Word: moskowitz
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Like ancient mariners, astronauts exploring the solar system will navigate by the stars. But when man finally ventures to the stars themselves, says NASA Mathematician and Physicist Saul Moskowitz in a Sky and Telescope article, navigation will become more of a problem. In place of the familiar and steadfast constellations he has learned to rely on, the star traveler will encounter a mystifying and spectacularly changing sky in which stars move, change color, brighten, disappear, and magically cluster together in front...
...study he headed while working at Long Island's Kollsman Instrument Corp., Moskowitz and his co-workers plotted a hypothetical space flight to the star 45 Eridani, barely visible to the naked eye from earth and some 466 light-years away. Picking well-known stars in 45 Eridani's region of the sky, he fed data about their positions, distance and absolute brightness into a computer programmed to generate the appropriate star map for any point along the route of the flight...
...Blue. Not surprisingly, as Moskowitz's imaginary ship moved far beyond the solar system, the appearance of the sky began to change. As the ship approached them, the nearer stars began to shift their positions in familiar constellations, eventually disappearing from forward view as the spacecraft passed them. More distant stars remained in relatively fixed positions. In the view from the rear, the sun faded from sight as the craft flew beyond a distance of 30 light-years from the solar system, while 45 Eridani loomed ever larger ahead...
...motion. Thus, the computer showed, as the craft approached 45 Eridani at ever increasing velocities, other stars in the sky began to converge toward the target star. At 90% of the speed of light, only a few stars remained visible through the rear window. In a nightmarish finale to Moskowitz's flight, the remainder of the visible universe-stars, galaxies, nebulas-seemed to collapse into a single point and simultaneously disappear...
...JOEL A. MOSKOWITZ...