Further Adventures of the Celestial Sleuth: Using Astronomy to Solve More Mysteries in Art, History, and Literature

338 Pages·2018·33.37 MB·English

by  Donald W. Olson

Donald W. Olson
FUR THER ADVENTURES OF THE
Using Astronomy to Solve More Mysteries
in Art, History, and Literature
Further Adventures of the Celestial Sleuth
Using Astronomy to Solve More Mysteries in Art, History, and Literature
Donald W. Olson
Further Adventures
of the Celestial
Sleuth
Using Astronomy to Solve More
Mysteries in Art, History, and Literature
Donald W. Olson
Department of Physics
Texas State University
San Marcos, TX, USA
SPRINGER-PRAXIS BOOKS IN POPULAR ASTRONOMY
Springer Praxis Books
ISBN 978-3-319-70319-0 ISBN 978-3-319-70320-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70320-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962323
© Springer International Publishing AG 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the
material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage
and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or
hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does
not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective
laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are
believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give
a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that
may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover design: Jim Wilkie
Printed on acid-free paper
This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Dedication
To Marilynn and Christopher
Preface
What do the following examples from art, history, and literature all have in common?
Claude Monet watches as the orange disk of the setting Sun sinks behind the towers of
the Houses of Parliament, with the sky above colored by light passing through the smoke
and fog of the London metropolis. Vincent van Gogh rides the last train of the day to a
small town in the Netherlands and then hikes for miles across a rural landscape under a
starlit sky. Viking graves surround Edvard Munch as he observes the full Moon and a spar-
kling column of light reflected in the Oslofjord. In the opening days of World War II, a
German U-boat commander has the mission of penetrating the secure home harbor of the
British fleet and making a surprise night attack. The crowd in Times Square celebrates on
the day of the end of World War II, as the afternoon Sun casts shadows on the surrounding
buildings and Alfred Eisenstaedt captures an iconic photograph of a sailor kissing a woman
in white.
During one of the most arduous campaigns of the Korean War, Marines anxiously await
the end of a snowstorm and spot a single “star” in the night sky as the clouds begin to clear.
Characters in the novel Don Quixote and in Shakespeare’s plays determine the time at
night by observing the positions of constellations in the northern sky. Edgar Allan Poe
writes an apocalyptic tale about an encounter with a comet that ends all life on Earth. A
meteorological observer in Le Havre makes written notes about the state of the sea and the
sky and the direction of the wind at the same time when, in a hotel window nearby, Claude
Monet paints the Sun rising into the mist over the harbor.
The common theme is that astronomical analysis can solve long-standing mysteries
about these and other similar topics, as explained in detail in the chapters of this book.
My previous book (Celestial Sleuth, Springer Praxis, 2014) detailed how astronomy
could be applied to solving dozens of mysteries drawn from art, history, and literature. The
connections between science and the humanities have ensured that there would be no
shortage of similar projects for this book. Artists throughout the centuries have created
drawings and paintings depicting the heavens. Astronomical factors can also affect histori-
cal events, especially in military history, where moonlight and tides can be important.
Poets, novelists, and playwrights from every era have described the sky, and their
vii
viii Preface
references are of special interest when we can make a convincing case that an actual celes-
tial event inspired the literary passage.
The chapters in this book are arranged in four parts.
Part I includes projects applying astronomy to art. These chapters describe the analysis
of night sky and twilight paintings by Claude Monet, J. M. W. Turner, Ford Madox Brown,
Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Caspar David Friedrich, Canaletto, and Edvard Munch,
along with new results for photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt and Ansel Adams.
Part II focuses on historical events influenced by astronomy. These are ordered chrono-
logically, from a thirteenth-century battle in Scotland through the eighteenth-century
events in France, to a remarkable meteoric event in the early twentieth century, and finally
to important battles of World War II and the Korean War.
Part III analyzes astronomical references in literature. These chapters are also ordered
chronologically and discuss a mystery regarding the motion of the Moon as described in
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, an enigmatic passage in Don Quixote about telling the time
of night by observing stars in the northern sky, descriptions of celestial timekeeping by the
stars and the Moon in two of Shakespeare’s plays, a spectacular twilight sky observed by
Lord Byron, the paths of comets in a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, and a moonlit encoun-
ter in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.
Part IV makes a departure from “celestial sleuthing” and describes two projects under-
taken as a “terrestrial sleuth.” The first project involved J. M. W. Turner’s painting Rain,
Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway. Railroad timetables from 1843, meteoro-
logical archives, memoirs, and other clues helped to provide an explanation for the origin
of this important work. The second terrestrial project studied another British painting and
solved a long-standing mystery regarding the ancient oak tree that was the inspiration in
1852 for the setting of The Proscribed Royalist, 1651 by the artist John Everett Millais. We
also discovered a surprising connection between this centuries-old tree painted by Millais,
the celebrated painting of Ophelia created in 1851–1852 by the same artist, and the dra-
matic moonlit scene near the beginning of the Wilkie Collins novel, The Woman in White.
August 2017 Donald W. Olson
Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA
Foreword
Welcome to this fresh set of probes into paintings by the masters, turning points in history,
and passages from great literature—all with a view toward explaining things that were
unclear, ambiguous, or downright baffling until now. Just as in the book’s predecessor,
Celestial Sleuth, the key often comes from an unexpected corner of human wisdom,
astronomy.
For the past quarter century, Donald W. Olson has taught an honors course at Texas
State University, and from this course, much of the present material is drawn. He once told
me that coming up with a topic is by far the hardest part of any project. The subsequent
work is more straightforward, though he’s often unsure where each investigation will lead.
Students accompany him on research trips, and the whole class shares in the analysis.
Quite often, the novelty of their findings makes news around the world.
A surprising lesson for me, reading these pieces, is how often a renowned artist paints
exactly what he or she sees. Like most people and even some art historians, I’d assumed
artists felt free to rearrange scenes to suit their emotional state or their sense of composi-
tion. “I’ll put the rising Sun over there,” an artist might think. In a night sky, jabs of the
brush could add stars here and there.
Or so I thought. Perhaps some artists work that way, but very often true masters like
Claude Monet place elements in their paintings just as they see them. Their genius lies not
in rearranging nature but in searching out natural scenes that resonate with their intended
message. They document their excitement faithfully, and this precision is what provides
Olson grist for his projects.
In this book he draws on clues from canvas details and astronomy to work out the exact
dates when Canaletto created two well-known night scenes in Venice. For Caspar David
Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon, he resolves questions about the date, iden-
tifies a “star” near the Moon, and learns just where in Germany the artist was situated at
the time.
When it comes to dating Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, Olson employs tides, weather
records, the Sun, the positions of ships, and even the presence (or absence) of lights and
known harbor structures—all to show that Monet most likely worked from a particular
ix
x Foreword
hotel window in Le Havre on a certain morning in November 1872. (And this for a scene
so vague and dreamy, it launched the Impressionist movement!) Olson first described his
penetrating study of Impression, Sunrise in the catalog of a Monet exhibition at the Musée
Marmottan, Paris. He took part in the press conference held when the event opened in
September 2014.
Olson’s interpretations of astronomical evidence often correct misunderstandings with-
out losing sight of the importance of the human record as well. In his moving account of a
Korean War campaign, we read how the US Marines became surrounded and hunkered
down in the town of Koto-ri near the Chosin Reservoir. After frigid and snowy nights, they
at last through an opening in the clouds spotted a single star, raising hopes for improved
weather and air support to make their breakout possible. Following the war, this fondly
remembered “Star of Koto-ri” was incorporated into the emblem of those veterans, who
call themselves the Chosin Few. Olson points out that what they saw that night was actu-
ally a bright planet and not a star, but his chapter stresses that the importance of the celes-
tial scene is that the “star” stands as a permanent reminder of the Marines’ courage and
commitment during this epic campaign.
Quite often these research projects correct widely held “truths” or invalid assertions by
various authorities that have echoed down the ages. One example involves Alfred
Eisenstaedt’s 1945 photograph of a sailor kissing a random young woman in Times Square,
New York, on the day President Truman announced victory over Japan. In the years since
that iconic image was made, many newspapers, magazines, and at least one book have
purported to identify the couple. But Olson makes clever use of shadows, old maps, and
building records to fix the exact time to the minute when Eisenstaedt snapped the shutter,
thereby ruling out some of the most widely accepted claimants.
Another case looks at eighteenth-century comet hunter Charles Messier and the Ring
Nebula in Lyra, which is numbered 57 in his famous list of targets for small telescopes.
Messier seemed to credit another astronomer with discovering it, and many books follow
suit, but Olson demonstrates that it was Messier himself who first spotted the Ring Nebula.
This result became the cover story of the June 2017 Sky & Telescope magazine.
I’ve been fortunate to watch the Texas team in action on some of the research trips for
this book, including their sally into the dense woods of West Wickham Common in search
of the real “Millais Oak.” We all came away convinced. The tree traditionally pointed out
to park visitors cannot be the one John Everett Millais painted in one of his best-loved
works.
While the group was in faraway Orkney in 2015 to study the harbor’s access channels
and the World War II sinking of HMS Royal Oak, an email arrived from back in Texas. The
Texas State University system had just named Don Olson a Regents’ Professor, its highest
honor. Only a year earlier, he had earned the American Association of Physics Teachers’
prestigious Klopsteg Memorial Award for his skill in explaining science to the public.
With his students, we can sit back and marvel at the scope and depth of this research.
Here, in essence, are some of the finest examples we’ll ever see of what twentieth century
English writer Philip Guedalla called “the busy spade of modern scholarship.”
Sky & Telescope Roger W. Sinnott,
Cambridge, MA, USA
Acknowledgments
The chapters will often refer to “our Texas State group.” Marilynn Olson of the Department
of English and Russell Doescher of the Department of Physics worked with me on almost
every project. Margaret Vaverek, research librarian at our Alkek Library, provided espe-
cially valuable assistance by locating primary sources, difficult-to-find articles and books,
maps and aerial photographs, and any other documents that we needed for our research.
Roger Sinnott of Sky & Telescope has been a valued colleague and has become an hon-
orary member of “our Texas State group.” Roger checked numerical calculations and par-
ticipated in a half dozen of our research trips.
Many helpful consultations about astronomy and the humanities took place over the
years with Brad Schaefer of Louisiana State University.
Special thanks go to Laurie E. Jasinski, a coauthor on several projects, for her careful
reading and editing of each of the chapters in this book.
Several scholars provided key ideas that helped to guide the research methods of our
Texas State group. Owen Gingerich of Harvard University inspired us to use computers
not just to predict celestial events in the future but also to understand the skies of the past.
The books by astronomical computing expert Jean Meeus provided algorithms to calculate
the positions of the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets at any time in history and at any place
on Earth. Dennis di Cicco of Sky & Telescope gave us the idea of taking modern compari-
son photographs of the heavens from precisely the same places used in the past by artists
and photographers.
My sister, Karen Hasenfratz, was the first to suggest that we try to find a Vincent van
Gogh site. The projects described in this book benefited from information gained on
research trips to locations employed by Claude Monet and J. M. W. Turner in London
(Chap. 1), Monet and van Gogh in France (Chap. 2), Caspar David Friedrich in Germany,
Canaletto in Venice, Edvard Munch in Norway (Chap. 3), and Monet in Le Havre, France
(Chap. 4). We also visited the site of a thirteenth century battle at Stirling in Scotland
(Chap. 6) and the locations of World War II events in Scapa Flow and in Normandy (Chap.
7). Our Texas State group walked along the same road in northwest London as did the
characters in the dramatic opening installment of The Woman in White (Chap. 9), and we
xi