The Milky Way is Under Attack!

July 16, 2008

Ladies and gentlemen, the Milky Way galaxy is infested with star-gobbling insectoids, but you can help stop them!

I'm talking about the garden-variety Milky Way galaxy, of course.

You might have heard about this masterpiece over at Centauri Dreams, or perhaps in one of those cheesey chain e-mails your mom always forwards to you. (You know... the ones with a font size bigger than a baby's fist and chock-full of "inspiring" yet really ridiculous images.)

But if you have no clue what I'm talking about, the Galaxy Garden is a scale model of our galactic home cast in plants at Paleaku Astronomy Center in Kona, Hawaii.

You can check out their site for the whole story, but here are some cool nuggets:

• The layout is based on real astrophysical data
• Each plant is picked to represent an astronomical object (or group of them)
• It's 100 feet in diameter, so each foot equals ~1,000 light-years...
• ...which means the solar system is barely a speck on a gold dust croton plant
• Globular star clusters near our galaxy are represented with dracaena trees (right)
• The supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center is a specially-made fountain

Pretty cool stuff, and this page shows you which plant represents what.

Back to my dramatic introduction of saving the Milky Way -- here's part of a digital cry for help that I received from Jon Lomberg, the mastermind behind the Galaxy Garden:

HELP WANTED!!!!!!!!!!

We are looking for some gardening support in spraying the Galaxy Garden weekly with neem oil to control the insect inhabitants of our Milky Way. It takes about two hours with a backpack sprayer to do the entire garden. We seek somebody who could donate their labor or subsidize the cost, which is about $45/week for labor and materials. Even if you can do it or pay for it only one time, it would help us. Please contact Barbara DeFranco at xxx-xxxx to discuss details.

So... if you're lucky enough to live in beautiful Kona, Hawaii (grrr) and have always dreamt about saving the galaxy from evil alien creatures, now is your chance!

Comments

[Paul Gilster]

In addition to its obvious beauty, the Galaxy Garden is a fabulous teaching tool for all ages. Just getting everything into perspective by walking through this layout (I haven't had the chance to do this yet, so I'm only imagining) is a major contribution to helping people see our place in the cosmos. What a fine job Jon has done! My question now is how readily the garden will adapt to possible changes in our view of the galaxy, now that the question of how many spiral arms it actually has seems to be up in the air. Jon presumably has the equipment at hand to make any needed changes down the road :-)