MOTHER’s Bi-Monthly 1977 Almanac: Summer Homesteading Tips

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ILLUSTRATION: MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF
 A star chart, from May and June in 1977, which can be used to help learn plotted constellations in the nighttime sky.

This may be the first generation to set foot on the moon and shoot rocket probes into the reaches of outer space. But, man for man and woman for woman, great granddad and great grandmother — or, for that matter, almost any primitive tribe of almost any past age — knew a lot more about identifying the stars and planets in the night sky than most of us currently do.

And so, with the help of Guy Ottewell (author of Astronomical Calendar 1977), MOTHER is going to try to change all that.

Star Constellations

Most any schoolchild can tell you that we experience alternating periods of light and dark (day and night) because the earth rotates on its axis once each 24 hours. Few people, however, realize that we live under a canopy of stars — day and night ( not just at night) — during every one of those 24 hours.

Nope. The stars don’t “come out” only when the sun “goes down.” They’re up there all the time. We seldom see them during the day, though, because Ole Sol (which is “only” 93 million miles from us) bathes the illuminated side of the earth with rays bright enough to overpower and “blot out” the much weaker light reaching us from stars thousands of light years (each of which is roughly equal to six million million miles) away.

  • Published on May 1, 1977
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