Another name for this star, circled right center, is Archid, found in the middle of the constellation Cassiopeia, the Queen. For you ultra nerdy types it is Right Ascention 00 hours, 50 minutes, Declination positive 57 degrees and 54 minutes. Only 19.4 light years away from our own sun, it is also a G-Type star (GV3) but appears slightly younger. Also known by several boring names that reflect its categorization, it can be seen near the PacMan Nebula and Shedar, the brightest, most southern star in the constellation, close to the Queen’s heart.
I chose this particular star for the next adventure in space that Captain Thomas Jackson and his crew will be traveling to. It has been designated as one of the top 100 candidates of nearby stars to harbor earth type planets, although this search was terminated a few years back when budget cuts came up. In the meantime, we science fiction writers will have a field day with it.
Our primary adventure will again focus on biology, but instead of genetics and chiral molecules, we’ll be investigating the domains of archaeal and bacterial life forms, and pharmaceuticals, or more precisely, the abuse thereof.
The Kiians return, the Pegasi return, and a bombshell awaits Jackson from his past, or perhaps it’s his future, that he must reconcile within himself, changing the fundamental theories of life and physics.
Sky Guide. It’s not free, but the small fee is worth it if you like celestial things.
Just a quick entry today about an app that I bet most of you have never heard of. Of course, there are plenty of sports apps and things I don’t know about. But this is cool for everyone who has ever looked up at the stars at night and wondered what the heck they were looking at.
This is a screen print from my phone of the app. I took it this morning, as you can see, the sun is in the east, and the sky is dark so you can see the stars. You can’t tell from the screen print, but it shows the constellations, planets, stars in real time. You can also set the time and date for almost any day in the past or future and see what the sky looked like at that moment.
If you tap on an object, such as a white dot, the name of the item will appear and you can tap again for a detailed description, including the type of star, its distance in light years, and its location in degrees and minutes.
If you want to search for something specific, just tap the menu icon and you are given choices of stars, satellites, planets, and more to search for! Tap the Satellites, and select the ISS. You’ll get a quick location and its path in the sky.
It has some ethereal music to go with it, and if you are sky watching, simply hold your device with the camera pointing in the sky. It will automatically orient itself and tell you exactly what you’re looking at. Point it toward a dot in the sky, you’ll discover you’re looking at Jupiter or Venus, or Regulus or Betelgeuse.
But don’t take my word for it. Go to the app store and check it out for yourself. Nothing is quite as fun as hearing a push notification that the ISS is going to be flying overhead in 5 minutes! What are you waiting for, go have some fun!
Speaking of science fiction, I’ve spent the last few days attending the Star Trek Las Vegas 50th Anniversary Convention. It was a great convention put on by the Creation people, and it’s been a blast, well organized, lots of things going on. Five thousand tickets were sold out months before the event had even booked its final guest list. Leaving this afternoon it seemed as if I owed it to myself to go home and binge watch for a while.
This is an iconic show, Star Trek. It owes its longevity to fans, to writers, to actors, investors, marketers, and a whole host of people behind the scenes that made it come to life and keep it not just alive, but thriving. More than 700 episodes and movies later, it shows no sign of ending. From emojis to props, costumes to games, trading cards, posters, photos, books (oh, the books!), star maps, aliens, and of course, the USS Enterprise, in another 50 years I can only surmise that it will be bigger, with new aliens, more ships, and a bigger fan base that ever.
It’s part of Americana, integrated and woven into our culture. Even if you are not a fan, you’ve heard of Star Trek as surely as you’ve heard of Watergate, but with a significantly more positive reputation. Developed originally during the early space race years, no one had landed on the moon until after the show had run 3 years and been cancelled. Deemed too cerebral for the average audience, the original Star Trek franchise suffered from time slot changes and censors that actually refused to air some episodes in some parts of the country, resulting in lower ratings.
Star Trek pushed the boundaries of television, and after a successful write in campaign brought it a third season, it was left to the fans in syndication. Ten years later, a major motion picture stirred up the hearth fire for Star Trek, and despite the limited success of the movie, mostly due to a rush for release and lack of editing. And more movies followed. Soon another franchise was born, followed by three more, several more movies, and we are here, 50 years later, hoping that the message of future peace will one day be a reality, even if it appears traveling faster than light from star to star in a matter of days is not in our future.
The industry that flourishes because of Star Trek can’t be dismissed without examination. Costumes, set builders, writers, film crews, camera repair, catering businesses, musicians, and others, just locally near the studio and on location, all benefit from the advertising dollars which support television. After the fact, conventions, licensing, reruns, more advertising, station employees – the trickle down from this single show over fifty years is almost incalculable.
Some products we use today were inspired by Star Trek, including small communication devices, small computers, nano technology, medical advances of all kinds, doors that open as we approach them – the list goes on. No one can deny the impact of this single television show on our culture, and, as originally hoped, perhaps on the improvement of our civilization, and humanity.
As long time fan, I enjoy the conventions, if for nothing else but the people watching! Young, old, fit, disabled, all races and both genders attend with the single obsession over this television show. They arrive from all over the world to meet the people who make it come alive – writers, actors, producers, composers, photographers, artists, vendors of everything Trek. Stage appearances and guest panels take place all day long, photographs and autographs are a major part of the activities as well as trivia games, contests, game demonstrations, even cake baking and art exhibits. Props are available for fans to make self portraits from cyborg regeneration alcoves to time travel portals and the famous transporters that look cool even if you don’t really go anywhere.
Star Trek is science fiction at its best. Not simply what we call Space Opera, a grand production with lots of show and sparkle with a basic story underneath, but a new concept of space exploration that “seeks out new life and civilizations” similar to historic explorers of Earth; Columbus, Magellan, Lewis and Clark, and Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. People who took risks for the sake of curiosity. In another fifty years, I can only hope that Star Trek is still going strong, boldly going where humans have never gone before.
It’s not enough in the 21st Century to simply write a story. Modern humans have been exposed to the moving image for too long to go back. Starting with black and white films that became “talkies”, then color, then television, video games, and so on up the line. It leaves authors in a predicament.
Do we abandon the novel and begin writing screen plays? Has the computer graphic image ruined model making and made stunt men obsolete? I want to imagine that computers haven’t quite taken over yet, that our skills are not slaves to machines.
I believe in computers. I think they are excellent servants. I use one every day to ‘blog’ and write stories. It’s a fantastic device with which to edit without killing trees, with which to submit without stamps, and communicate without travel. I’d like to elaborate on the “edit” characteristic if I may.
In the late 1980’s I typed out a rather large manuscript, about 55,000 words. Of course, I didn’t have an exact word count. We just counted pages and used Courier 12 for everything, one inch margins. There were no such things and widows and orphans, wrap around text, auto correct, spell check, or even a way to justify the resulting page. And I resisted technology, finding the learning curve too steep, until I saw the power of a word processor.
Suddenly, I could go back and change something without having to re-write the entire damn novel! I could change a characters name 100 times if I wanted. I could add paragraphs, remove sentences, cut and paste entire chapters or just a single word. I didn’t have to re-write the entire book over and over, inserting a page, changing the page number, worrying if I put in one too many little words if I would need an entire sheet of paper for the word “it”.
And so comes the showing and telling. The technology of today encourages, or at least hopefully it does, better story telling. No longer is the author limited by frustrations of paper and correction fluid. We no longer have to stop and look up the spelling of a word, fumble with a thesaurus (sometimes I still do), or best of all, drop everything and go to the library to research a topic.
And therein lies the rub. We no longer have to do the work. The computer serves at our leisure. Hopefully this allows the author to put more into the showing of a story instead of the mechanics of getting it done. And so we should hold the novelist to a higher standard. The showing becomes critical to engage today’s reader, and with so many resources readily available, mistakes, oversights, neglecting facts and assuming the reader is not sophisticated are deadly to today’s novels.
Showing takes work. It’s when a character slams his fist on the table instead of the author typing “he was angry”. It’s when a character crumples to the ground in heartbreak, not typing “she was really sad”. The novelist today must write scenes as if they were playing on the cinema. And jumping around is not allowed. The author must clearly identify when you are moving to another character’s point of view.
I have a couple of rules I try to follow at all times (coming back to the technology). I avoid two words whenever possible. “There was.”
There was a creaking sound.
If I write that at all, I will go back and rip that flat, pale, pathetic sentence out and replace it with something more like “In the silence of the dark, dusty kitchen, she heard a door creak.” Or something like that which makes a person put themselves into the shoes of the character and hear the rusty hinges as a door opens with unimaginable consequences.
So the writer must, must show the reader what is happening and trust that the reader will know that the young widow is devastated because she couldn’t even stand up upon hearing of her husband’s death. Don’t tell me she is sad, show me what she’s done and I will be there with her, investing my emotions in the story, feeling her sadness. If you can’t do that, then you might want to consider another profession. Today’s reader demands it, today’s market is ruled by the reader, and given how easy it is to search, replace, and research, it is now the writer’s duty to compete with the sparkle and glitter of Hollywood. If a picture is worth a thousand words, it’s time to employ words with care and intent. For practice, try describing the image below. You’ll know the challenge of today’s authors.
Sorry I missed you yesterday! I am recovering from a very brief vacation off the west coast of California, on Santa Catalina Island, about 25 miles west of Los Angeles. It was hot, but nothing like Las Vegas, although I have to say, in Las Vegas, it’s a dry heat or no heat.
Avalon Harbor, Catalina Island, California
Star watching is pretty good if you can get away from the main city, Avalon, Catalina Island, which is home to about 4000 people, including formerly Zane Grey who wrote more than 100 novels selling more than 40 million copies. I can see how his imagination would have been inspired by the beautiful views, perfect weather, and isolation of an island, this island in particular. If you’ve never heard of it, think of Chicago Cubs, Wrigley Gum, and the Catalina Casino with world’s largest circular ballroom.
I tried snorkeling. Now mind you, I’ve done this before, 18 years ago, wearing a Personal Flotation Device, about 20 feet from the shore. I also can’t swim (not that anyone hasn’t tried to teach me). I will remind you, I am nothing like the fearless leader Captain Thomas Jackson of my novels. I am more like an anonymous stone that won’t even skip across a stream, immediately plunging into water and heading for the bottom never to be seen again. But I did try to be a good sport.
Garibaldi
A 20 foot outboard motor boat with a happy senior at the helm took my son, husband, and me a good four or five miles north from the beautiful Avalon harbor perhaps 1000 feet away from shore where the water was clear and the Garibaldi (California State Marine Fish) schooled with kelp beds and striped bass. There I sat, in my wet suit, flippers on my feet, and a snorkel and mask facing the bottomless ocean with no PDF. my husband (a fish, I swear it!) had been the first to leap, my son, 15, followed. They waited for me. It was sink or swim time.
And sink it was. Ha! They said my wet suit would help me float; not me, I am rock. I managed to tread water, briefly, but trying to do so while attaching the snorkeling stuff was, in one word, multitasking, something I’m not terribly efficient at. As soon as I put on the mask, I couldn’t see or breathe, which trumped the treading water business by 100 fold. Then, I’d sink. I was promptly rescued, but once I got the suffocation – blindness device on and could tread water, I realized I also had to become a mouth breather, not terribly different the from fauna I intended on observing on this little outing.
I saw one fish, got water in my snorkel, and I was done. I wanted out of that water and into the boat and I didn’t care how embarrassed I was. I could only think of being hospitalized with a another stroke (which just happened 8 weeks ago), my heart pulsing little sticky platelets into my brain at incredible speed and pressure as panic triggered an adrenaline boost. The snorkel and mask went into the boat, then the mermaid flippers, then someone pushed and someone pulled and I flopped into the boat like a giant tuna.
Sea Turtle
I didn’t leave the boat again until we docked. in the meantime, my son and husband saw not only huge schools of striped bass and vivid orange Garibaldi, but, of all things, a sea turtle as big as a bed pillow.
These particular creatures are not native to the area, and this individual had probably come in with the most recent storm off the coast of Mexico. Yes, a living, swimming, gentle sea turtle. I did see its head when it came up for air. Yippee.
Outside of this near death experience, our little vacation rolled peaceably along until we arrived back on the mainland. I always enjoy the big catamaran that sails us out there and back at 30 knots per hour and serves snacks and drinks, also without internet service so the kids must put down their phones for about 30 minutes. This was fine. But the car had no intention of leaving the parking garage. Just a fluke, no marine pun intended, the battery decided to quit. Just quit, no warning, no rrr rrr rrr trying to turn over, just “nope, sorry, not taking you anywhere tonight.”
AAA came to the rescue, and I must say they were top notch, keeping us posted via text and getting a tech out to us in 28 minutes flat. I crashed into bed last night without so much as changing my clothes. Been visiting the family all day, and heading home just in time to prepare for the Star Trek Convention coming to Las Vegas on Wednesday. Now this is where I boldly go.
The Fabulous Five Star Trek Captions of Television
There are excellent stories and feelings and emotions to draw upon to entertain readers, as Zane Grey, and myself, can attest to on this lovely island. If you have the opportunity, when in Los Angeles or a little south of there in Long Beach, visit the Queen Mary, and spend a day or two on Catalina Island. I’m sure you’ll remember something worth writing about!
It’s not enough in the 21st Century to simply write a story. Modern humans have been exposed to the moving image for too long to go back. Starting with black and white films that became “talkies”, then color, then television, video games, and so on up the line. It leaves authors in a predicament.
