Friday Jan 27, 2023
Hi all! Happy Friday! We had a great sea day today. Got lots of education again. Look out the next time we play trivia since we now have all this obscure knowledge… but the question is will we remember it all?? Probably not! Lol.
We started the day listening to a talk on the explorer Francis Drake who named that crazy Drake Passage that we survived. He was British and was out exploring the world for the then Queen Elizabeth. Along with finding the Drake Passage he also would pillage all the Spanish ships that were finding silver and gold around the world and he’d bring the goods back to the queen. An interesting fact he shared was that Queen Elizabeth had Mary Queen of Scots killed to preserve her throne. That caused King Phillip of Spain to get mad and assembled the Spanish Armada of war ships to invade England but Drake proactively went into the harbor before the Armada left and destroyed their ships to prevent the attack. That in essence
is the reason we all speak English in North America rather than Spanish since the British prevailed. Queen Elizabeth knighted him for this so he became Sir Francis Drake. Sadly he died of Dysentery in the Caribbean and was put in a lead coffin and dropped to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.
We then had someone discuss the constellations of the southern hemisphere since they are different than what we see in our night sky. The most important constellation is the Southern Cross with the stars Alpha and Beta Centuri coming up a close second. Both New Zealand and Australia’s flags include the southern cross in them as well as many regions and provinces in the southern hemisphere. Some people consider it a bucket list item to see it.
He sounded like Carl Sagan (“billions and billions”) as he discussed the huge number of galaxies in our solar system and how far away some are. He said it would take 40,000 years to get to the closest galaxy to earth! He shared that Sirius is the brightest star in the southern sky and that’s why Sirius Radio was named that since they wanted to be the strongest satellite signal. One other interesting fact he shared was that the Arabs plotted all the stars against the flat desert and placed a rock at the point they’d find them. They’d come back days later and realize the stars had moved from where the rock was placed so that helped them plot the constellations and document where they were and how they moved across the sky. Amazing!
We ended the day with the speaker pointing out all the stars in the night sky. It really helped that the captain turned out all the rear lights on the ship and given that we were away from land and in the middle of the ocean, there was no ambient light around so we could easily see the Southern Cross. I took a picture and it came out fairly well but I still can’t post pictures due to the weak internet signal. Hopefully soon!
Tomorrow we are in Puerto Madryn, Argentina and going to see more… yes, you guessed it… Penguins! Lol. Can’t get enough of those cute little buggers. Hope everyone has a great weekend!
The Wandering Italian 