Just another speck of light

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, go outside on a clear night and look up at the Big Dipper. There are 2 stars below the handle that make up an obscure constellation called Canes Venatici - the hunting dogs. Now look at the fainter star of the pair. That's Chara. Its Bayer designation is Beta Canum Venaticorum and it's after this star that I've named my blog.

What's so significant about this star? Nothing...and that's the point.

Chara is a type of star called a G-dwarf. This type of star is larger and brighter than K and M dwarfs which are more common in the galaxy, but it's smaller and fainter than most of the stars visible to the naked eye in the night sky including all of the stars that make up the Big Dipper.

Our own Sun is a G-dwarf star almost identical in size, brightness and colour to Chara. The Sun only looks brighter to us Earthlings because at a distance of only 150 million kilometers it is 1.7 million times closer to us than Chara is. Light from the Sun takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach the Earth. Light from Chara takes 27 years and 6 months.

If you traveled to the Chara system and found an Earth-like planet orbiting this star at the same distance that the Earth orbits the Sun, Chara would be your Sun. You could sit on a beach and watch the "sunset" just as you do on Earth, although you might call it charaset. And as the twilight faded and stars emerged there would be one faint star, reminiscent of Chara viewed from Earth, twinkling among the more distant stars of the constellation Phoenix. The casual observer would discern nothing in its scintillating radiance that would indicate it was host to planets and that one of those planets has a biosphere which includes a species that has developed art, agriculture, architecture, law, economics, politics, religion and interplanetary vehicles and the capacity to ask questions about their origins, purpose and future and for some of them to seek answers with a yearning for understanding and objective truth that can't be articulated.

This blog will be a little ADD. It will cover a lot of topics but will be unified by this theme of cosmic perspective. It will also include photos and tales of my adventures in travel and in imagination.