Tough Bananas

Everyone has the one burning question, just in different forms. Where did we come from? Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy says “42″. Well, some mind-wandering and Wikipedia searches makes me think “42″ isn’t too odd or cryptic an answer.
There are four major moons that orbit Jupiter; Io, Europa, Ganymede and Calysto. The man who originally discovered them gave them these names based off of Greek mythology’s lovers of Zeus (who Jupiter is the Roman equivalent of). Until the mid-20th century, they were not referred to by these names, but instead numerically. That is to say ‘Io’ was ‘Jupiter I’.
Now, if you look at astrological signs, Jupiter’s very much resembles the number ‘4′. So in essence, you could refer to Europa as ‘42′. There is the number connection. Thing is, astronomers have found Europa has a vast ocean of frozen water just under it’s surface. It is the most plausable place in our solar system (other than Earth) that could potentially support life; even if it is just bacteria and single cell organisms. Much like where life began on Earth.
So maybe the 42 means to look at Europa for the answer. Maybe seeing life in the beginning and evolving is the best way to answer the question. Maybe Douglas Adams was on the right track after all!

So I have been a big fan of astronomy as long as I can remember. I ran across a program a year or so ago called Celestia. It’s a desktop application that allows you to ‘fly’ around the universe and see the sights. It was the first of it’s kind, so the fact that all stars looked identical and there were no nebulae wasn’t a big trade-off. Fast forward to today, where I decide to play around in Google Earth. On load, I was notified that as of version 4.2, you could go to View > Switch to Sky. Here is where Google Earth far surpasses Celestia. The images used are from Hubble Telescope images (along with others like Chandra I’m sure), nebulae are clear as day, and every star is unique. I remember running across a great video depicting the scale of stars in our galaxy on YouTube. I’ve posted it below:

YouTube
EDIT: WordPress broke with embedded Flash. Here’s the link for now.

This got me to wondering where all of these stars are. Most are ‘free-floating’ without being part of a constellation. Rigel and Betelgeuse though are both part of the constellation Orion. As I made my way to the bigger stars, I noticed that Google Earth did not seem to have information on the two largest presented in the video: My Cephei and \/\/ Cephei. I decided to search for the KML file that would add them to the collection. Sadly, most hits were in other languages and, quite possibly, irrelevant.

Regardless, if you have any interest in astronomy, I highly recommend checking out Google Earth’s new addition. If anyone has found where the Cephei stars are located, please leave a comment and link.