
What could Neith have been, if not a satellite second-cousin of our Moon?
The earliest plausible explanation came from the strangely-monikered Father Maximilian Hell, a Jesuit and director of the Vienna Observatory in the mid-eighteenth century. He suggested that Neith was an optical illusion. The light from Venus, seen through the magnification lens, was so bright as to be reflected in the eye back into the telescope, resulting in something of a double image.
Sounds good, sounds probable, but over a century later a Belgian astronomer speculated that Neith was actually another planet which orbited the sun in such a manner as to periodically appear in conjunction with Venus. The result was the illusion of a planet-moon system. The astronomer, Jean-Charles Houzeau, was responsible for the name “Neith” (after an Egyptian goddess) in 1884.
This whole business prompted the Belgian Academy of Sciences to roll up its massed sleeves and get to work on the problem. They studied every recorded sighting of the furtive planetoid and discovered, to their satisfaction, that each event could be explained as a misreading or misviewing of background stars. This seemed to quell the controversy, Dr. Barnard’s sighting a few years’ later notwithstanding.
But my favorite explanation has to be this: Neith, or the object purported to be a natural satellite one-fourth the size of its planet, Venus, is actually … an alien mothership, doing reconnaissance work in our neck of the galaxy.
S P O O K Y …
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