The first image is of Orion tangled up in a tree at Lac Teeples: March 20, 2022. This was shot with a small Canon 24mm camera lens and the ZWO ASI294MC Astronomy Camera.
I was born in the month of May, with an astrological sign of Gemini. I learned this week that the word “Gemini” is a swear word! “Jimini Crickets” is one of those curses or swear words that avoids saying any nasty words. The “Jimini” part of it is “Gemini”.
Who knew?
More interesting is the Latin word “Deus”, meaning God. That word goes back thousands of years to the Proto-Indo-European root “deiwos”. From this word “deiwos” come the English word “deity”, “deus” in French, the Sanskrit word “deva”, and countless others. Similar words derive from this in Slavonic and Persian. This is about as far back as you can go.
Another name you probably didn’t associate with Deus is “Zeus”. The supreme God’s name in Greece, Zeus, is a variant of “deiwos”. Zeus simply means God.
Well not so fast. Actually “deiwos” means something more specific than “God”. It comes from a root word meaning celestial or shining, From this ancient root word come derivative words for sky, heaven and god. To be God-like is to shine.
For the Romans, their chief God was Jupiter. Jupiter was the father god, and God of the Sky. Take a look at the beginning of the name Jupiter. The sound is not far off our word Deiwos. Now look at the end of that name: Piter is similar to father or “pater” in Latin.
The Greeks used to refer to “Zeu Pater”, or father Zeus. In Sanskrit they had a similar expression, “Dyaus Pitar”, meaning “Heavenly Father”. This is the origin of the name Jupiter. The Greek Zeus and Roman Jupiter are the same God, and it is not a matter of them using different names for the God: In fact they used the same name.
In Hinduism (the RgVeda, circa 1500 BCE) there is a sky-God who is a father figure and who has a consort, Prithvi, the Earth Goddess. His name is Dyaus. Feel free to pronounce that as “Zeus”.
The word Jupiter also referred to the sky, the heaven, or the air. Jupiter was the sky-god.
To be God-like is to shine in the sky, to be in the celestial heavens.
The second image is an interesting “blooper”, a superposition of the M38 star cluster, a period of telescope movement and perhaps other scenes. Imaged on December 26, 2021 at Lac Teeples with the RASA11 telescope.
Comments