APOD: Pelican Nebula Close Up (2010 Aug 19)

[neufer]

Giuseppe Baretti said that after Galileo's abjuration [he] said the phrase "Eppur si muove"

<<The Italian phrase "Eppur si muove" means And yet it moves (Nonetheless, it moves). Legend has it that the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei muttered this phrase after being forced to recant in 1633, before the Inquisition, his belief that the Earth moves around the Sun. It is occasionally used in modern speech to indicate that although publicly someone who is in a knowledgeable position may discount or deny something, that does not stop it from being true.

At the time of Galileo's trial, the dominant view among theologians, philosophers and scientists was that the Earth is stationary, indeed the center of the universe. Galileo's adversaries brought the charge of heresy, then punishable by death, before the Inquisition. Since Galileo recanted, he was only put under house arrest until his death, nine years after the trial.

There is no contemporary evidence that Galileo muttered this expression at his trial; it would certainly have been highly imprudent for him to have done so. The earliest biography of Galileo, written by his disciple Vincenzio Viviani, does not mention this phrase, and depicts Galileo as having sincerely recanted. The legend first became widely published in Querelles Littéraires (1761), recounting a tale published by an Italian living in London in 1757 (124 years after the supposed utterance). In 1911, the famous line was found on a Spanish painting owned by a Belgian family, dated 1643 or 1645. The painting is obviously ahistorical, since it depicts Galileo in a dungeon, but nonetheless proves that some variants of the "E pur si muove" legend had been circulating for over a century before it was published, perhaps even in his own lifetime.>>

George: I think it moved.

Jerry: Moved?

George: It may have moved, I don't know.

Jerry: I'm sure it didn't move.

George: It moved! It was imperceptible but I felt it.

Jerry: Maybe it just wanted to change positions?
__ You know, shift to the other side.

George: No, no. It wasn't a shift, I've shifted, this was a move.

Jerry: Okay, so what if it moved?

George: That's the sign! The test; if a man makes it move.

Jerry: That's not the test.
_ Contact is the test, if it moves as a result of contact.

George: You think it's contact? It has to be touched?

Jerry: That's what a gym teacher once told me.

[starman]

"It would be great to see a star forming"... well, now you can!
Within the past few days, a new star has appeared in this very region!
And a new star, not a nova. Actually, a formerly very faint star (18-19m) has just increased by about 5 magnitudes because the circumstellar disc that encircles it has just dumped a huge amount of material down onto the star. This is what is known as an FU Orionis star. The position of the object is: RA 20h 58m 17.03s +43° 53' 43.4" and its name is LkHA 188 G4 (i.e., it's star no. 188 in the Lick observatory catalogue of H-alpha stars... or to be more precise it's the fourth in a group of h-alpha stars that surround LkHA188!) - this whole region is an area of intense star formation, and there are many others in Cygnus, one of the other more active ones being the area a few degrees North of Deneb.
The erupting FU Ori star is currently about magnitude 13, but it could brighten up a bit more. FU Ori stars normally have amplitudes of about 6m.