ispectrum magazine #13
TRANSCRIPT
ISPECTRUM MAGAZINE
Issue 13/May - June 2015
P e r s o n a l i s e d Medicine
Jupiter the Lord of the Night Sky
the eNigma of the thraciaNS13
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Features
03 Personalised Medicine Use of Personalised Medicine in the Preven-tion of disease and the Maintenance of wellness08 Barriers affecting the availability of Personalised Medicine 12 Personalised medicine - part of everyday life
15the enigMa oF the thra-cians and the orPheus Myth16 fighting spirit18 Journey to the Past21 orphic Mysteries23 the devil’s throat
25JuPiter the lord oF the night skyoBserve toP sPring oBJects with a roBotic telescoPe29 galileo and the telescope32 Jupiter the lord of the night sky
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CONTENTS
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Mado MartinezEditorial Director
Editorial DirectorMado Martinez, [email protected]
Art DirectorRayna [email protected] Contributing EditorsBradley Terblanche
Laura Hayes
Contributing WritersEllie Pownall
John Baruch
Imageswww.commons.wikimeadia.org ,www.morguefile.com ,www.freeimages.com
editorial
Ispectrum magazine
Dear Readers, I am really glad to bring you this lat-est issue which is full of varied topics, all equally interesting. Our contributor Ellie Pownall goes into personalised medicine. In recent years, the path of medicine has progressed both scientifically and social-ly; one of these recent developments is the ideology of personalised medicine. Personalised medicine is an emerging practice of medicine that uses an indi-vidual’s genetic profile to guide decisions made in regard to the prevention, diag-nosis and treatment of disease.
Also in this issue, I make my own contri-bution with ‘The Enigma of the Thracians and the Orpheus Myth’. The Thracians are well-known for their exuberant fight-ing spirit; but the history of a popula-tion is not just built on its wars and the exploits of its soldiers and leaders, as is usually read in encyclopaedias and his-tory books. Spread across South East Europe were groups of men and women who were highly skilled in working with refined metals, were followers of a deli-cate mystique that worshipped the moth-er goddess and had complex funerary rituals immersed in symbolism.
And to top off the final contents, John Baruch walks us through Jupiter, the lord of night sky, and an attractive proposal. Our computers take us into amazing worlds where anything is possible but reality can also deliver the amazing. How about using computers to take us into the real world, to control robots that will take images for us of the far distant reaches of the Universe?
www.ispectrummagazine.com
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Personalised Medicine
USE Of PERSONAlISED MEDICINE IN
THE PREvENTION Of DISEASE AND THE
MAINTENANCE Of wEllNESS
By
ELLIE PoWNALL
WEBSITE
WWW.ISPECTRUMMAGAZINE.CoM
n recent years, the path of medicine has progressed both scientifically and social-ly; one of these recent devel-
opments is the ideology of per-sonalised medicine. Personalised medicine is an emerging practice of medicine that uses an individual’s genetic profile to guide decisions made in regard to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. Scientists believe that this new approach to medical treatment will cut costs on the NHS, improve over-all health and ensure patients have more urgent treatment and better facilities with the financial benefits from this new scheme. An article from the New England Journal of Medicine states that “major invest-ments in basic science have created an opportunity for significant prog-ress in clinical medicine ”, reflecting optimistic views on the future of the personalised scheme and high hopes for its impact in basic scien-tific discovery.
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Examples of this new social devel-opment in medicine includes the per-sonalised medicine summit taking place in the life Science Institute, University of British Columbia , in partnership with the Personalized Medicine Initiative, Genome BC and lifeScience BC on Sunday 7th-9th of June this year. Professor Terry Allen, Conference Organizer, describes that “in many ways, British Columbia (BC) constitutes an ideal testing ground for putting a personalised medicine rogramme into practice, with its highly integrated single-payer health care system, its ethni-cally diverse, well-educated popula-tion and its advanced expertise in the development and application of molecularly-based medicine .” This scheme aims to use pharmacoge-nomics and other ‘omics’ analyses to guide diagnosis and treatment and manage, interpret and use big data in a new system of data consolida-tion to access improving health care in BC and investment in basic and translational research to advance personalized medicine discoveries. This aims to create a better knowl-edge of the maintenance of wellness in the public and eventually create
new development in personalised medicine beyond what has already been discovered.
Another example of the progress and breadth that personalised medi-cine has reached is in the PMwC (personalised medicine world confer-ence) held in Silicon valley 2014. This conference provides the entire range of people involved in personalise medicine, and each speaker gives a unique take on the developments of the future. Brook Byers, senior part-ner in KPCB (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), even goes as far to say that “this is the best personalised medicine conference there is today .” from 400 attenders and 41 speak-ers in 2010 to 1000+ attendees and 100+ speakers, is it clear to see there is growing interest in the area of personalised medicine with more than 40 companies investing in the development of the scheme, socially and technologically.
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Dr George Church, Harvard Medical School, helped to develop the first direct genomic sequencing method and the human genome
project; he explains the importance of person-alised medicine: “I think this is something easy to misunderstand, in that 100% of the peo-ple are at risk of some disease; this doesn’t mean that everybody
has it, but they don’t know until they get genetically tested. As the price comes down, it seems an obvious choice to find out if you do have a genet-
ic disease, for e x a m p l e
b r e a s t c a n -
cer”. H e
d e s c r i b e s the process of testing the presence of genetic diseases: “genetic materi-al in your file, not
requiring family histo-ry, as many people are the first person in their family that have dis-eases, can therefore be stored until symptoms present themselves or doctors can act on the genetic information that has been discov-ered”. This evidence of new ways to quickly act upon genetic dis-eases such as cancer and therefore decrease the chance of a moral-ity. To have access to this information will also enable parents to
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will provide a basic net-work of medical infor-mation for both doc-tors and patients to access, which would otherwise be difficult to discover, and thus pre-vent or become aware of potential future dis-eases in both offspring and relatives.
Indeed, there are many ethical issues surrounding person-
alised medicine due to the open depth of information about each patient. Reagan Kelly is a PhD student at the University of Michigan , and he explores the problems surrounding personalised medicine and if these will be easy to overcome. He states the three main issues surrounding the drawbacks of this new scientific development are protecting patient privacy, protecting
cover the inherited genetics of future off-spring and therefore be able to prepare both socially and finically to aid the living standards of their children such
as the current devel-opment of medical
care surround-ing Down’s
syndrome in infants. The use of per-sonalised medicine
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patient autonomy and allowing access to personalised medicine. In previous years, patients have always had the right to retain infor-mation about their health and well-being from both insurance compa-nies and the government, yet do these personal rights also apply to genetic makeup? what uses are acceptable for genetic information, and if a person has this information collected for use in risk profiling or diagnosis, should that then auto-matically commit them to allowing their data to be used for diagnos-ing and profiling others? As people have a right to refuse treatment and have personal privacy when it comes to diagnostics, how will this work when relatives also poten-tially encounter the same issues? Cost is also a massive issue in per-sonalised medicine -- as 46 million people are without health insur-ance, how will companies ensure everyone receives personalised medicine? And will the benefits of cost cuts to everyday NHS be spent on attempting to achieve person-alised medicine globally? These outline the fundamental issues in the personalised medicine scheme
in which many scientists and legal advisors have worked throughout the years to address and overcome, and the article below explains how they have succeeded.
An article named ‘Personalized Medicine: Ethnical, legal and Regulatory Issues’ explains that “although tests and companion diagnostics exist to improve pre-scribing and care outcomes, phy-sicians typically do not have the detailed analyses of clinical infor-mation needed to select optimal drug treatments and dosages on the basis of a patient’s unique genetic profile, physiology, and metabolic
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processes. In the absence of what is needed to know to deliver per-sonalised medicine, physicians can easily continue to use a certain amount of trial-and-error meth-ods when they evaluate treatment approaches ”. Along with the sta-tistics from the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) stating that more than 770,000 deaths or injuries a year are due to adverse reactions to treatments, this shows that the benefit of per-sonalised medicine massively out-weighs the issues highlighted pre-viously. These deaths also cost up to 5.6 million per hospital per year, which shows that although trying to implement personalised medicine around the globe will be expen-
sive, this will massively save on hospital expenditure and improve the economics of medical industry. The article also states that “the recently enforced regulations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) could obviate some contentious priva-cy battles, particularly those aris-ing within immediate families, by requiring all patients to consent to disclosure of private health infor-mation and to authorise access to specific third parties”. This there-fore reduces the amount of cau-tion regarding privacy and dignity within personalised medicine, and this aids to ensure the treatment is both fair and continues to offer patient disclosure in medical prac-tice. The article somewhat answers the concerns regarding person-alised medicine in Regan Kelly’s work and thus enables scientists to focus more on developing the process of the personalised scheme and eventually put the ideas stated in the ethnic, legal and regulatory article into play.
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An article named ‘the future of Coverage and Payment for Personalised Medicine and Diagnostics’ also states the progress personalised medicine has made to modern day health care. for example, non-invasive maternal blood testing. In the past two years, non-invasive prenatal
testing for trisomy dis-orders, such as Down’s syndrome, has begun to rapidly replace tra-ditional amniocente-sis methods. There is also multi-analyte assays with algorithms (MAAAs). Another tech-nological achievement includes the develop-ment of MAAAs, which help physicians plan
the management and in many cases reduce the overtreatment of diseases as diverse as breast, prostate, colon, ovarian and thy-roid cancers. Several of these tests are fDA approved, which expands their potential as widely distributed platform-based kits. This table below also
shows the newly devel-oped scheme in which the American Medical Association (AMA), which controls the standard code set for the communication of outpatient and labora-tory services between providers and payers, has developed more than 100 new codes for genetic tests and delet-ed the former ‘stack codes’ for molecular test processes. This enables an easier pro-
cess for both insurance companies and medical personnel, which will aid the transition into personalised medicine being global. The mass progress both medical
and economically sug-gests that the idea of personalised medicine will eventually become a regular part of every-day life and there-fore both reduce the costs on the NHS and improve health condi-tions or disease aware-ness of a large major-ity of the globe.
Patrick Conway, MD, states that “innovation
is happening broad-ly across the country. The promise of per-sonalised medicine and innovation is amazing, and we’re already see-ing dividends ”. He sug-
gests that personalised medicine is becoming gradually more popu-lar and consumers, although having little say in health care sys-tems’ protocol, would surely be for a physi-cian to have access to a diagnostic test to pick the right, as opposed to the wrong, treat-ment. The maintenance of wellness for patients will undoubtedly be much higher, due to a larger amount of medi-
cal information for per-sonnel to make deci-sions regarding both treatment and diagno-sis. Of course, the cost would be worrying to the average consumer,
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The mass progress both medical and economically suggests that the idea of personalised medicine will eventually become a regular part of everyday life
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yet the ‘the future of Coverage and Payment for Personalised Medicine ’ article states that “from the public and payer perspective, the margin-al cost of the benchtop chemistry is only a small part of the test’s value to the health care system, which is measured in years of life extended, quality of life and the avoidance of drugs that are not helpful”. It seems that once the finalised scheme of personalised medicine takes off, it is only natural that the tax payer will feel both strain and benefit over the new system, as there is a belief
that this new scheme of having medicine personalised will be over-all cheaper than the previous ‘trial and error’ tactics that costs money for improper medicine usage.
Overall, there is no doubt that the use of personalised medicine will improve health and maintenance of wellbeing due to the ease in identi-fying diseases at early stages using genetic information already logged for medical personnel. Although, there are some issues surround-
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ing the price and cost effective-ness for aspects, such as insur-ance, hospitals and the tax payer. Arguably, experts are working tire-lessly to create a sound scheme which can work in many different environments and economic bud-gets, to eventually make person-alised medicine a global scheme where all of the general public will have the ability to maintain medi-cal wellness.
1. The Path to Personalised Medicine -- The New England Journal of Medicine- Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D., and Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.
2. http://www.personalizedmedsummit.com/ -- Terry Allen, Professor Emeritus, Conference Organizer
3. http://pmwcintl.com/index.php - Brook Byers on PMWC
4. Reagan Kelly is a PhD student at University of Michigan -- Science, Policy, and Ethics in Personalized Medicine
5. Personalized Medicine: Part 2: Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory IssuesF. Randy Vogenberg, Carol Isaacson Barash, Michael PurselP T. 2010 November; 35(11): 624-626, 628-631, 642.PMID: 21139819
6. ‘The Future of Coverage and Payment for Personalised Medicine and Diagnostics’ -- The Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC) , Bruce Quinn 7.Patrick Conway, MD Deputy Administrator for Innovation and Quality & Chief Medical Officer, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services at the Tenth Annual State of Personalized Medicine Luncheon hosted by PMC March 15, 2014
REFERENCES:
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he passage of the millen-nia has brought us traces of ancient civilisations that shone enough to make their
cultural glimpses last through the ages. Humanity itself has featured in the art, culture and funerary rites of these civilisations, so whilst from a
mollusc we only find a trace of fos-silised shell, from a human we find much more than just remains: we find pyramids, mounds, sculptures, coins, tools, weapons, scripts, trea-sures, houses, palaces, altars and more.
T
The enigma of The Thracians and The orpheus myTh
By
MADo MARTINEZ
WEBSITE
WWW.MADoMARTINEZ.CoM
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All of this, in light of archaeology, allows us to know more about our ancestors. But for some of them, like the Thracians, what has been discovered barely casts a shadow over what is still unknown. There are many mysteries surrounding this ancient civilisation that occu-pied what is now Bulgaria and some adjoining parts of Romania, Greece and Turkey.
In archaeological terms, evidence of civilisation in Bulgarian lands dates back thousands of years. Not coincidentally, it was found in Provadia (Bulgaria) the oldest prehistoric city in Europe, dated between 4,700 BC and 4,200 BC, in a fortified settlement of 350 inhabitants. On the other hand, we know that for years the world’s oldest golden treasure was not found in Sumeria, nor in Egypt, nor in pre-Columbian America but in varna (Bulgaria) and dates from 4,600 BC.
Scientists and archaeologists still harbour serious doubts about who
the people were that mixed with the Thracians around 5,000 years ago, from which Thracian civilisa-tion itself would emerge. But it is known that there were some who came from the North to the Balkans with their livestock, finding a place with a bright and attractive culture. It was the intermingling between the local population and the new arrivals that allows us to talk today of the Thracians.
The Thracians are well-known for their exuberant fighting spirit; but the history of a population is not built only on its wars and the exploits of its soldiers and leaders, as it is usually read in encyclo-paedias and history books. Spread across South East Europe were groups of men and women who were highly skilled in working with refined metals, who were follow-ers of a delicate mystique that
fIGHTING SPIRIT
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worshipped the mother goddess, and who had complex funerary ritu-als immersed in sym-bolism.
There are many puz-zles that arise when we investigate the ancient Thracians. for example, they had a rare ability for discov-
ering and extracting natural deposits with-out harming nature. Archaeologists and anthropologists contin-ue to be surprised by the kinds of advanced technological practices that the Thracians were using. If, as some schol-ars believe, they were intermingling with the people who inhabited
Bulgarian lands since ancient times, they presumably exchanged knowledge, and their wisdom swelled as they incorporated the skills, practices and informa-tion of the other cul-ture.
So what mysteries remain from the first
Old, historical map of ancient Thrace, 1585
Thracians over 5,000 years ago? Although we know of some Thracian names and words, apparently they lacked their own alpha-bet and came to use Greek and latin charac-ters to perform certain inscriptions. However, this Indo-European lan-guage spoken by the Thracians is still a mys-tery and no one has been able to decipher it... yet. Some bilin-gual inscriptions in Greek characters writ-ten in Ancient Greek and Thracian that were discovered in Northern Greece could perhaps shed some light in help-ing to decipher the con-tents of the Thracians texts, something that certainly would reveal important informa-tion about the people of whom we still know hardly anything.
The Thracian burial rite is one of the most compelling evidences of belief in the after-life and immortality of the soul. The valley of the Thracian Kings is in the region of Kazanlak, where we can find sev-eral grave mounds, making this area a real route of the funeral ritu-al (over 500 burial hills). we are in the realm of the Odrisios (fifth century to the fourth century BC), ruled by the King III Seuthes. Their mounds did not reach the colossal size of the pyramids of Egypt, but the Thracian funeral process had many things in com-mon with the Egyptian one, not least the idea of resurrection and an afterlife. we drove to
the ancient necropolis of the city of Seuthes III, called in those days Seuthopolis, and head-ed to the mound-tomb of the King himself.
The remains of Seuthes III were buried with his horse, his weapons and a bronze statue of his own image that had been placed in a special chamber of the tomb, according to the Orphic funeral practices. Thus, we are reminded of Iberian funerary ritu-als in which the war-rior was buried with his weapons but placed in a way that neutralised them, rendering them completely unusable. why? The texts of the ancient Greek geog-rapher and historian
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JOURNEy TO THE PAST
Herodotus shed light on this mystery. He claimed that whatever was destroyed or made unusable during funer-al rites would become useful for the afterlife. The logic of this phi-losophy is overwhelm-ing and beautiful, from
my point of view. If the human being whose life was destroyed with the advent of death was meant to revive in the Hereafter, so the objects had to ‘die’ to revive again. Death was considered to be the beginning of a new life. In this passage, the spirit of the deceased travelled to reach the heavenly abode where they would stay. On this trip, they need-ed to carry everything they would need.
The most valuable thing for the elite of the Thracian warriors was their horse and their wife, though we do not really know in which order! So not only did they sacrifice their horse, but also their favourite wife.
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Bronze Head of Seuthes III
(end of 4th - beginning of 3rd c. B.C.),
Golyama Kosmatka mound, Kazanlak
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was it cruel? If, as the ancients used to say, the Thracians wept at births and cheerfully sang at their deaths, far from being a cruel act, the Thracians probably considered it an honour. In fact, wives are said to have argued over who would have the hon-our of being the chosen one. As the Greek poet Hesiod said: “when a husband dies, his wives, which are many for each one, argue in competi-tion held by the deter-mination of those who are their close friends and relatives, and claim them to be the deceased husband’s dearest one. The wife who comes out victorious and honoured with a judgement in her
favour, which is full of praise and applause of men and women, will be beheaded by a kin hand over the grave of her husband and is bur-
ied beside him, while the ones who lost the case, that is for them the greatest infamy, remain mourning their misfortune”.
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Tomb of Seuthes III– the famous Thracian ruler of
the Odrysian kingdom
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ORPHIC MySTERIES
Bacchus
The Thracians wor-shipped Ares, the god of war; Sabazios, the sky father god; and had faith in the Sun, son of the goddess Bendis, the incarnation of per-fection and immortality. The most popular cults were the Dionysian mysteries, which surely came to Greece from Thrace, along with the cult of Orpheus and the Orphic mysteries.following Orpheus’ foot-steps, I ascended to the top of a mountain to the ruins of an abandoned place called Perperikon in Southern Bulgaria. It is a real city temple, which can still be seen in the stone altars that were part of a temple dedicated to the God of wine and sexual ecstasy, known by the Greeks as Dionysus and Bacchus by the Romans. It is the most sacred and
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The ruins of the ancient city of Perperikon, Eastern Rhodopes
important place dedi-cated to the Dionysian cult, which consisted of sexual orgies and sac-rifices. But Orpheus, who according to leg-end had been a disci-ple of Dionysus, argued against these practices in the name of Apollo, the god of reason. According to ancient legend, this act of defi-ance resulted in his con-viction and murder at the hands of the mae-
nads, the female fol-lowers of Dionysus.
Some archaeolo-gists maintain that the Thracians’ musician god could have been a real character who resided in the Bulgarian Rhodope Mountains and would had been a Dionysian priest who had access to hidden knowledge of Egyptian and oriental sages. His
cult proclaimed asceti-cism, was against sac-rifice and taught the transmigration of souls and mankind’s capac-ity to experience the divine, although they had to be initiated in order to learn to break free and rise in a state of “happy immortality”. without being initiated, one could not experi-ence happiness in the afterlife.
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The Greek poet Sappho of lesbos wrote a poem referring to a woman who died without having access to the Orphic mysteries: “After you die, you will lie without anyone remembering or missing you with sorrow, because you did not enjoy the roses of Pieria. you will be ignored, as well, in the house of Hades, floating wandering among the dark deceased”. was Sappho a follower of the Orphic mysteries? Possibly yes.
Candidates had to be accepted into the Orphic mysteries, which were esoteric and only disclosed to those who managed to be initiat-ed. The initiates were required to then save and protect the knowl-edge they were taught. Sappho’s poems speak of reverence to the Orphic religion on more than one occasion, for instance, in one she speaks of rising over the afflic-tion of death, considering it a sin to lament at the Muses’ Home, because as she said: “I’d rather die listening to this song (Orpheus with his lyre)…”.
THE DEvIl’S THROAT
The Head of Orpheus
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According to mythology, Orpheus descended into the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, and did so through the Devil’s Throat, a cave in the Rhodope Mountains, South East Bulgaria.
The Bulgarian Orthodox Church follows doctrines explained by the ancient creeds of the apostles, where it is described the moment in which Christ had to descend into hell to defeat the devil and release the righteous. Here, we see some parallels in the accounts of both Orpheus and Jesus. Both had to go down to the depths of hell, to “die” and to come back to life trans-formed. They both preached that humans have souls that would be judged at the moment of death and would pay for their actions. They both practiced ceremonies that included rituals such as turn-ing water into wine. furthermore, the brutal murder of Orpheus was considered a sacrifice to redeem mankind for its sins. The similari-ties are interesting to say the least.
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AN AUDIENCE wITH JUPITER THE lORD Of THE NIGHT SKy
ur computers take us into amaz-ing worlds where anything is possible, but reality can also
deliver the amazing. How about using computers to take us into the real world, to control robots that will take images for us of the far distant reaches of the Universe? One such robot is the Bradford Robotic Telescope, situated
high on the northern side of Mount Teide on the Spanish island of Tenerife at the Instituto Astrofisica Canarias Northern Hemisphere Observatory. This is one of the few autonomous robots available on the web: www.telescope.org. See below for a free offer code for you to use it with Ispectrum.
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John Baruch, Edward Hand, Chris Tallon, Dan Hedges. Bradford Robotic Telescope. University of Bradford UK.
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OBSERVE TOP SPRING OBJECTS WITH A ROBOTIC TELESCOPEIspectrum has teamed up with the University of Bradford to bring you one month of access to their robotic telescope, free with this magazine.
The Bradford Robotic Telescope is located in the best observing site in Europe, 8000ft above sea-level on the island of Tenerife. From this prime location, this fully-autonomous observatory takes pictures of the night sky. Unusually however, its main purpose isn’t academic research. Rather, it is taking images for members of the public, for school children and for amateur astronomers all
over the world, who are able to request images from the telescope via the website. These images are scheduled automatically and taken for you while you’re sleeping. Log on to the website a few days later and your very own images are waiting for you. All the raw data collected is available and online image processing tools are provided to make sure you get the most from your pictures.
HOW TO GET YOUR FREE MONTH’S ACCESS
What you can see
1. Go to telescope.org 2. Enter the access code EUROPA3. Try out imaging the six objects above for one month
JupiterGalileo turned his telescope onto Jupiter just as you can with the robotic telescope and was able to see the bright planet with its tiny family of moons just like the planets going around the Sun.
The Milky WayThe Robotic Telescope comes equipped with two wide-field cameras. The widest is able to capture our own galaxy in all its glory. Glowing areas of star formation and dark obscuring dust show up clearly.
The MoonA favourite of astronomers for centuries, take a simple image of our nearest neighbour up close. Take detailed images of craters and watch as the moon changes of the lunar month.
The Andromeda GalaxyThe closest large galaxy to our own, Andromeda is on a collision course with our own galaxy. As a result it appears very large in the sky and makes a great target for the mid-field camera.
The Hercules Globular ClusterGlobal clusters are among the oldest structures in the galaxy, around 11 billion years old. This one is thought to contain around 300,000 stars. Might there also be a black hole at its centre?
The Dumbbell NebulaThis is a bright planetary nebula: the remnants of a dying star and a peek into the future of our own Sun. The red areas are ionised Hydrogen and Nitrogen, with Oxygen showing up in green.
Tell the telescope what you want it to do, and it will service your request and send it back to you with-out any human inter-vention. It collects all the requests, and as soon as it is dark, it checks the weather to see if it is safe to open its dome, schedules its observing and sets off. you can do real science with the telescope and follow in the footsteps of the pioneers like Galileo.
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The Bradford Robotic Telescope is located in the best observing site in Europe
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It was Galileo who made the first telescope following a rumour that a Dutch optician had built such an instrument. In his hands, the tele-scope changed the world. The date was January 1610. It was already known that the Earth was a sphere since Magellan had sailed around the world and returned in 1522 to be followed by the Englishman Drake in 1580. There was also the ter-rible idea published by Copernicus in 1543 that the Earth along with
all the other then known planets (Mercury, venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) all circled the Sun just like the Earth, and like the earth by implication, they could easily have rivers, mountains, animals and people. The idea was terrible and clearly wrong for the guardians of thought since the Bible was quite clear. God only tried his hand at cre-ation once, and it was here on this special place Earth – but the proof that the Earth was a sphere, both
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the Magellan and the Drake expe-ditions had returned home sailing only west, unearthed some terrible implications. Heaven was clearly up there and hell down below, but if the Earth is a sphere, then the centre of the Universe as created by God was hell.
Copernicus helped get out of this dilemma showing that ‘down below’ was not the centre of the universe – the Sun was. But there was the other terrible implication with the ideas of Copernicus that were even more unacceptable: the idea that there were other similar planets and Man was not alone in the Universe. for the Catholic Church this was too much, and Copernicus was clearly wrong; they would live with the hell conundrum. It was clearly
Galileo Demonstrating the New Astronomical Theories at the University of Padua.
A replica of the earlest surviving telescope attributed to Galileo Galilei, on display at the Griffith Observatory.
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very hot just below the surface of the Earth since we had found vol-canoes breathing fire. Copernicus must be wrong. Galileo with his telescope threatened to turn all this on its head in two ways. One was venus: a clear proof that the planets did not go ‘round the Sun was that venus hard-ly changed its bright-ness, and if it went around the Sun, it would sure-ly be much b r i g h t e r when it was near the Earth a n d f a i n t e r when it was far away; and a n y w a y , it would have phases like the Moon. No-one had seen anything like phases
with venus, but Galileo with his telescope could see clear phases with venus, which also explained the bright-ness. when venus is near, it is apparently bigger, but only a small part of it is illuminated. when it is far away, it is smaller and fainter, but the whole disc is illumi-
nated. The size and the phase cancelled each other out and kept the brightness of venus the same as it orbited the Sun. for the ortho-dox Catholic view the unvarying brightness of venus was proof that it did not go ‘round the Sun, and only when Galileo could show the phases of venus to
everyone did these ideas change.
venus
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The other more dramat-ic discovery involved Jupiter. After venus, the Sun, and the Moon, Jupiter is the brightest object in the sky, and at the moment (spring 2015), it is prominent high in the sky in the
early evening. Galileo turned his telescope onto Jupiter just as you can with the robotic telescope and was able to see the bright planet with its tiny family of moons, just like the planets going around
the Sun. The faint line of dots of light change their position every night sometimes disap-pearing behind Jupiter or each other as Jupiter follows its majestic journey around the Sun. you can see these
Photo:©Bradford Robotic Telescope
The four largest satellites of Jupiter are easily seen in a small telescope and were first observed by Galileo.
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moons and their daily motion the same as Galileo did. Ask the tele-scope to take images of Jupiter for a few days and you too will see these tiny spots of light move around the planet. Check exactly how to do it by finding images in the image gal-lery. with a bit of care and by using different exposures, you should also be able to see the Great Red Spot on Jupiter: a giant storm that has been raging for at least 400 years and which is big enough to engulf the Earth. The moons themselves are uniquely interesting; Io, the moon nearest Jupiter, is the most
volcanic object in the solar system, blasting out sulphur with moun-tains higher than Everest. It orbits Jupiter in just under 2 days, but it is Europa that will probably receive the most attention because it has oceans under a thin surface of ice, and the general view is that liquid water is the best place to look for life.
with multiple requests to the tele-scope, you will be able to measure the orbital time of the moons of
Jupiter with its Great Red Spot, and Jupiter’s four largest moons, known as the Galilean satellites. from top to bottom, the moons shown are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The Great Red Spot, a storm in Jupiter’s atmo-sphere, is at least 300 years old.Source:Wikipedia
Photo credit:NASA
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Jupiter and with some effort appre-ciate the first measurements of the velocity of light, since the time of disappearance of a moon behind Jupiter can be measured exactly and so can the orbital period. we need to add on the time the light takes to get to us; the distance from Jupiter to the Earth varies by the diameter of the Earth’s orbit: about 16 minutes in light time as we circle the Sun. you can enjoy a foray into the history of science and much more with the robotic telescope. for Galileo, he achieved everlasting fame, but in his lifetime,
he was shown the instruments of torture and forced to stop looking at the stars and remain silent about the motions of the planets around the Sun. He was pardoned in 1992 by Pope John Paul II. you can have all these delights for free unless you decide to subscribe. There are no instruments of torture… just £5 per month.
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“orpheus with his Lute made Trees,And the Mountaine tops that freeze, Bow themselves when he did sing.To his Musicke, Plants and FlowersEver spring; as Sunne and Showres,There had been a lasting Spring.Every thing that heard him play,Even the Billowes of the Sea,Hung their heads, and then lay by.In sweet Musicke is such Art,Killing care, and griefe of heart,Fall asleepe, or hearing dye.” - SHAKESPEARE