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| Old and New: Neta at 93 years, Angus at 1. |
More guzzling and more eating, but slightly less paranoia of dehydration.
By about the third day, the novelty of the whole fasting thing was wearing off and the reality of a month worth of 5AM starts was kicking in. As usual I had gulped down enough food and water to be well on the safe side of hydration, but this meant there was no chance of going back to bed for a little beauty sleep. So off I was again, walking down by the Seine before even a hint of sunlight was touching the sky.
On this third morning walking, things were much the same: it was very quiet, the waters were as still as mirrors and the air carried a slight chill, signalling the nigh approach of winter. It was another cloudless morning and as I mosied alongside of the river, I noticed again the arrangement of 3 bright stars pointing east. But there was something different: I could have sworn that one of the stars had moved. The lowest star certainly seemed to have changed position in relation to the other two, but how could such a thing be possible? My groaning belly afforded me plenty of time to contemplate the mystery, and as I continued my digestive promenade I suddenly hit upon an idea: stars don't move, but planets do. I was so excited by this possible discovery that I turned around straight away and headed for home - I wanted to find out whether my hunch was correct.
When I got in the door, I turned on the computer to hunt for an old piece of software that I knew was languishing somewhere in a dusty corner of my hard drive. Celestia was a free but fully featured virtual planetarium, and it would be able to verify if my theory held any weight. Once I had it running, I zoomed down to Paris to see a recreation of the morning sky, only this time with informative annotations. I quickly recognised the familiar arrangement of 3 stars in the east and in a genuine eureka moment I saw that my suspicion held true: the lowest "star" was actually the planet Venus!
I had always held a passing interest in Astronomy, but my knowledge generally stopped with being able to recognise the Southern Cross and the belt of Orion. Whenever I tried to learn a little more, I was stymied by those impossible-to-read star gazer charts. As for the zodiac or the phases of the moon, they were just concepts - I wouldn't know where to find Scorpio if my life depended on it. But here was another curious by-product of Ramadan: getting up at exactly the same time before sunrise every morning made astronomy an absolute no-brainer.
When we casually observe the night sky, its very difficult to make sense of it. We often catch a glimpse of some stars at odd hours and in varied places. Of course depending on the time of night, the stars change positions. Furthermore, depending on the season, a certain constellation may not be visible at all. It can be very hard to orientate oneself and build a picture of what is actually happening when every time you look, you see different things. The beauty of Ramadan is that it forces you to get up at the precisely same time before sunrise, every morning, for a whole month. When you get a few clear mornings in a row, you can very quickly begin to recognise constellations because they are always in exactly the same spots.
That morning I also learnt that the two bright stars which hadn't moved were the heads of the constellation Gemini. The excitement of my chance discovery of the 'wandering star' Venus had sparked my interest, and each morning (weather permitting) I was able to add to my growing knowledge of night sky features. Along with this purely geometric knowledge came a depth of history, as each time I got home and googled a new constellation I learned the stories of how it had been perceived throughout the ages. It was a humbling way to start each day: seeing proof of planets and stars before my eyes and considering not only our place in the stellar scheme, but also contemplating the previous generations of humanity who had seen the same sights and had offered their own interpretations.
But my crash course in historical astronomy was about to kick into overdrive a few mornings later when I saw something that made the slowly wandering Venus look like a stellar stick-in-the-mud.
