Object Not of This Earth

High powered people have a nice sense of entitlement, and a willingness to ask for favors in spite of circumstances. About the time of the first Moon landing in 1969, Dean Sayre at the National cathedral came up with the idea of requesting a piece of Moon rock to decorate the stained glass windows being designed to commemorate scientists and technology. Only problem was, the Dean was a leading opponent of the Vietnam war, and Richard Nixon was very aware of that, and not inclined to go out of his way to do Sayre any favors. But Sayre was the friend of a friend of a friend, and eventually the Apollo 11 astronauts came to present this 2 inch basalt fragment in a little round plexiglass fixture. Maybe Nixon was busy with other considerations by then, too ...

Rodney Winfield's artistic concept here was to show the Earth and the Moon among the celestial spheres, and you can see the mission spacecraft orbital trajectory joining them. The design straddled all three window lancets, unlike most stained glass designs. The red Moon is also a Fibonacci spiral, linking nicely to one of our latest game conceits

We can start exploring the cathedral setup at the designated time - the cathedral is not squared up strictly to N/S/E/W, although the altar is generally Eastwards, per standard church setup. Research says that cathedrals are set up any which way to fit in the available space - the Washington cathedral had to fit into a 30 acre plot that already had a parish church, and needed to fit into existing and future garden plans.

Speaking of fitting in ... Washington DC already had a Catholic cathedral, finished in 1913 - but that cathedral is relatively small (the National Cathedral is the sixth biggest in the world, bigger than Notre Dame!) And an Episcopalian church fit in better with the power elite of the time.

Google maps gives the location as 38.93063 N, 77.07078 W, and we can set this into my copy of the Starry Night application to see where the Moon was at that time. My version of Starry Night is "copyright 1990-1999" (it only runs on Windows XP!), so it should be accurate for 1991. We can look this up in the nautical almanac for 1991 if not, but we'll have to figure out how to use it. So we will try the easy way first.

March is near equinox, so we have close to 12 hours of light. The Moon's co-ordinates are:

204 54.740’ azimuth, 59   1.117’ altitude

The length of a shadow is given by the equation L = H / tan A, where A is the altitude angle, and H is the height of the object. 

From pictures at the dedication of the Space window, looks like the Moon rock is about 20 feet up. 0.601 * 20 = 12 foot long shadow. The shadow will be 180 degrees from Moon azimuth, so the shadow points at 205 - 180 = 25 degrees.

We will maneuver around the cathedral to find the clue - next time.

- Job 22:12