{"id":33590,"date":"2022-07-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-20T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/?post_type=purple_issue&p=33590"},"modified":"2022-07-21T14:11:35","modified_gmt":"2022-07-21T14:11:35","slug":"field-of-view-drive-me-to-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/2022\/07\/20\/field-of-view-drive-me-to-the-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"Field of view: Drive me to the Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The amateur astronomer\u2019s forum<\/p>\n\n
Field of view<\/span><\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Drive me to the Moon<\/em><\/h2>\n\n
Artist Oliver Jeffers <\/strong>on creating the Our Place In Space sculpture trail <\/span><\/p>\n\n
The trail winds its way through Cambridge this month <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n
Assuming the average speed that people drive is 60km\/h, how long would it take to get to the Moon? The answer is about a year, if you took breaks. To get to Mars it would be 400 years, to Saturn 2,500 years; to get to Pluto it would take nearly 10,000 years.<\/span><\/p>\n\n
Scale and perspective are things I\u2019ve been interested in with my work and many of my projects involve the night sky. I like looking at the great unknowns of the sea and the sky, and looking at Earth from a distance. After reading about just how hard it is to portray the size of the Solar System accurately, I wondered if there would be a way to make a scale model. The result, Our Place In Space, is a sculpture trail that ran in Derry-Londonderry and Belfast in April to July, and comes to Cambridge in July and August. <\/p>\n\n
There were two things that had to fall into place for this to happen. One occurred while I was in the USA, when the path of totality from a solar eclipse went across the country in 2018. We drove to Tennessee to be in the path and accidentally ended up in the best spot, on a bridge across a dam. We met Dolly Parton the same day, but even she couldn\u2019t eclipse the eclipse. <\/p>\n\n
It was two o\u2019clock in the afternoon in the middle of summer and the light started getting weird. It was like the sodium glow of a car park at night, then all of a sudden there it went, it turned from day to night, like someone flicked the switch. And you could actually see stars. When it got to totality it was like a black hole had appeared in the sky, and that\u2019s when I realised, I\u2019m looking at two different objects in a line. <\/p>\n\n
You don\u2019t need numbers to understand spatial awareness physically, so I asked myself, how can I show this in some way? I thought of a scale model of the Solar System where you\u2019d be able to line it up with your own eye. But then if Earth was the size of a ping-pong ball in the scale model and Mars was a marble 200m away, you wouldn\u2019t be able to see them. <\/p>\n\n
Then the last piece of the puzzle came when I was in Las Vegas for the American Librarian Association \u2013 with 10,000 librarians. There, everything is fighting for your attention, with neon lights and arrows, and I thought, \u201cThat\u2019s how we do it!\u201d We build modern art sculptures, arches which will hold the planets that are accurate to scale, each with a giant illuminated arrow so your brain can work out roughly where the next one is and you get that sense of spatial scale. <\/p>\n\n
I wanted to use the perspective of Earth\u2019s place in our Solar System as a way to look at how we fight over the only space in the Universe that\u2019s habitable to human life. When you get to Pluto, which is two kilometres past Uranus, it\u2019s like the size of a match head, and the next stop is Alpha Centauri, which at the trail\u2019s scale would be 160,000km away. At each point you\u2019re encouraged to think back and look back at Earth. The aim is to get people to think about how long it would take in reality to get to that point and what was happening on Earth that long ago. <\/p>\n\n
Many of these events in history tie back to some territorial dispute. We have quite literally and figuratively been fighting each other over space, as we hurtle through space, since civilisation began. My hope for Our Place In Space is that it gives visitors a widefield view of how unnecessary all that is. <\/p>\n\n
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