I went looking for pictures of Saturn today.<\/p>\n
Last week I spent some time on redesigning my website<\/a>, and taking the Vertigo<\/a> theme for WordPress, I combined it with a header and stylesheet I had put together a year before based on Saturn.<\/p>\n Why Saturn? I wanted something dark — and Tarski<\/a> was a light theme. Even though it came with three variant stylesheets, they were all black text on a white background. I wanted something… cosmic<\/i>. So, one weekend, I whipped up a white text-on-black background stylesheet, blue headers, and a header graphic…<\/p>\n And did nothing with it.<\/p>\n Making the little bit of work I’d done a year ago work within the Vertigo framework wasn’t difficult — change the hex colors in the stylesheet, adjust the size of the header graphic.<\/p>\n But I wasn’t happy with my choice of an image of Saturn.<\/p>\n You see, that unused stylesheet for Tarski was not<\/i> my first flirtation with a Saturn-esque theme.<\/p>\n In my early, early<\/i> WordPress days — when the cutting edge of WordPress was version 1.2 — I found a Mars template. And I liked it, because it had a nice feel<\/i>. But I wanted something a little bluer, something a little more mysterious.<\/p>\n Something Saturn.<\/p>\n I did a great deal of work on changing the Mars theme into a Saturn theme. I found an image of Saturn that was nigh perfect. I worked on changing the color scheme from browns into blues. But then WordPress moved into version 1.5, and this template didn’t really work in the new-fangled way of doing things in the WordPress world.<\/p>\n The work went abandoned. A project from a world that had moved on.<\/p>\n I looked at the files a few days ago, while cleaning out directories — I collect WordPress themes for no good reason, except that I enjoy looking at code for strange and inexplicable reasons, and sometimes I need to prune the directory on my hard drive.<\/p>\n I liked the header graphic of Saturn I had used. I liked it more than the image I have now, in all truth. But, it was completely unsuitable for my needs now<\/i> — I’d done a fair bit of alteration to the image, so it wasn’t “clean” to adapt for my present needs.<\/p>\n I decided I’d try to find it.<\/p>\n I didn’t.<\/p>\n Anyone interested in images of the ringed planet should check out the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Cassini-Hugyens website<\/a>. Out there, in the distant cold of space, the Cassini probe’s mission continues, with new pictures sent back to Earth every day.<\/p>\n They can make you feel very<\/i> small.<\/p>\n Little dots in the night are places<\/i>. Unimaginably far away. But places all the same.<\/p>\n From the perspective of those points in the night, the Earth is just another light moving through the skies.<\/p>\n That puts a lot<\/i> of things into perspective.<\/p>\n We’re very small.<\/p>\n We think everything in our lives is so<\/i> critical and so<\/i> important.<\/p>\n We like to think that we matter<\/i>.<\/p>\n But in the grand scheme of the universe, we are very small.<\/p>\n On the Cassini website there’s a picture — I’ve since lost the URL, and I’m not tempted to find it — of Saturn eclipsing the sun. And from Cassini’s vantage point, Earth can actually be seen, as one point of light in the sky.<\/p>\n I’ll share this one, instead.<\/p>\n Earth and Jupiter, together in the sky, as photographed from Mars<\/a>.<\/p>\n We’re just a light in the sky.<\/p>\n This light in the sky is what we have<\/i>.<\/p>\n The differences that separate us — differences of race and gender and creed and color and nationality — are so unimportant. The importance we attach to them is far out of proportion to their actual weight.<\/p>\n Go outside. Look up into the sky of a clear night. Lose yourself in the deepness of the night. Feel<\/i> the smallness.<\/p>\n We’re just a light in the sky.<\/p>\n I went looking for pictures of Saturn today. Last week I spent some time on redesigning my website, and taking the Vertigo theme for WordPress, I combined it with a header and stylesheet I had put together a year before based on Saturn. Why Saturn? I wanted something dark — and Tarski was a lightContinue reading “On a Place in the Universe”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}