Milky Ways
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NT Issue 2 correspondence: "Marxist Astronomy, The Milky Way According to Anton Pannekoek" by Lauren Collee, p. 158-163 & "Axis Spiderform" Jeff Mills & Alexander Kluge, p. 164–171.
Paul Valéry on Mallarmé's Coup des: “He has undertaken, I thought, finally to raise a printed page to the power of the midnight sky,”
Seigow Matsuoka and Kohei Sugiura's legendary book "Summa Cosmographica":
Sugiura: In 1979, 28 years ago, I designed a "black book" of 3 cm thickness. Titled Summa Cosmographica, it has 400 pages of black paper and black ink, all covered in black, as if to wrap up the light of all the scattered stars of the universe.
The editor's and my intention was to enclose in one book the entire cosmos with its myriad heavenly bodies, utilizing pictures, text and the art of design to this end. The book was intended to portray the universe as a whole, pursuing a new image of the universe made available by the technology of radioastronomy that emerged in the 1970s, as well as introducing a comprehensive cultural theoretical view of the cosmos.
Starlight and stardust fill the pages, competing with the text out to the edge of every surface. The book is filled with heavenly bodies glittering and dancing across the entire universe. Summa Cosmographica is divided into eight sections, each consisting of a chain of linked themes, like the stars that make up constellation. Turn the pages and you will see the sun, a diagram of the life of a star, a black hole, the force of gravity, a comet's tail, falling meteorite. The last chapter complements this scientific viewpoint by introducing human images of the universe - the cosmos in the mind.
In this book the full spread of right and left pages is treated as a single unit. Within that space we allocate smalll fields in which special themes unfold. For example, at the bottom of the right page is a corner outer edge that introduces astronomers. The top inner edge of the left page is a place for telescopes. The top outer corner of the right page carries a picture related to the content of each text. And across the bottom of every spread is 12 mm wide space for a scale that measures various cosmic phenomena. Scales of time, distance, mass, density, light intensity, energy from the smallest heavenly bodies to the largest - appear one after the other.
In this manner various sets of images occupy every page in the same location, extending across the expanse of the entire book. In other words, this one volume also contains four more little booklets: precisely design of "one in many, many in one."
Milky Way fore-edge image:
The book has another surprise as well. Depending on which way you slant the pages, the trim edge reveals either the Andromeda Galaxy or Flamsteed's chart of the constellations. Thus two disparate images miraculously appear the edge of the same volume: a on design of "one in two, two in one." Every element of the book is a universe in itself.
Asian philosophers see the universe not only as a vast space around us, but as a presence inside our own bodies and minds. These teachings, found in ancient India's Upanishads and in the works of China's Lao-tse and Chuangtse, have penetrated deep into the lives and hearts of Asia's people. Just as Asians believe there is a universe in the body, this book was designed to manifest the universe in a book.
John Durham Peters:
The sky is a tomb or a cave as well as a map, clock, or book.
Many cultures see the heavens as the abode of the dead. The idea that each star represents a soul is still pervasive.
Anton Pannekoek’s naked eye observations of the Milky Way’s cygnus clouds, 1894. Faint surface brightness is more difficult to detect in a telescope, even a very powerful one, than with the naked eye:
Collee on Pannekoek:
Born in the Netherlands in 1873, twenty-five years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, Pannekoek studied mathematics and physics at Leiden University, publishing his first paper on the Milky Way while still a student. He became interested in socialism upon reading Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Equality (1897), after which he began to study the philosophies of Karl Marx and Joseph Dietzgen. His scientific and political careers proved difficult to reconcile, and he eventually left his job at the observatory after he was reprimanded for supporting a strike. Deciding to devote his life to revolutionary politics, he moved to Berlin and then Bremen, where he published widely, often with a pseudonym, and taught classes on historical materialism at schools founded by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).
In A History of Astronomy (1951), Pannekoek asks:
What really is the Milky Way? Exactly speaking, it is a phantom; but a phantom of so wonderful a wealth of structures and forms, of bright and dark shapes, that, seen on dark summer nights, it belongs to the most beautiful scenes which nature offers to man's eyes. It is true that its glimmer is so faint that it disappears where the eye tries to fix upon it is perceived only by the rods, not by the cones of the retina, hence is seen only by indirect vision; yet, when all other glare is absent, it gives an impression of brilliant beauty.
Pannekoek's "MEAN SUBJECTIVE IMAGE"
Pannekoek devised a method to produce what he termed the "mean subjective image" of the Milky Way, which was comprised of multiple, layered perspectives. To achieve this, he collected accounts of the Milky Way perceived by several other observers, initially as written descriptions (believing that sketches were more likely to lose their accuracy in the act of drawing), and later also as extra-focal photographs, where the plate was intentionally placed outside of the focal plane so that light was distributed more fully, mimicking the way astronomical light is perceived by human eyes.
Pannekoek: It is true that its glimmer is so faint that it disappears where the eye tries to fix upon it it is perceived only by the rods, not by the cones of the retina, hence is seen only by indirect vision; yet, when all other glare is absent, it gives an impression of brilliant beauty.
Collee: The Milky Way images, then, are not images of the sky so much as cosmic mirrors for the human subject, revealing the interplay between the individual and the collective, between thought and matter, and the deep correspondence between art, science, and politics.
Pannekoek: The external world flows before the mind like an endless river, always changing; the mind registers its influences, it merges them, it adds them to what it had previously possessed and combines these elements.
P on Herschel: How large is this universe? What is its structure? Does it consist of an immense number of solar systems similar to our own? In 1750 Thomas Wright had already considered that what we see as the Milky Way encircling the sky was the projection of a gigantic system extending farthest in the plane of the luminous belt. Kant had adhered to that view. In 1761 Lambert elaborated a theory according to which the thousands of stars surrounding the sun constituted a system, and the Milky Way, because it consisted of a large number of such systems, was a system of higher order. There might be an even larger number of Milky Way systems in space, forming a still higher system. All these opinions, however reasonable they might appear, were mere speculation and fancy. Herschel was the first who attempted to determine the extent of the stellar system by systematic observations.
He explained that, by their mutual attraction, stars that formerly were evenly spread must concentrate into regular or irregular condensations, with voids left between them. He called it the 'formation of nebulae', indicating that what is seen as a nebula in the telescope consists of a cluster of very small and distant stars. In the irregularities and cloud forms of the Milky Way this clustering tendency was clearly visible. Extensive nebulae he called *telescopic milky-ways'. Our Milky Way is of the same kind as other nebulae. 'I shall now proceed to show that the stupendous sidereal system we inhabit consisting of many millions of stars, is, in all probability, a detached Nebula.' The chapter in his paper of 1785 containing this discussion is superscribed by the thesis: 'We inhabit the planet of a star belonging to a Compound Nebula of the third form.
William Herschel's (1738--1822) first drawing of the Milky Way As deduced from his star gage method. The star gages were what we would call star counts. Herschel was attempting to map the shape of the Milky Way in relative distances:
A blog on Herschel: In this segment, we are going to look at Herschel’s attempt to catalog the nebulous stars and use them to unravel the “construction of the heavens,” which was his goal for observational cosmology. In 1783, two years after his discovery of Uranus, Herschel completed his second 20-foot telescope, with an 18-inch mirror that allowed him to peer further into the universe than anyone had before, and he immediately began, with the help of his sister Caroline, to "sweep" the skies for any object that was “nebulous” – not a pinpoint of light (a star).
H's big a telescope:
Herschel discovered early on that many nebulous objects could be broken down into individual stars by a powerful telescope, so his initial working hypothesis was that there is no true nebulosity in the heavens; if the telescope doesn't reveal individual stars, it is only because the object is so far away. Later, he changed his mind, and came to believe that some nebulae were really made of a self-luminiferous material unlike anything on earth.
First diagram of the Milky Way galaxy, viewed from inside and outside, engraving accompanying "Account of some observations tending to investigate the construction of the heavens,' by William Herschel, 1784:
