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Helpful Synchronicity
On 20 December 2023, as I left our house [in Tennessee] at 3am to catch a long flight to Alaska to visit family, I stood outside waiting for my husband and noticed Jupiter very bright at the zenith of the perfectly clear sky. The planet was so bright I wondered if a person with excellent vision outside of the city might be able to see the moons, or even the stripes; this in turn brought to mind an FT letter a few years back in which the author had described an old lady who claimed to be able to see astronomical details beyond the ordinary: “[As a child] I could see everything. Everything.” I distinctly remembered the writer quoting her. [This was Stephen Collier’s letter, “Jupiter’s Moons” in FT390:69, March 2020; I’d forgotten the author describing the lady as specifically being able to see Jupiter’s moons!]
Continuing to look up at Jupiter, I thought of a book I’d re-read recently, , by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, in which the authors describe a character in Persian mythology and his “seven-ringed cup”. Since the authors emphasise the character’s association with Jupiter, I’d wondered while reading if the ancient Persians could possibly have known that Jupiter is striped, and if so, could the “seven-ringed” cup have been a literal description of the disc of Jupiter? I made a mental note to look later for a good photo online of Jupiter so I could count the stripes. (Note: there appear to be more or less seven, but I’m not an astronomer.) Then, I tried my best to remember the name of the Persian character with the cup but could only recall
