John Rachal's Blog

All this recent talk about discovering new planets circling other stars reminds me of when William Blackman and I discovered a new planet when we were twelve years old. William and I had known each other since tricycling days on Phelps Avenue. I’m not sure whose idea it was, but we dredged up softball-sized rocks from the creek and laid them out neatly across Phelps to block traffic, and sure enough some lady came along in her Chevrolet and made us move them. But we soon matured and took an interest in astronomy. Both my Mom and his folks had moved, and it was a habit of mine to get invited out to his house for the weekend several times a year to watch the late Friday night Nightmare Show, to build forts and tree houses in the woods, which I didn’t have, and to sleep sometimes in his German Shepherd Flint’s aromatic doghouse, which I didn’t have either.

We had one of those $1.25 science paperback books on astronomy—but you could get them on flowers and trees and rocks and bugs and other subjects appropriate for young scholars—and it gave all kinds of factual information on the planets and comets and stars and such. It predicted a few eclipses, and my first lunar eclipse was observed about two a.m. from his bedroom window, since it was cold outside. We asked his Mom–a wonderful lady who made delicious biscuits, and wasn’t bad at fort-making either–to wake us up in time, which she duly did. I saw my first total solar eclipse in Alaska in 1963, and another one on a camping trip in North Carolina in 1970. The fact that I remember the dates is testimony to my interest in the extraterrestrial, and by the time another one came along in the 80s or 90s, I was such a solar eclipse veteran that I could shrug them off with an air of long experienced indifference and disdain to any enthusiast who brought the upcoming one to my attention. I had a 30x table-mounted telescope, and I remember seeing the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn as a boy, drawing pictures of their nightly movements. Even in my 20s I remember tracking the progress of the fifth or sixth magnitude planet Uranus, a planet whose pronunciation you need to be pretty careful with.

When we were around ten or eleven, William had a 40x telescope with extension legs, and one warm night we pointed it in the direction of the Big Dipper’s handle, naturally assuming that few people had explored the nuances of that area of the constellation. Sure enough, we found exactly what we were hoping to find, a dim light object very close to the star in the bend of the handle, a new planet that we modestly named Johnwill. Well, there is a small legal controversy about that–it might be called Willjohn. William and I are still working out the priority issue. Anyway, like most planet-discoverers, we were pretty excited, and so telephoned William’s amateur-astronomer uncle with the thrilling news, and would he drop by to confirm our discovery and have the pleasure of being the third person to see the new planet. This needed to be done fairly quickly, as we were a little concerned about patents, and who knows how many other astronomers were taking advantage of this clear night with plans of claiming our discovery for themselves.

Uncle Bob pulled in the driveway, peered through our scope, and said, “Boys, that’s the star Alcor.” It took us a minute to realize that he was serious. This was a heavy blow. Surely he was wrong. But he didn’t back up, and our dreams of astronomical fame began to drift away. Then one of us began to have the suspicion that his smile was not from sympathy but from dissembling. He was trying to trick us, and then go to the Patent Office to claim Johnwill for his own, and to re-name it after himself. We confronted him with this accusation, and darkly hinted that the police might have an interest in the matter. He protested his innocence in the strongest terms, and agreed not to challenge our patent, whenever we got it. Unfortunately, his honesty on that point was never tested, since the Patent Office informed us that they did not patent new planets, or any celestial bodies for that matter. Our subsequent letter to President Kennedy sadly went unanswered, even though I told him that I had gone to his inauguration.

John Rachal
April 11, 2011

One of the pleasantries of the internet and email is the opportunity for expanding one’s friendships. For example, I recently received the following:

Hello
I ‘m a young lady called Favor Diop. I found interesting in your profile in that inspired me I discovered that my true partner for life and wants a serious relationship of love with you. If you are interested and have the intention that we should move forward, contact me via email:- I will send my pictures to you. It will be nice to receive your response.
Have a beautiful day.
Miss Favor

I was touched; I was moved; I was gratified. After all, she found me inspiring, and thus showed good taste. I prepared the following reply, but in the end chose not to send it for fear of hurting her tender and generous feelings.

Hello Miss Favor,
I was favored with your recent inquiry with the subject line “Hello am seeking for friendship.” I too have been seeking for friendship for quite some time. My wife and I just the other day were lamenting the sad state of our friendships, and so your recent missive gave us considerable pleasure not only in the reading of it (you have a delightful and inimitable prose style, including those clever syntactical whimsicalities), but also in the prospect of our gaining a new friend. I note that you observed that you “found interesting in [my] profile” and that it inspired you. This is flattering indeed, but I must, in all candor, assure you that I am, being of superannuated years, as homely in profile as in full face. Thus for you to infer from that profile, especially given my receding chin and generous nose, that you have discovered your true partner for life seems to me to exceed the facts. Of course these defects are no bar to true friendship of a platonic sort. I could envision the three of us, along with some other friends of our acquaintance, discussing just the sort of issues that true friendship inevitably entails, such as theology, philosophy, art, and science. No doubt it is just such issues as these which prompted your thoughtful and charming letter in the first place, a letter from which I can see that you are a lady of depth and substance. But alas, I fear that the grim and soul-less state of our society, with its intrusive strictures and incapacity for seeing the ethereal beauty of such friendship, might weigh heavily upon me. I can see that others might unjustly infer that you are seeking something other than your stated goal; they might find your protestations of true friendship insincere; they might even think that your words are fraudulent. While I know these calumnies not to be true, I confess that I am a slave to convention and decorum, and fearful of public disdain, and must therefore most regretfully decline the courteous hand of friendship which you have so graciously extended.
Have a beautiful day.
Mr. John