‘There sinks the nebulous star we call the sun.’
Alfred Tennyson, The Princess (1847)
Waterfront Charters have been offering sunset cruises for over three decades, and they remain amongst our most popular events. Every evening of the year (except when inclement weather makes it unsafe or just thoroughly miserable) we head out into Table Bay for a relaxing cruise, followed by a ringside seat for guests to watch the sun drop elegantly and picturesquely over the Atlantic horizon. With Cape Town’s amazing mountains as a backdrop, the view is unbeatable; chilled sparkling wine and other delicious libations add to the magic as the evening creeps in from the east.
On offer is a wide variety of cruise options; sail or power being the most obvious, but no matter what boat is chosen the star of the show remains the sun. And by star, we mean that literally. The sun is such a dominant factor in our lives, it’s very easy to forget that this immense ball of flaming nuclear fusing gas is, in reality, one of trillions of stars that inhabit the known universe, and for that matter, one of probably trillions more in the unknown universe: we just can’t see any further yet.
Our night sky is testament to the immensity of space: our galaxy, the Milky Way, which is pretty much a run of the mill galaxy in the big picture, is one of many, many galaxies in the universe. How many, you ask? Good question: somewhere between 200 billion and two trillion galaxies, depending on who you ask. With the advent of the latest space-based photographic evidence, astronomers are learning that previous estimates of the size and nature of the universe are probably way off target – not to mention the fact that the whole Big Bang Theory of the first moments of the universe needs to be revisited. Good luck with that, cosmologists.
The more we learn, the more we realise there is to learn; we have certainly come a long way from believing that the earth was the centre of the universe only a few hundred years ago. Those space photographs we alluded to above have captured close-ups of some of the billons of galaxies that surround us, and they are objects of exceptional beauty. Space isn’t just a mystery; it’s a compelling mistress too – the variety of shapes and colours that are displayed hide the fact that each one of these magnificent photogenic sights is a grouping of billions of stars, millions of which will be similar in nature to Sol, our own white dwarf.
And Sol is our sun, the one we gaze on each evening from our boats. The same sun that circles the Galactic Centre at some 28 000 light years distance. Distances in terms of our understanding of space defy human comprehension. We know that light travels at 300 000 km per second; can any human picture how far 28 000 years at 300 000 km per second is? It’s unlikely, and yet in universal terms, that pales in comparison to the distance of the observable universe: 13.8 billion light years. Douglas Adams, the late great author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy, put it in terms we like best: “You may think it’s far to the local chemist, but that’s peanuts compared to space.” Thank you, Douglas – that sums it up perfectly. It may take half an hour to get to the shop; the sun takes 250 million years to orbit the galactic centre. Waiting for New Year in galactic terms: that’s patience.
While the sun orbits its way through space at 251 km per second, with the earth clutching at its skirt, every second its core fuses about 600 billion kilograms of hydrogen into helium and converts 4 billion kg of matter into energy. This has been happening for around 4.6 billion years, but don’t worry about the tank emptying just yet: this phase of the sun is expected to last for a total of 11 billion years. The only changes our (very) distant descendants will see is a gradual increasing of temperature of around one degree per every 100 million years.
There is so much more to this remarkable star that we highly recommend taking some time out of busy days to research and marvel at the facts of this stellar object, the giver of life, light and warmth: our sun. And of course, joining us aboard one of our luxurious boats to toast Sol as it sets in the west; there can be no more enjoyable way of spending an evening. We know for a certainty that our star will return exactly on schedule the following morning, and we will be able to repeat our evening salutes for at least another five billion years.
Our sun: primus inter pares; first among trillions of equals.
